Borders

Approaching storm, June 2016, Ocean City, NJ.

I’ve spent my entire life within 100 miles of the seashore. Over a seventeen-year stretch, I lived each summer in a New-Jersey-shore town and I’ve always felt something different about being there, on the coast. Now I live on the bay with an expansive view of the water and the flat horizon of mainland to the west where I can watch storms slowly crawl toward me. When the winds come from the west, from over the mainland—a “land breeze”—they are usually hot and stultifying and insect-filled. Hungry greenhead flies ride in from the marshes on land breezes, so do mosquitoes and no-see-ums. Sitting on the beach can be unbearable on such days. When the wind turns, when the wind becomes a sea breeze, the temperature drops and the air is fresher and fragrant and the beach is a paradise.

At the seashore, I'm treated to a menagerie of seabirds across the skies and on the water, different birds than I see on the mainland. Seabirds sound different, too; they don’t have songs like the mainland songbirds—their calls are staccato and harsh. They have unique names like kitiwakes and petrels. Cormorants put on a show whenever they turn their bodies in flight, lift their heads, extend their legs, and settle into the water. I've watched common terns—a white seabird with a black cap, red feet, and black-tipped red beak; they are quick as light and they dive into the water like a spear to feed. Often the terns have to outrace the larger gulls who swoop in to steal their catch. On the beach, I’m amused late in the afternoon when the sandpipers race against the crawl of the ocean’s very edge, staying out of reach of the waves, picking the sand for food. I love watching the skimmers over the bay at dusk...black-backed, long-winged birds whose lower bill extends past its upper bill so they can skim the water with open beak in a great circle around the bays and lagoons.

The water is equally alive, even in the shallows of the bay or in the churn of the surf. I’ve seen schools of skates as they shoot through the rolling waves, feeding on unseeable creatures. I’ve watched pods of dolphin as they curl across the ocean surface, their dorsal fins scaring people at first—“Is that a shark out there?”—and then delighting them as five, six, seven fins move in unrehearsed unison. Bay waters often glitter with schools of tiny fish darting just under the surface. The sun glitters on their silver sides or the surface churns when they rush in confusion. I’ve also watched larger fish appear from underneath—seemingly out of nowhere—to scoop up a mouthful of minnows. Or sometimes a fish will pop out of the water in a glitter and splash back in an ever-growing ring.

Seeing and feeling storms approach—regular summer thunderstorms from the west, not the life-changing hurricanes that come from the south—gives the greatest sense of being at the seashore. The birds react in anticipation; the waters turn dark as they absorb the sky’s deepening grey-blue and they begin to chop; the winds shift from sea breeze rushing into the storm to land breeze rushing and rising into the clouds; the lightning bolts down in the distance or flashes fire filling the clouds; I’ve watched the rain as it advances over the bay in a froth, and then it’s soon upon me.

I love the something different about the seashore, because even in my quietest times—especially in my quietest times ahead of a storm—I feel it. I feel a difference of standing solidly on solid land, tied to the tides, brushed by breezes…I love to greet the border interaction among three worlds—land, sea, and sky—constant and constantly visible.

Shazam

With the summer heat upon us, I regret the loss of my ability to enjoy a Martini. Time was that I could wend away an evening enjoying an ice-cold Martini or two while listening to music or reading or just staring out into space…just to wend away the evening and enjoy the Martini, not to lose myself in drunkenness. But several years ago, inexplicably, gin decided to mistreat me…a single ice-cold Martini and I had trouble speaking clearly. I realized that terrible evening that neither my speech nor my thinking was clear, after just one drink. Trying to ignore my misfortune, I tried another Martini a week later and suffered the same, cruel effect.

No more are my summers filled with early-evenings of gin-flavored relaxation. I had really enjoyed the spice-rich flavor of Bombay gin, although a friend always championed the crisp juniper of Beefeater’s. A Martini is made of four elements that must be expertly aligned: ice-coldness, gin, dry vermouth, and olives. Some sadly mistaken people drink Martinis with an onion or a twist, but those treatments miss so much of the essential. The martini must be icy—it must be drunk quickly or the coldness fades as a contributing factor; the vermouth must be a whisper that seduces the dryness of the gin to the surface—too much vermouth and the clarity of the gin is overwhelmed; the olives add a salty crunch just before the final swallow. Not the pretentious Martini of James Bond; but served ice cold in a tall, conic, frosty, sweating glass, Martinis are a quintessential summer experience: the cleanliness of the gin, the hint of vermouth’s grape, the salt and crunch of the olives all crystal clear in the crystal. Simple. Perfect. Summer.

Fortunately, bourbon has not mistreated me…yet. I used to reserve Manhattans for wintertime, but without Martinis, I sometimes call a Manhattan into summer duty, too. But let me warn you: Beware the Manhattan! It can be a half-hour of heaven in a glass, or it can be a grand disappointment. I’ve had many a Manhattan poured for me at bars and restaurants, and often they are no better than a dump of whiskey in a glass. Often, bartenders mix a Manhattan as if it were a whiskeyed version of the Martini with just a hint of vermouth or they add some designer cherry or way too much bitters. But such a drink expresses the bartender’s ignorance much more than it provides the pleasure of the Manhattan. A real Manhattan offers a richness of flavor that is a delight. Really…a delight. Four elements: cherries with their juice, sweet vermouth, bourbon, and a splash of bitters. It must be cold, too, to be enjoyed, but it can be served “on the rocks.” I prefer my Manhattan served in a highball glass to funnel the scents to my nose as I sip. A Manhattan has a sweetness to it…a good bourbon—Knob Creek is my preference, but I’m not a bourbon snob—has the natural sweetness of corn, then mix it with two Maraschino cherries and a teaspoon of the juice, then add sweet vermouth (one part vermouth to three parts bourbon) to complete the sweetness, and finally just a splash—one or two drops—of bitters to add a real flavor fullness. The bitters—if added last right on top of the floating ice—grab your nose before you even taste the drink. It’s like eating chocolate-covered pretzels, or sweet and sour chicken from your favorite Chinese restaurant, or cheese-stuffed jalapenos… it’s the complexity of flavors dazzling your mouth that astounds you. The sweet vermouth accentuates the corn-sweetness of the bourbon, and the pure sweetness of the cherry adds to it all…except that the bitters smell like mincemeat pie and taste like a surprise. I hate getting a poorly made Manhattan—in the end it’s just a drink…it’s like kissing one’s Aunt Erma. But a well-made Manhattan is a delight of mixed flavors, accentuated one against the other, intertwined and inseparable…it’s like kissing the girl you’ve always wanted to kiss, and right in the middle of it, she pulls you closer. Shazam!

Language

I’ve been trying to develop an essay on the importance and power of human language; ironically I’ve struggled to find the right words. Human language expresses subtleties and complexities of our existence: meanings and contradictions and explanations and questions and compromise. The character Thomas More, in Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, says that God created Man “…to serve him wittily, in the tangle of his mind!” To me, the tangles of my mind are filled with tangles of language.

Yesterday—July 4, 2016—a satellite arrived at Jupiter and, reports say, “Jupiter will give up its secrets.” But even in all its magnificence, Jupiter won’t express a thing, won’t say a word…anything that is learned or “given up” will be the language of scientists who labor to formulate that understanding into words. Our understanding of Jupiter has grown since the Babylonians first identified it about 2800 years ago…without language, where would all that understanding go?

Look at everything that language allows; think of everything that lack-of-language would take away. Language can be as pinpoint as a person chooses and can uniquely express that person’s humanity in a pinpoint, unique way. Language can make plain a person’s humanity to the humanity of others. So, language is at the center of a person’s ability to experience life…I must assume, then, that the more enriched a person’s language, the more enriched is his/her existence.

I have a friend who recently told me that in Montaigne’s essays in the late 1500s, he writes that language is a defining feature of being human. I hated to find out that “my idea” had already been expressed 450 years ago but I love that a friend learned the idea from this antique source and then shared it with me, expanding my own understanding in the tangles of my mind: being human and using language are inseparably intertwined. Without living things, in all the universe there would be no source for love or hate or sadness or joy or anger or sympathy or understanding…nowhere. Because in all the universe, only living things have those appetites and emotions and achievements…and the need to express them in words.

Other living things can certainly communicate; animals clearly communicate through body language—for example, our cats express many emotions by purring or rubbing or hissing or arching their backs…but their communication is limited to gross appetites and emotions: hunger, joy, anger, and love. Our language allows us to refine those things, to know the variations of love or the various evils of hate or the damages of fear and anger… expressing those subtleties and complexities is purely human.

I think this is why I often resort to quotations to a make a point: many phrases in books, poems, songs, and movies have captured an idea so perfectly that it can’t be improved; even the sound of the words—their poetic quality—sometimes adds to the beauty (a purely human perception) of the idea. Within the tangles of my mind, I often come upon the words of others that illuminate a subtlety here, a complexity there…and then I find and add a few words of my own. Regularly, I struggle to find the right words, but I believe the struggle is important because the right word holds the importance and the power.

Wisdom

My dad in 1949, Atlantic City, NJ

In the shadow of Father’s Day—yesterday—I am thinking about my father, whom I lost seven years ago. Since then, I’ve gotten to enjoy Father’s Day without any worry of meeting a son’s Father’s Day duty or the pressure of buying a Father’s Day gift. But the day has never passed without my thinking about—and missing—my dad. Understandably, he has grown wiser in my eyes over time because now I am wrestling with that role: trying to infuse my days of fatherhood with some kind of wisdom.

One word of wisdom that came from him—probably his wisest advice—did not come in the form of an old expression or an aphorism or quote from a book or play…he was full of those and always had them at-the-ready. This time, in the natural flow of life, he listened to something I’d said, understood it in a bigger context than I could, and instantly directed me into a thought that I should have had on my own, into a thought that I’d never abandon thereafter, into a thought that ended up—I think—changing my life.

On Father’s Day in 2006, my family—wife, son, and daughter—took a trip to Florida. We stayed in a beautiful resort hotel overlooking the Gulf. We arrived in a gloomy overcast Florida after a long morning of travel, and my wife and son collapsed on the bed for a nap. I sneaked onto the balcony to call my dad—a son’s Father’s Day duty. My daughter begged me to go swimming in the “waterfall pool,” a great attraction for any 12-year-old, but I bemoaned the weather and my travel fatigue and my need to make the phone call. “We’re here all week,” I excused myself. “We’ll go tomorrow.”

I chatted with my dad about the trip and our plans for the week and about his plans for Father’s Day…my siblings would be visiting him shortly. In the background of our conversation, he could hear my daughter pestering me about the pool. He paused in the conversation and said, “Son,” so I paused to listen. “If your daughter wants you to go swimming with her…go swimming with her.” It was a pronouncement of great certainty and clarity. I was stuck there in the middle: between a daughter and a father where I was the father and the son…he fully appreciated the moment and made it clear for me. I wished right then that he could come swimming with us.

Needless to say, we went swimming in the waterfall pool within the hour, despite the slight sprinkle of warm rain, despite being the only people at the pool or in the pool. I remember standing waist-deep in the pool, washed by the waterfall, holding my daughter’s hand, wondering how many sons and daughters were watching us from the hotel windows wishing their old man had taken them swimming.

In his poem, “East Coker,” T. S. Eliot says, “Do not let me hear/Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly.” My dad’s wisdom on that Father’s Day was his folly and he made it mine…sending us swimming in the rain because he could, because we could.

Meanings

James Joyce, photograph by Sylvia Beach, Paris, Bloomsday 1925. Image courtesy of the Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. Used with permission.

I’ve been reading and enjoying James Joyce’s Ulysses since first reading it in 1974. I remember asking my college professor, “Can someone who doesn’t know The Odyssey (the Greek story on which it is loosely based) make sense of this?” I asked because many sections of the novel were confusingly complicated…I was struggling through my first reading. Her answer was, “Yes, the association just lets you enjoy another level of meaning and interpretation.” Her answer opened me up to “levels of meaning” and I’ve been reading Ulysses that way ever since: a conundrum of meaningful entertainment.

Joyce, I think, created a richly blended world of reality and myth. Leopold Bloom, the novel’s central character, is a person who loves living life and all it offers as he wanders Dublin, just as Odysseus loves adventure and all it offers as he wanders the Mediterranean. But Bloom is not the hero that Odysseus is—he does not challenge the Sirens nor the Cyclops the way Odysseus does. I’ve come to understand Bloom’s behaviors and tastes and appetites as purely Epicurean: Bloom pursues and meets and enjoys the realities of Dublin life “with relish.” As a reader, I understand things about Bloom because they are the same and because they are different than his ancient Greek counterpart. He is completely a Dubliner, but he is mythic, too.

Other characters, other places, and other incidents in the novel have those same blended sources: part 1904 Dublin and part ancient Greek myth…and everything in between. Each time I’ve read the novel, I’ve understood more and different meanings of Joyce’s story because my own library of sources has expanded as I’ve experienced more of life, literature, and history.  My college professor was correct about enjoying additional levels of meaning and interpretation through association. For me, finding those levels is a beauty of the novel.

A few years ago, I bought the audiobook of Ulysses and was amazed at how clear and engaging the book becomes when it is read aloud in a voice tinged with an Irish brogue. I think the Irish brogue was probably how Joyce heard the book in his head while he was drafting it. The meaning of each sentence is clearer, plot developments are clearer, and characters themselves are clearer…and then it occurred to me: the producers of the audiobook have made specific editorial decisions to present the text clearly. “Read the sentence this way,” they must have told the performers. All the challenges and ambiguities and richness of potential meanings in the text are “pre-digested” by the producers…the audiobook presents an excellent single version of the book—a straight path through what can be a labyrinth of Joyce’s craft. For me, that clarity of such a complex novel is a beauty of the audiobook.

Thursday, June 16, is Bloomsday, the day on which the novel takes place. The Rosenbach Museum and Library at 2008 Delancey Place in Philadelphia features live readings of excerpts of the novel…attendees get to hear dozens of interpretations of the novel as the readers present their selections just the way they mean it.

Difference

I’ve gotten great entertainment from watching several movies from the 1930s recently. They are so dated yet so different that they’re cool in a unique way. Sometimes it feels like kitsch, sometimes it feels like art, sometimes it feels like someone has let me in on a not-so-obvious secret. But they never feel like today’s Marvel or Star Wars or Bourne movies. I struggle to decide what’s at the center of their difference.

I watched Gold Diggers of 1933, a fabulous Busby Berkeley movie of dazzling scale and visuals and sound. The art direction seems pure Art Deco. The musical numbers are huge with armies of dancing girls naturally bouncing about—“naturally” because breast implants weren’t a 1930s possibility. The musical numbers are literally sensational and yet the music is simple and catchy. The language is phony but simple; lots of things are “Swell!” and many sentences begin, “Say….” I found myself looking at the scenery, sets, and clothes in wonder…they aren’t synthetics or plastics—the lingerie is silk and the suits are wool and the sets are crystal and brass and real, crafted things.

I watched Blonde Venus starring Marlene Dietrich. Dietrich is a strong-willed showgirl trying to make it as a single mother…a daring storyline in 1932. All the same wonder fell on me: the sets, the clothes, the language. The drama is melodrama: Dietrich, despite her strong masculine look, plays a great vulnerability…being “just a woman,” even though she acts and imbues the character with great strength.

I watched Grand Hotel, 1932’s Best Picture winner, with Greta Garbo (she speaks her famous line: “I want to be alone”), John Barrymore, and Joan Crawford. The art direction and cinematography—the look of the movie—are incredible. The perspective of the camera is magic: the camera swoops through hotel spaces to give the multiple storylines a solid place to play and makes the hotel itself a central character. There is a sensational murder, and yet some elements feel very naïve. It creates for me an “other world” feel of the 1930s—even though they are just like me, they aren’t just like me.

I watched It Happened One Night—the first film to win Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Actress…and for good reason. Clark Gable is funny, strong, and vulnerable…his is a very stereotypical character that he plays very real: a news reporter with the world in the palm of his hand and a tiger by the tail. Claudette Colbert is the spoiled rich girl…and we all know how the movie will end, but the movie succeeds on its characters and charm.

Finally, my favorites: Astaire and Rogers in The Gay Divorcee and Top Hat. I must be honest, the movies are so alike that I remember them as a unit…but the lightness of the stories, the funny ease of the characters, and the dripping style of elegance are all wonderful. Cole Porter’s songs are romantic and poetic. The dancing is graceful and expressive. I don’t think we could produce such a dream world today, even with our pyrotechnics and computer-generated images. In The Gay Divorcee, watch the romance of Rogers falling in love with Astaire by the end of the “Night and Day” sequence…her starry-eyed look at the end of the dance is the romantic power that 1930s movie-making created.

In the “Cheek to Cheek” dance sequence from 1935’s Top Hat, Thirties’ artistry may be at its finest. The first two minutes of the sequence are all one take…acting, singing, dancing, hitting their mark across the set…all in one take! Then they glide and swirl around the veranda…effortless, elegant movement in one 1:15 take! And finally, the music builds to a passionate crescendo and Rogers falls back in Astaire’s arm until you think her back will break! Then gracefully, rhythmically, he raises her with just that one arm: the only “special effect” is their artistry.

They have a secret difference I can feel but can’t define.

Evolution

My great grandfather, Ferdinand Coin Ray (left, circa 1915)

I know hardly anything about my great grandfather except that he was a bookbinder. He was a bookbinder, and one of the only pictures I have of him is at work: He wears a heavy apron and leans on the press. He worked in a Philadelphia bindery in the first part of the Twentieth Century, when bookbinding was more an art than a trade…books were made to be lasting, beautiful things. His daughter, my Great Aunt Ada, went on to work as a bookbinder long after he had died…she came to it not through fatherly guidance nor nepotism, but through genetics…she loved books. That’s my mother’s side of the family.

When I was a boy, my father worked at Curtis Publishing in the Curtis Center across the street from Philadelphia’s Washington Square, where he managed production of The Saturday Evening Post, Ladies Home Journal, Holiday, and other national titles. In his heyday, his job included receiving Norman Rockwell paintings when the paint was still wet so they could be photographed in time for the Post covers. Our home was filled with all the Curtis magazines, renewed on a weekly and monthly basis. My father also loved books, but magazines were a kind of next-generation of accessible reading. By the end of the Twentieth Century, books and magazines survived because they were a trade…an industrialized way to package, present, and distribute information and entertainment.

I grew up loving books, loving magazines, reading fiction, history, biographies, and how-to books. I was introduced to the classics when my father brought home a new Classics Illustrated comic book every other night during the summer of 1962…I learned the plots and characters of so many classics…from The Iliad to The Time Machine. Yes, television was a big part of my growing up in the 1960s…but that was different for me than reading. I loved the permanence of a book and the link to the past that a book carries. I received new books for my birthday and read my parents’ old books or borrowed books from the library.

Now I find myself embarking on this blog…the next next-generation of accessible reading. It feels very different to communicate this way. The blog has an immediacy to it that is faster than a newspaper’s…I write it, post it, and someone else can read it (if I’m lucky) instantly. The blog has an evanescence to it that is more fragile than a television show’s…I can rewrite or even retract my blog post at any given moment. But that immediacy and that evanescence give it its power: My readers will want to find it, read it, be impacted or impressed, and move on. No time for Moby Dick or Atlas Shrugged here. But I’m finding it harder to write like this than to write Moby Dick! I find my idea, develop it, hone it, give it a point, and make it stick…then move on. I aim at making it a lasting, beautiful thing that has immediacy and evanescence…kind of like my great grandfather did.

Relevance

In 2014 when I saw the movie Birdman: Or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), I understood it as a movie about an elderly man struggling against his growing irrelevance. My wife understood it as a movie about a delusional narcissist. From my perspective—that of a nearly 60-year-old man—the lead character’s delusions were a fun plot device that added whimsy and drama and special effects to the movie. But at the movie’s core, I watched Michael Keaton’s character struggle with irrelevance…life passed him by, his career had run its course, and late in his career he struggled to be relevant, be seen as relevant, feel relevant.

Not that I am so very old, but irrelevance is a threat that grows over time as tastes and styles and technology push “life” along…knowing and reading the Classics seems passé, knowing and understanding history seems irrelevant, living anywhere but “in the moment” seems dated. Thus each morning while I stare at my lathered face in the mirror I see Yeats’s “smiling public man” and worry/wonder that maybe I am only his “old scarecrow,” just old clothes on sticks to scare away the birds (is this reference to a 1920s poem even relevant?). I began to recognize in the mirror the same character that I had watched in Birdman: An elderly man struggling against irrelevance.

But then a revelation came to me...

On a Saturday afternoon, I watched a television program about the Milky Way and its place in the universe. Naturally, the descriptions of the Milky Way used numbers like billions and trillions and zillions for time and distance and amount: “Our nearest neighboring galaxy is 147 million billion miles away and contains 200 billion stars,” or “The black hole at the center of the Milky Way contains the mass of 100 million stars compacted into an immeasurable density. All this matter began after a Big Bang that happened about 14 billion years ago…” things like that.

Pretty quickly, I began to feel so utterly insignificant sitting in my TV-viewing chair watching my giant flat-screen TV, that my insignificance could only be measured in hundredths of millionths of trillionths or whatever it is that makes up a single, infinitesimal piece of nothing. Not only could I not be seen from a jetliner flying above my house, my house couldn’t be seen from a satellite, my state couldn’t be seen from the Sun, and my Sun couldn’t be seen from that black hole right in the middle of my very own galaxy. Overwhelming insignificance.

As I continued to watch and listen, I became fascinated by the ability of the program’s producers, artists, and writers to create for me a new understanding of where I am: On the outer edge of a relatively small galaxy that came to be from a Big Bang that threw an infinitely large amount of energy and mass into existence. The effect of that blast and the extent of its energy are expanding even today.

We have tools that detect infinitely large and infinitesimally tiny parts of the universe and we have math sentences that explain how all this works. At times, we’ve had to develop new math sentences to explain why the old math doesn’t hold up any more…the Universe is too diverse to be explained by one math or one physics. We have math sentences that explain why certain realities exist and other math sentences that explain why opposite realities probably exist, too.

My revelation: I am not really so insignificant as I’d feared. If my brain—just a regular human brain—could process and imagine and define and interpret something so complexly and hugely gigantic as the Universe, then what a wonder it is to be a human. If I can contain in my brain the entire Universe, even as it continues to expand infinitely, then the Universe can’t possibly be greater than I. My existence must be relevant if only because my knowledge and understanding continue to grow.

And thus, my blog. I am hoping not for a new math or a new physics, but for new understandings, new explanations, new observations…I want to assert my continued relevance by offering my growing understanding and knowledge…what Yeats calls, “hammered gold and gold enameling.” I hope someone is out there to find it relevant.