Home » Posts tagged 'irony' (Page 6)

Tag Archives: irony

Wilderness revisited

Posted on by | 13 Comments

It’s a crazy world.  The other day, I decided to go for a walk; it was the first gorgeous day after a period of rain, and utterly irresistible.  I ended up at the city library, one of those Carnegie structures so ubiquitous in small and medium towns across America, a millionaire’s atonement for ravaging society, back when such people even cared.  This particular one sits in a little park with a bandstand and a monument to a parents’ grief for their soldier son, killed in action.  It has the added virtue of offering coffee from one of those Keurig pod machines for fifty cents.  Pretty good coffee, too, and you get entertained by the myriad characters that hang around such places.

It was, as I said, a beautiful day, so I took my coffee outside, to sit by the fountain donated by another benefactor to the glory of his family.  It was windy, so it was just as well the fountain was off.

Just as I settled in, I heard an animal running somewhere behind me, a large dog, I thought.  As it passed in front of me, though, I was startled to see a young deer bounding headlong toward the midday traffic.  It’s not a huge town, but the streets along the park run to four lanes, and I worried that the deer wouldn’t make it without getting pancaked against a cement truck.  No problem.  In a flash, it cleared six lanes, including a side street, and disappeared into an adjacent church parking lot.

Now, those with a mystical bent might see an omen of some kind here.  Me, I just reflected on the fact that our town, these days essentially just a suburb of St. Louis, has grown very rapidly, outstripping its sleepy county seat days, and leaving nearby wildlife precious little room for, well, wild life.  Ironically, as habitat shrinks, so does the taste for hunting among the minions of the town, now pretty much gentrified and unused to killing their own food.  Canada geese, which used to pass here twice a year during migration, now stay year round in the many ponds dug for all the wilderness-sounding suburbs (Iron Mountain Lake, Notting Hills Forest, etc.).  People complain about the scat, but eating the birds is illegal, so they thrive.  As do wild turkeys, of all things, frightening toddlers in their own yards.

This is happening all over the country, as demographic studies continue to show the increasing urbanization of America.  At least we don’t have bears where I live; that would, indeed, be a portentous omen.

I suppose the upshot is that wherever you might find omens, there is usually a practical element involved as well.  I’m reminded of a student I had while doing archaeology on the island of Ithaka, in Greece.  It was, of course, the home of Odysseus, and we were at the foot of Mount Aetos.  My student, who was supposed to be paying attention to a prism pole he was holding, looked up and cried, “Hey, what kind of bird is that?”

I looked where he was pointing, to his left.  “It’s an eagle,” I said, “and it’s to your left.  According to Homer, that’s a bad omen.”

“Oh,” he said, and turned around until it was on his right.

 

The power of positive thinking

Posted on by | 11 Comments

Manuel and Jorge Fazú were two brothers, born just 18 months apart, and as close as twins. They grew up in a run-down flop house in an impoverished district of an anonymous city in Brazil. Seeing them as boys in their surroundings, no one would have thought anything would come of them.

But the Fazú brothers had a dream. They wanted to be musicians, and work their way out of the slums, and into the great world outside. Manuel learned to play guitar, and Jorge sang; they worked the busker circuits in their town, and eventually hitchhiked to Rio, where they reinvented themselves as the Fabulous Fazús. In no time, their logo, FF, could be seen spray painted all over town. It became the question of the hour: who or what was FF? It was an ingenious advertising gambit, and it worked wonders. The time came, carefully calculated, when they began to reveal who they were. There was only one problem.

They weren’t very good. In the first club they played, they didn’t even get through the first set before the manager threw them out, refusing to pay them. Worse, the scene was repeated in every first and second tier club in Rio, until the only gigs they could get were in the lowest dives on skid row, where patrons got a kick out of laughing at them, and throwing bottles.

Jorge grew discouraged, and wanted to quit, but Manuel talked him out of it. He was sure that, now that they were in the big city, there would be lots of opportunities to improve. He dragged Jorge to the clubs they were ejected from, where they sat and listened through the night to the bands who played there regularly. Afterwards, Manuel doggedly practiced, and Jorge did his best to maintain his spirits and practice along.

But it was no use. After a several months, Jorge confronted Manuel.

“Listen, we’re just no good. I’m quitting. I’ve got a chance of a job gardening for some rich family up town. I’m out of here.”

Manuel was devastated.

“You’re quitting now? Just when we’re starting to get somewhere?”

“We’re not starting anything. We’re no better than we were when we left home. We just don’t have any talent, bro, face it!”

“Talent?” said Manuel, “What’s talent? We got heart, man. And hard work. Come on, stop talking crazy, we got three new songs to learn before our gig tonight.”

‘Gig!” Jorge spat the word out, like rotten vegetables. “They only let us play there so people can make fun of us! And they don’t pay anything!”

“So what? We pass the hat, we do okay. That’s how all the great bands started, man.”

But it was no use; Jorge had had enough, and left that very day to take the gardening job.

But Manuel? Manuel had a dream, and he refused to let it go. One furious night, he went around to all the walls of the city and obliterated the second F from every place he found their logo. Then he realized he could simply call himself Fabulous Fazú without the plural, and went back and put it back in. Now it looked like F●F, which he thought was an improvement.

Anyway, he continued to work and dream, practicing until his fingers bled and his voice grew hoarse, playing the dives on his own, determined to prove to Jorge that he could make it.

Twenty years passed. Jorge was still working as a gardener. He had saved up his wages and started his own landscaping business, but, basically, he was still a gardener.

And Manuel? Manuel died of a heroin overdose in an alley behind one of the dives he played at.

Such is the power of positive thinking.

Bucky

Posted on by | 9 Comments

Another tale from my dubious youth.  As usual, the names have been changed to protect the guilty.

Among the questionable movements of the hippy era was back-to-the-land romanticism, sustainable only if you had a paying job that left you enough time to muck about with gardening, a grant whose results didn’t fall due for a few years, or parents who thought you were studying to be an engineer.  My friend, call him Ned, fell into the first category.  He worked as a construction laborer, a job he described as being a human mule, and which scrubbed a good many romantic scales from his eyes.  I remember someone telling him admiringly what a healthy life physical labor was.  When he asked what she meant, she explained that you always see these old men on construction sites, obviously of advanced age, but still able to do the strenuous work required, as opposed to aging men with sedentary jobs.  Ned patiently explained that those men were only in their thirties, they just looked old, worn down by lives of hard labor and dubious choices.

Nevertheless, Ned, an eagle scout, kept a romantic edge on the idea of self reliance, to the point that he rented a house in the country from a farmer who had moved into a subdivision, having tired of the “simple life.”  He diverted water from a nearby stream for his use in the house, and heated it with a wood stove (albeit a state-of-the-art Swedish one).  He also kept a kitchen garden, and raised a few goats;  by and by he acquired a cow.  Because he earned a reasonably nice paycheck from the construction industry, he was able to make a go of it without going bankrupt.

One of the goats was a young billy who was constant trouble.  He was particularly adept at escaping the pen and eating up all the produce in the garden.  Ned devised more and more complicated ways of keeping him in, which he always defeated.  To make matters worse, he delighted in charging the legs of Ned’s friends when they were about, earning him the name Bucky.  He was especially frightening for children, who had no height or weight advantage in these confrontations.

Eventually, Ned got tired of it, shot Bucky in the head with a handgun he kept for security, and announced there was to be a goat roast.  A friend who had read somewhere how to do such things offered to clean and prepare the goat for cooking, and Ned got on to digging a pit for charcoal and rigging up a reasonable facsimile of a spit.

The actual gutting and cleaning, along with the subsequent hide tanning, is a whole other story, fraught with missteps and near disasters, that I won’t go into here, as it eventually was successful.  Suffice it to say that I will never forget the taste of fresh goat liver omelet for breakfast as long as I live.

The day of the party arrived, and guests along with it.  I have to say, it was as varied a group of individuals as you will see.  There were hippies, academics, construction workers, and people from foreign countries, reflecting Ned’s multifarious interests and genuinely diverse community of friends.  Among the merry-makers was his current girlfriend, with her five-year-old daughter, whom we shall call Robin.

Beer flowed like … beer, and the country air was hazy with cannabis.  Everyone gathered around the pit, taking turns turning the spit and arguing about whether the goat was done yet.  It didn’t take long for Robin to figure things out.  In the midst of one of the discussions, she turned to Ned.

“Is that Bucky?” she asked, pointing to the sizzling roast.

Ned took a moment, no doubt turning over in his mind exactly how to approach the topic of death and the food chain to a five-year-old.  Eventually, he cleared his throat.

“Yes, it is,'” he said.

“Good!” she replied.

 

From the diary of Pedro de los Palos, late of the caravel Pinta, 11 October 1492.

Posted on by | 3 Comments

Day 34 since we embarked from San Sebastién on the pitiful island of La Gomera.  As barbaric as it was, I wish I’d have stayed.   Of course, I admit that even this is better than shoveling horse shit for Don Carlos back home, but the Italian is completely mad.  It’s all very well to say China is just over the horizon, but the horizon keeps moving, and is new each day.  Only that imbecile Rodrigo still climbs the mast every night, hoping to claim the pension promised to the first man to sight land.  Even if he does see it, does he think the fancy men will let him take it?  It will be a fight among the pilots over that juicy plum, no doubt!  No matter; we’ll never make it anyway.

So far, it’s just muttering.  The grog makes it just possible to hold down the hard tack and salt grub, but it won’t last forever.  If poor old Inigo ever sobers up before he gets his silk shirt, he’ll kill everybody on the boat.  We all agree, except for Don Martín, of course, that we ought to turn around.  I think he would agree as well, but for his position as master of the ship, but it’s up to those fancy Genoese on the Sta. María.  Those bastards would sooner change their pants before they’d change their minds.  That’s why Colombo stays on that ship.  If he ever got next to a proper Spanish crew there’d be hell to pay, I’m telling you.

Things will change soon, in any case, if we don’t get any wind.  Not that we’re short of butt wind, with these rations.  Those fancy pants with Colombo hold their farts.  I swear they’ll blow up like balloons and float away one day.

Then let the last man point his ass to the sunset, and blow us all back home, God willing.

Living in the present

Posted on by | 10 Comments

In these faux-buddhist  times, it’s become a true cultural meme: “Live in the present!”

It’s the fault of the beats, really, Kerouac especially, giving a Zen paint job to all the self-indulgent behavior they could muster, which was substantial.  Now we get Zen home decorating, Zen cuisine, Zen motorcycling, for Christ’s sake.  But the worst of all of it is the live-in-the-present motif, which seems to be interpreted, as often as not, as licence to reject responsibility.  You can’t fault Zen itself, which is in reality all about accepting responsibility.  Far from the hedonism spawned by everyone living “in the moment,” Zen actually teaches that desire, which motivates all this extremity, is something that we could all do without.

But let’s look at the idea of living in the present itself.  Can such a thing be done?

Not a chance.  First of all, from a purely physical point of view, it’s impossible, because by the time any information reaches our senses, it is already in the past, and from there it still takes time for us to process that information and become conscious of it.  It may only be microseconds, but it’s not the present.

But maybe we’re talking about the present as it relates to sense data already processed, and ready for use.  In this case, it doesn’t matter that the events themselves are in the past; the present we’re talking about refers to the interior present.  Can’t we live in that?

Good luck.  Suppose some light reflected from a moving bus enters your eyes and is processed.  Just to identify that light pattern as a bus requires you to use information stored in your memory from a lifetime of observation.  You’re stuck in the past.  Not only that, but if the bus happens to be moving toward you, you had better be thinking of the future, or you soon won’t have any.

You could say this is pointless quibbling, that what is meant by the present in this case includes events and decisions in the immediate temporal vicinity.  Also, you get to take advantage of all you have learned in your life in interpreting the present.  And, of course, you get to consider the immediate future.  Enough to stay alive, at least.  Okay, enough to have a reasonably secure life.

Trouble is, when you start expanding the bubble around the present to include what you need for survival, you immediately run into problems with what that means.  In the end, for most people, that seems to involve cars, cell phones, huge televisions, and the sources of money to pay for all that.  Next thing you know, living in the moment just means doing what you want, and to hell with the consequences, for yourself, yes, but more often the consequences for others.

Blap! Just like that, you’ve taken a concept out of Zen and turned it completely around to mean its opposite.

This sort of thing is not unusual where religion is concerned.  Lots of airy contemplation and metaphysical nuance at the top, but by the time you get down to the ground zero believer, it’s boiled down to a list of rules and regulations.  We are, of course, familiar with this for the Abrahamic religions.  God knows that what the nuns taught us at St. Philip Neri School all those years ago had little to do with the rarified theology debated at Notre Dame and the corridors of the Vatican.  But with Buddhism, somehow, we all think we get it.

I don’t consider myself a Buddhist; I don’t believe in any religion, actually.  I was enchanted by it for a time in my youth, however.  I read all of the Western Zen writers, like Alan Watts, and moved on to the works of D. T. Suzuki and what other Japanese writers I could find in translation.  This sparked an interest in Buddhism in general, and so I was delighted when I met a young man from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), who was an ardent Theravada Buddhist.  Theravada is the closest thing in Buddhism to orthodoxy, so I jumped at the chance to get at the roots of it all.  My friend was delighted in my interest in his religion, and gave me a handful of books and pamphlets.  To my dismay, what I found was the same old list of things to do and things not to do.  It could easily have passed for my old grade school catechism with a few minor changes in terminology.

What happened to all that cool Zen stuff about letting go and being in the moment?  I later learned that, even in Zen, the practice of it was far different from the lofty metaphysics, involving more sitting in wretched discomfort (for someone raised to sit in chairs), and getting whacked with a stick than any of that marvy freedom I’d been reading about.  My horrible nuns, it seems, had been Zen masters all along!

By the time any religion percolates down to the great unwashed (us), it’s all about rules and regulations, sprinkled with more or less of magical ritual.  I think of the St. Christopher statues in the cars of my youth, or the prayers rated with the precise number of days off from Purgatory their recitation would get you, or how, if you took communion on nine consecutive first Fridays of the month, you were guaranteed salvation.  Interesting that I never made it past five!

Buddhism is no different.  Think of the prayer flags of Tibet, or the redemptive power of reciting “Namu Amida Butsu” over and over in the Japanese Pure Land school of Buddhism.

I must say we’ve been pretty clever in our cooption of Buddhism in Western culture, though.  We’ve taken some of the lofty metaphysics of a religion we’ve no intention of following seriously, stripped it of any inconveniences, reinterpreted it to suit ourselves, and imagine ourselves to be marvelously spiritual.

Sweet!