SaturdayThe beach vacation difference, this year, is we decided to take our dog Obi, mostly because we’re mad as hatters. As one military wife (whose husband is slated to go back for another 18 months in Baghdad) told us at the beach kennel after going crazy upon seeing her dog after an absence of just one day: “at least we have children and we’re not substituting”. Indeed at least we have Aaron, who provides in this instance the slim cover that we’re not treating our dog as a child in lieu of a child.
Obi is a hundred and ten pound lab/shepherd mix whose dimensions almost perfectly fit the space in the “extended” part of the “extended cab” portion of our pick-me-up truck. But he made do. There is something in Obi that is of the land of Nog, a fairytale place completely inaccessible to mere mortals. His brown, intelligent eyes speak of great wisdom though in actuality he delivers precious little. For most of the trip he stood in the back seat and leaned towards the bow in a statue-like pose as if intending to serve as a live ship figurehead.
We drove expertly, like over-the-road truckers, until a stop in the New River in old Virginny (or was it Carolina?). There was a huge gorge there backdropping a thin river and little boys and middle-aged boys made their way through it, amid the rocks and shallow water, and they couldn't look up lest they fall. Nature is an unforgiving taskmaster and punishes distraction.
On we went, to South Carolina, sending the oil and gas reserves a bit lower and enriching the Saudis imams. Alas. Is it the nature of things that conservatives feel guilty for personal behavior while resisting gov’t interference while rich liberals feel guilty for not doing enough politically to limit freedom but driving their SUVs without conscience?
SundayThe air flies! We call it wind, a wind that goes around corners, over umbrellas, uplifting sand granules. Let the longnecks fly! Let’s drive to Longneck City Limit sign and run to the rhythms of “innocent music” – the only totally innocent music ever invented – Irish jigs and reels. I want to fly from the recidivist eye, from coarseness and know-it-all-ism and negativity. The all-seeing-eye judges unsqueamishly, constantly appraising despite the fact that only the Appraiser’s appraisal is meaningful. I need lots of exercise to exorcise the demons of too much thinking. There is a realness here, the realness of the surf, wind, flesh, sand, sun.
* * * Feelings about feelings are conflicted these days and understandably so. The Enlightenment taught that feelings were minutiae, the Romantic Era taught the opposite, and so now we’re in the ‘muddly’ middle, neither Christian stoics like George Washington nor human gyroscopes like the crowds at 19th century Pentecostal missions.
Pondering my youth I see great barbarities and great pieties. Certainly I must’ve thought there was a clause in the bible that allowed fighting with your sister if she started it, a sort of Just War theory as applied to sibling relations. Was it that love was a feeling or a decision? Love was always
eros then, not in the sexual sense but in the sense that it must make you feel good, by definition. If you didn’t want to do it, then you were not granted that particular grace, case closed. The Ten Commandments taught that you couldn’t do a bad act despite wanting to, but the reverse – doing a good act despite not wanting to – seemed elusive in the ‘70s era catechism. In that other modern catechism,
Romeo & Juliet, all the sympathetic characters acted only on feelings.
Many saints (with the great exception of St. Jerome, patron saint of critics) seemed cheerful despite some must've having been serotonin-uptake challenged. But what to make of it? Nature always has her limits, same as it ever was. Serotonin is no different than the bread that was multiplied to feed the five thousand. If one difference between a saint and a sinner is that the saint’s reflex is towards charity and the sinner’s toward self, that reflex doesn’t happen by accident, any more than we offer grapes and wheat at the Consecration during Mass. We offer not grapes and wheat, we offer things that require human cooperation and effort - bread and wine. And yet the miracle is still God’s.
Monday
Another little mystery at the beach: on the first night there was a phosphorescent blue glow in the sand about the size of my thumbnail. On and off it would blue (who doesn’t like to use colors as verbs when possible?) at irregular intervals. Later Obi would discover the small crabs on the beach and he was on one like white on rye (the Chinese variation of “white on rice”) until he found they have pinchers and he quickly lost interest. (A guy passing us at the local dog park, Hispanic male in his 50s, stares at Obi: ‘What a beautiful dog…wow!’. He takes a second look back. Which struck me as odd. It's the way most guys react to a beautiful girl, not a dog. (By the way, it's a little known fact that the state mammal down here is a face-down woman in the sand with bikini straps at her side. The many sightings suggest there’s no immediate threat of extinction, and depressions left in the sand afterwards confirm this.)
* * * I read some of David McCullough’s
1776 today. Our national chronicler, McCullough didn’t become so by accident. There’s nothing in his writings to offend. It’s all agreeably non-partisan, a national salve for partisanship and sectarianism. His literary theme is always courage undaunted. (He wrote a book titled “Undaunted Courage”, the story of Lewis & Clark, but the title was taken from I believe Thomas Jefferson who’d praised Lewis & Clark with the clause “of courage undaunted” and I liked the quirkiness of the original.)
He produces books that beat back the tide of cynicism, the tide that suggests all eras are the same, morally-speaking. The end result of that view is that all people are the same, even saints (to which Christopher Hitchens would certainly attest). McCullough writes of the hard lives of our forebears and instills gratitude for them and gratitude that we are not in their shoes. His books go down easily, like tonic water. A recent Tocqueville’s biographer made his atheism known in the first chapter when he disdained Tocqueville’s religious search. That would never happen with McCullough.
Civil War books are likewise never vexing. The two figures from the past hundred years who most fascinated me only for the fascination they trigger in others are Lincoln & FDR. Both seem of very limited interest to me but are studied ad nausea and treated as saints by our era. Part of it might be the “war effect”. If you are a president during wartime you are often raised to godlike status whether you deserve to be or not. Lincoln was an extremely skilled politician but that’s about as interesting as being a fine house painter. (No offense to house painters intended or pretended.) Ultimately Lincoln had great endurance, and that is a sterling quality, perhaps the only one that ultimately matters, but others at that time also had it in spades. All the advantages in terms of materiel and manpower were to the North’s advantage and yet Lincoln gets credit despite the length & tremendous bloodletting of the war.
FDR, again a fine politician, was a good orator. If you’re a good orator and symbol-maker during wartime and you win the war, you’ll be considered a great president. But perhaps that’s the main part of the job? We are guided as much by emotions as by reason, and thus by orators. Perhaps good decision-making is overrated. He recognized that Communism was a real threat and that the government would need to step in, but arguably the Depression shouldn’t have lasted as long as it did and it was WWII that eventually ended it. Pain spread out can be better than pain concentrated, and he went with the former (Ronald Reagan was pro-FDR but anti-Great Society), even though I dare hardly speak of the matter, living as I do during an age which knows no financial hardship, at least by comparison.
McCullough’s clean prose reminds me that reading is a fine auxiliary to vacations. Reminds me of when I first saw Niagara Falls as a kid and reading a souvenir book there about daredevils who attempted to go over in barrels. A quadzillion gallons of water falling from a rocky mountain is amazing, but even more so is that some supposedly sane human might attempt to go over those quadzillion gallons. In some ways the book made a longer-lasting impression than the sight of the falls. Then I recall the visit to Washington D.C. and reading of the ghosts. It made it more vibrant to think there were not just statesmen but ghosts of statement in those halls.
The search for the ideal beach read is always challenging. The best are lyrical but meaty, with a dash of the history, but that combination is rare. Nothing is as memorable as Joseph Pearce’s biography of Oscar Wilde, with the inbuilt lyricism of selections from Wilde, along with the religious content and history. Down here in addition to McCullough I read Philip K. Dick’s
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which, although not lyrical, is completely absorbing. He can flat-out tell a story like nobody’s business.
* * * Drinking Yuengling
The aroma is almost
like circus peanuts.
Gallop the grey tops!
Spirited with salt!
a maison of foam and grey-green water
the color of Irish eyes.
The sand is soft and piled up
like a woman’s hair
still carrying the sun’s heat
like furnace coals.
The waves storm the Bastille of my heart,
battering rams of God
displaying the Beatitudes of resistance.
* * * The foam disperses in ghostly patterns, like expressionist paintings, but it is scent not sight that lingers. The sight of water to the horizon no longer shocks me but the scent, that brine-smell carried by ceaselessly caressing breezes, still does: the ocean’s incense given for the blind. I want to get the smell into my nostrils such that it echo-lingers into the mainland.
The sky is overcast, a painter’s palette of grays and light blues, or in modern terms an HTML hexadecimal array of colors. The beach is littered with bamboo shoots, called sea oats by some, carried by the surf but from where? What is the IP address of this drift wood? Cross island or India?
So it’s Monday and I'm in this captain’s chair, sitting at the shore at 6pm when few are out & a late lunch affords a stiff-arm to food needs. The dark waves pearl in the distance like white shark fins only to immediately disappear. I love this time of quietitude when the South Carolinian Gloucester men come out with their fishing poles, reminding us that though we don’t see them in the opaque waters, fish exist. It’s mostly private now, paid for by the lack of sun. There’s nothing better than a front row seat to this theatre, the waves gathered around like the fire-ring at camp.
Every time here you see something new. I remember Annie Dillard, her love for the natural world. Why doesn’t she write anymore? And Kathleen Norris and her religious/poetic sensibilities? It’s as if they’ve encountered the dark night of soul or literary equivalent, and weirdly I patiently wait for them to break thru as if we’re connected in some mystical fashion, their break-thru being mine. They, who praise by paying attention to His creation.
The tide goes out but occasionally reaches back for a surprise, like the periodic resurgences of the Roman empire though we know the result in the end. Some ask why Rome fell when the question is why should Rome have survived so long. An old man walks by wearing green shorts to his knees and black socks to an inch below the knees and I wonder why he wears so unfashionable a get-up until I recall that I refuse to use hair gel despite its use in all men under 30.
I pick up a book and it speaks of the properness of manly tears despite protestations to the contrary. But tears can “have legs”. If tears are a release similar to sex (if accompanied by completely different emotions) that only results in greater frequency. As I recall Aquinas said that sexual activity, far from decreasing, actually increases desire.
TuesdayIt’s Tuesday and I’m in “beer arrears”. I haven’t reached my required daily allowance (Beer RDA) yet. My RDA for vacation is much higher than during non-vacations, for medicinal purposes only. I'm not kidding. I found out the hard way, through trial and error, that the incidence of getting sick on vacation was high due to the gigantic increase in exercise. But a few beers each night prevents cold or flu. The increase in exercise requires more alcohol while at the same time the increased exercise prevents hangovers. I can never recall a vacation hangover though often get a headache after having consumed only three or four beers the previous night. This vacation synergy is the very definition of what we call a win-win. But drinking is surprisingly ineffective for sublimination purposes.
Today is long bike ride day. I ride until the road side fruit stand, the one that has been operating since time began. It has the quirky homemade sign of a South Carolina mom & pop operation. The building is squat and square, a tiny white shack with an elderly black lady with extremely good posture still as a statue inside. It seems a heartwarming last bastion against the sterility of conformity and modernity.
WednesdayApropos of nothing, I recall Fr. John McCloskey’s daily prayers for George Bush. Every time he passed the White House, which was almost daily, he’d say a prayer for him. It was a kind of inspiration and I did likewise for awhile, having never really prayed for the President before. I wanted George Bush to succeed, and I was touched by the fact he was touched by having so many pray for him. So now there’s a let-down, that Iraq has turned out the way it has. So many Christians praying for him and yet we can’t judge prayer by the results. Even Mother Teresa surely prayed for world peace with mixed results.
St. Cyril of Jerusalem wrote about how it is necessary to “walk by the dragon” during this life, a sort of gauntlet of horrors. Here is a gauntlet of another sort, a skin gauntlet, as the clouds take on a sheathlike appearance. As children, we pay, or our parents pay, for the privilege of waking down a corridor of horrors, otherwise called a Halloween or fright house. There is no resolving the fear there, we merely move from one fleshy shock to the next.
Old songs tend to come unbidden in this June time in the sun. Paul McCartney’s "Band on the Run" which I’d thought at the time was “Man on the Run". I’m ready for moody music like “Suddenly Last Summer” – the sort of “longing” music the ‘80’s trafficked in. There was “Life in a Northern Town”, “I Ran”, “Hungry Like a Wolf”, “Rio”. The long drawn-out Duran-Duran whole notes: “I’m after you..”.
But the radio stations are of little help. 80s music is too old for the young, too young for the old. I don’t have any ‘80s songs on my Ipod since it is for vacations. I don’t want to “ruin” the old songs by playing them while running around the track of a health club in the basement of a corporation on a Tuesday afternoon.
When I was a kid I wallowed in nostalgia like F. Scott Fitzgerald did alcohol. I couldn’t wait to graduate from (fill-in) so that the nostalgia could begin. If you live in the past, the present and future are more enjoyable it seemed. I was nostalgic the next day about all night baseball card trading sessions with my best friend. He was a nostalgic soul until college, at which point he promptly lost the gene for it. I started losing it in earnest around the time I got married, though sometimes I’m able to resurrect it. I became then much more forward-looking, at least by comparison with the past. During the Blogging Era I think I became more attuned to how sentiment is experienced from another’s perspective by reading other people’s sentiment and imagined I might’ve overvalued its appeal.
The collecting impulse seems married to a nostalgic frame of mind. You collect in order to extend the past into the present and future. Experiences of nature are saved via rock collecting or via the autumn leaves we pressed in books. I write this trip log in part for that reason, to extend the ocean, to be able to virtually re-visit it. A Passionist priest once attempted to extend this collector impulse to the Eucharist – Jesus was giving us a souvenir to remember Him by, only it is Himself and not just the lock of hair given to a soldier before going to war. “Do this in remembrance of me” at the same time as “This is my Body.”. The Eucharist is like Scripture, both remembrances, souvenir of the past and yet a living, breathing thing in the present.
* * * Passed a 7th Day Adventist Church. Probably won’t pass one of them again without thinking of blogger William Cork, who I rarely if ever read but now whom I remember more in his “death” than in his life. He converted to the 7th day Adventists. Hearing the news was shocking, or the shock was shocking given how little I “knew” him.
I always check, as Mass begins, for Scott Hahn & family since the years have shown that they have the same week as we do and sure enough I see them again. Or rather all but Scott, who I suppose has another commitment this time (the first time I'd seen Kimberly & family but not him.) I love their dependability & consistency at daily Mass. I’ve never gone and they’d not been there.
* * * Apologies always make more news. Like little children, we’re often tantalized not so much by what is said but by someone having to apologize. Reds announcer & Hall of Famer Marty Brennaman made news down here for having to apologize for saying the coming Reds road trip would be like the “Bataan death march”. A ridiculous hyperbole, and I suppose it’s arguably still too recent an event since some involved are still living, but I wouldn’t have caught the original line as offensive. In fact I surely would've unthinkingly used it in my blog. It’s interesting how boundaries change over the years. Could Don Rickles have made it now? Could Howard Stern have made it in Rickle’s age? I wonder if we’re becoming coarser and more sensitive at the same time.
Thursday “Ridin’ on his daddy’s shoulders / behind a mule, beneath the sun” – Matthew, John Denver
Private ground found! The island revealed a secret surprise today, as we found Fish Haul Creek Park and explored an off-beaten path that led to a remarkable vista. We set our chairs out there and watched the sailboats in the Sound. It was probably the longest period I did nothing for years. I did not read, nor eat nor drink. I did not sleep. I watched and drank it in, like an elixir, a potent elixir of beauty and privacy found here, nowhere, everywhere. We improvised shade for Obi, clearing brush from under a small tree, and he slept the sleep that a dog deprived of his family but now reunited sleeps.
Dogs aren’t allowed on the beach after 10am, but this was a loophole. The clay earth was just meters from the sand of the beach and had an unobstructed view of Robinson Crusoe nature, not Baywatch nature. It’s good ground, slightly elevated with small battlements though our left flank is unprotected – which is the way we found it after all –and during the four hours we were there only a couple of guys walked through (Obi, predictably, acted like a house afire).
Boaters swear by the peacefulness and one gets a sense of it as you watch them, and perhaps I briefly “get” the appeal of the regattas my college roommate enthused over. This previously unknown are of the island reminds me of other shadows in my geographical mental landscape, of other unmapped areas like the Catskill mountains and the Utah desert. Specks of granite spackle the ground like leftover Spanish galleons from a shipwreck long ago. This soporic pace and place reminds me of Colonial Williamsburg, another coastal town, where I once watched dumbly as artisans went about their work and it would’ve been dull as dishwater but for the quiet green grounds and grand uniforms and tall oaks which lended a sense of awe.
The heat reminds me of battle fields too, of the Land of Davis and Jackson & Lee, of bronze monuments to generals and gravestones gothic with Spanish moss. The brick-brack river water of the Savannah river. Of sun-elation, sun-oblation, while birds call back and forth, echoing in the forest tops, reminding me of tapes I’d once bought but hardly played, of sounds of forests and oceans but it seemed so different, removed and played at home, like a bird in a cage.
The sun awakens ‘85 reveries: “want to be a man in motion / all I need is a pair of wings”. Here at St. Elmo’s Sound the undulant waves and callipered pines give the feel of Adam’s race starting over. Snow white birds and seven humpy dwarf islands are scattered round this paradise. Sailships in the distance appear like Cortez’s and there’s green timberline beyond and a tiny island of greenest grass in the foreground, just beyond where this clay shore that is protected by pines and of but not on the beach perches. And it’s after 10am, past the time all dogs turn to pumpkins.
It feels like a scene for Manet or Monet, it feels a French sea, a maritime Provence, full of conical brush and gutterances and breezes off the Channel and brandy and cigars at nine. The claws of civilization pale into the murky horizon, unreal, the levers of progress disappear. And far away, across the isle, we see another isle with its bright sand spit of beach and its protecting cedars and its promise of civilization within the protection of the primitive. We look up the names on the map - there is a thrill to finding the name of mysterious things - and one is "Parrish Island U.S.M.C." & the other "Hunting Island".
FridayWhereupon I write (in jest) fiction:
Tragically, I’ve experienced large periods of chronic full employment. Corporate re-structurings, mergers, reorganizations, downsizings and rightsizings all left my job intact lo these many years, back from the time I left the collegiate womb at the tender age of 21. (It was an emergency C-section; I didn’t want to come out.) Indeed, we emerge from our mother’s womb squalling and blinking from the light and we emerge from the collegiate womb squalling and dilating from the dimness of the light in the corporation’s hallway.
I spend Sundays looking in the paper for jobs advertising for beer drinkers or part time diarists who write about their dogs. I’ve never seen such an ad, which I attribute to the evils of capitalism. Under the Chesterton/Belloc Distributist model, I ‘d have a high-paying job as a beer-drinking part-time pet diarist.
I decided to write A Natural History of Work, a three volume work to be published on acid-free paper using an obscure 16th century font face developed laboriously by Belgian monks after drinking Trappist ale, but found I didn’t have the work ethic for it. Perhaps too someone had already written it. I checked, and no one had, and so I began thusly:It’s been said that work is the curse of the drinking class but work has been found in every human culture from the beginning of recorded history. Before there was beer, there was work, because it takes work to make beer.
Examples of early Egyptian hieroglyphics include inscriptions which, roughly translated say: “I go to work so I can send my kids to Cairo Elementary”. Cave drawings recently found outside Newark, New Jersey illustrate an early computer programmer doing a “hard re-boot” – that is, dropping the PC off a cliff.
Most of the bad press work has received over the millennia has come from poets and song lyricists and playwrights, none of whom have ever worked a decent day in their life. “I don’t want to work, I just want to bang on the drum all day,” speaks a modern rock poet, but it’s not clear he’s a disinterested source. Similar too Walt Disney’s “Mary Poppins”, a film in which the husband, a banker, by the end expects to get paid flying a kite. He converts the board of directors to the wonders of kite flying and all is well that ends well but how many times does this happen in real life? If the board of directors of a bank wrote this script, one suspects the outcome would’ve differed...
SaturdayObi’s lip is made up of a cluster of bean-like protuberances. I touch one of them as he sleeps and he wakes, his eyelids open, and I watch as his eyeball slowly rolls back from the heavens, like a Magic 8-ball saying slowly coming to the fore.
June, oh June
so surpassingly beautiful
and yet brief as the firecracker
at your next-of-kin’s party.
June, oh June
the memories you spin
from just a leaf
lit by the meridian sun.
June, oh June
so redolent of the past
smelling of covered bridges
and old Carolina barns.
June, oh June
feasts of Sts Anthony & Thomas
of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus & Mary
so full of consolations.
