Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “Dear Possible” by Laura Riding appeared first on The American Scholar.

“[M]y life has been far less roiled by external events than most lives. The death of those dear to me I have usually been able to take in stride, although the last dozen years have become heavier and gloomier with such loss and the loss of the familiar, comforting world of which they were components.”  Loss and pain are inevitable, regardless of whatever virtues we may possess, a truth never suspected by children, so we persist in thinking the good are rewarded and the bad are punished. It’s complicated because our nature mingles the good and the bad. While in Cleveland I spoke with two women and a man whose lives were radically “roiled by external events,” unlike my own. The man was severely wounded in Vietnam. One of the women was raped decades ago and tears came to her eyes as she described the attack. All managed to simulate “ordinary life,” whatever that means. They married, had jobs, two had children, all dabbled with but none descended into drug and alcohol addiction. They paid their taxes, committed no significant crimes and persevered.       The late American novelist Richard G. Stern wrote the passage at the top in his final book, Still on Call, published in 2010, three years before his death at age eighty-four. I have a soft spot for Stern. His fiction is thoroughly human. It sometimes reminds me of his friend’s, Saul Bellow. He is devoted to the ordinariness of an American life. In the piece quoted above, “How I Think I Got to Think the Way I Think,” Stern writes for me:   “I have never been a soldier, never been in prison, never lived in a city being bombed, never been longer than three days without electricity and plumbing, have never lived under tyranny – except during brief lecturing or tourist visits -- never been threatened by arrest because of my opinions, and never been restrained from expressing political sentiments . . .”   In short, a typical American life, like my own. Cause only for thankfulness. Another American writer who embodies a similar sense of realism and gratitude for life in America is the late John Updike. I read most of his books as they appeared, starting in the sixties. Today, his novels mean little to me but I frequently return to his poetry, essays and criticism. and a handful of his early short stories. This is taken from “Spirit of ’76,” collected in the posthumously published Endpoint and Other Poems (2009):   “Be with me, words, a little longer; you have given me my quitclaim in the sun, sealed shut my adolescent wounds, made light of grownup troubles, turned to my advantage what in most lives would be pure deficit, and formed, of those I loved, more solid ghosts.”

Are we doomed to repeat history—or can we build something better first?

Gammer Gurton loses her needle (solution to the mystery: distracted by her cat she forgets it in her servant Hodge’s pants).  A wandering stranger uses the hubbub to sow chaos for some reason, which gives the play a kind of plot, which for something like this is just a way to give the gags some order.  The stranger wants chaos but of course  so do we, the readers, the audience.  That is the point of comedy. Such is Gammer Gurton’s Needle.  I date it near but somewhat after Ralph Roister Doister, so mid-1550s.  It was possibly printed in 1563 and certainly printed in 1575.  There we go.  The authorship is a total hash.  The author is one or another Cambridge do, writing a holiday entertainment performed by and for an audience of teenage boys. They presumably found it hilarious. Tib.  See, Hidge, what’s this may it not be within it? Hodge. Break it, fool, with thy hand, and see an thou canst find it. Tib. Nay, break it you, Hodge, according to your word. Hodge.  Gog’s sides! Fie! It stinks; it is a cat’s turd!  (Act !, Scene v) As a character says later, “An thadst seen him, Diccon, it would have made thee beshit thee / For laughter” (IV.iii).  Gammer Gurton’s Needle is rather more earthy than the English comedies that would follow it.  The student of Shakespeare soon learns that anything that looks like a dirty joke probably is.  Such is true here, too. Gammer.  For these and ill luck together, as knoweth Cock, my boy, Have stuck away my dear neele, and robber me of my joy, My fair long straight neele, that was mine only treasure; The first day of my sorrow is, and last end of my pleasure!  (I.iv) The play has an outstanding cat, Gib, who sadly never appears on stage, such were the limits of mid-16th century theatrical special effects.  In Act III, scene iv, for example, Gib “stands me gasping behind the door, as though her wind hath faileth” – has she swallowed the lost needle!  The characters debate what to do – “Groper her, ich say, methinks ich feel it; does not prick your hand?” – but the cat stays behind the door the whole time. Whoever the author was, he knew how to have some fun with the language, which is again in rhyming couplets but with more North English rural dialect. My guts they yawl-crawl, and all my belly rumbleth; The puddings cannot lie still, each one over other tumbleth.  (II.i.) Or these two old ladies screaming at each other: Gammer.          Thou wert as good as kiss my tail! Thou slut, thou cut, thou rakes, thou jakes! Will not shame make thee hide thee? Chat.  Thou scald, thou bald, thou rotten, thou glutton!  I will no longer chide thee, But I will teach thee to keep home.  (III.iii) And the humor deepens when I remember that these are two teenage boys dressed as old women shouting these lines for an audience of teenage boys.  This is what we call classic humor. Next week I switch to tragedy, with Gorboduc (1561) by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville, written and performed for young lawyers and full of important lessons and Classical learning and so on.  It will be a tonal shift.

Dana Gioia speaks for me, though he has another sort of reunion in mind:  “This is my past where no one knows me. These are my friends whom I can’t name— Here in a field where no one chose me, The faces older, the voices the same.”   Our fifty-fifth high-school reunion was held at the Cleveland Yachting Club, about as alien an environment as I can imagine. The guard at the front gate asked if I knew where to go. Had I been there before? “I didn’t come from a yachting family,” I explained. I entered a dining room full of strangers, “my friends whom I can’t name,” some of whom were classmates for thirteen years. Slowly I started recognizing a few people, or at least figured out who they were by reading name tags. Youth and old age are like foreign countries often suspending diplomatic relations.   The person I most hoped would attend walked in. I wrote about Lynn Kilbane four years ago after our previous reunion. She has retired after forty-five years as a registered nurse and lives in Cincinnati. We resumed that earlier conversation, and Lynn answered questions that had puzzled me for decades. A guy I had known since kindergarten, Norm Kuhar, died in 1974, just four years after we graduated. Vietnam, drugs, cancer? Lynn told me he committed suicide. Louise Koch died in 1972 of an undiagnosed blood disease. These are people whose images I carry in memory. I would recognize them, or at least their younger selves, if they walked in the room. From Lynn, after sixty-four years, I got a second kiss.   “Must I at last solve my confusion, Or is confusion all I can feel?”