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Utopian Turtletop. Monsieur Croche's Bête Noire. Contact: turtletop [at] hotmail [dot] com

Friday, August 22, 2008



After a day’s drive and ferry ride,
we hiked in the two miles to Shi Shi,
the northernmost ocean-facing beach
in the Lower 48,
just south of the Makah Reservation,
through which we had to hike.
The forecast predicted rain
but we were lucky our two days there,
never getting more than a few sprinkles.
We saw a gray whale in the surf
thirty feet from shore,
its fin and its tale splashing out,
and then later out in the bay,
its gray, white-flecked back
humping out of the water.
I thought of the poetry of Kenneth Rexroth,
his beautiful poems on nature’s immensity,
nature’s and time’s,
and our puniness, redeemed, if at all,
only by our consciousness
and more than that, our love.
The crashing surf lullabyed us
with its awesome song
of nature’s splendor and indifference.
Frank O’Hara’s epigram against nature
echoed in my head too,
though I could neither quote it
nor place it to look it up later
when I got home,
but something to the effect that,
only commercial culture gives a sign
that we don’t totally regret life.
Our stay on the beach needed
commercial culture -- our tents,
sleeping bags, cookware, food.
O’Hara’s urbane urban-centricity
putting him in the line of
Socrates and Oscar Wilde, not bad company.
I read The Hobbit aloud to my kid,
a suggestion of my beloved spouse’s,
who loves Tolkien more than I do,
and I love him.
We’re about halfway through it
and the kid is enjoying it,
and I love seeing his face shine
at passages he finds funny,
such as Bilbo’s tricking the dwarves
by wearing the ring and
invisibly entering their circle
as they wonder whether he’s alive,
and he slips off the ring and says,
“Here is the burglar!”
My 5-year-old son’s face shined at that,
he quoted it, “‘Here is the burglar!’
That’s so good!”
At first he had been skeptical
about a book with no pictures,
but only a few pages in he interrupted
to say that the book was putting pictures
into his brain.
My beloved spouse got the idea
to read The Hobbit aloud from a friend
who read it to his son when he was four.
I read it when I was about 10 and loved it,
and read it again 16 years ago
and loved it less but still enjoyed it
and am enjoying it again now
though now that we’re back from our trip
finding time to read it aloud
might be tough.
The kid is in bed and I should be.
We had planned to stay three nights
but after two the kid and I wanted to go
and a good thing too,
the rain came pouring
just after we reached our car.
1:25 AM, I need to sleep.
The waves crash on the Pacific shore,
electricity hums through our house,
and somewhere a gray whale
remains indifferent to its splendor.



-- Photo of Shi Shi lifted from the Visitors Bureau.



Update, 8/26:
From Mickle Maher in comments,
here's the original O'Hara line I butchered above;
it's from the prose poem "Meditations in an Emergency":

"One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes -- I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life."


Thanks Mickle! (And thanks for giving my beloved spouse the idea to read The Hobbit to our kid.)

Thanks Frank O'Hara!

(I feel bad for so wretchedly transforming O'Hara's epigram into a drab bit of quasi-dogma, which, as Mickle points out, is not what it is at all.)



Posted by: John / 12:59 AM
Comments:
Funny thing -- was just in NYC wandering around the MOMA book/gift store and thumbed through O'Hara's "In Memory of My Feelings" and read that quote -- not the whole poem, my eyes went right to that line: "One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes -- I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life." and I quoted it to my friend Kristin the very next day (we'd been arguing the degree of NYC's foulness and un-livability) and now here it is again.

And "regret" is italicized -- which somehow makes the thought less dogmatic and dire and serious by making it breathy and over toppy -- which is O'Hara's great trick: total sincerity crumpled in total irony injected with absolute conviction and an eager joy around indecision.
# posted by Anonymous Anonymous : 9:21 PM
 
Thanks Mickle!

I knew I was doing a grave injustice to the wit of O'Hara's epigrammatic line, but I couldn't remember it. The wit does undermine any sense of dogma.

Thanks again -- you're right on about O'Hara's light, complex touch.
# posted by Blogger John : 9:41 PM
 
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