Graham Crackers & Ovaltine

Two popular food products from my childhood are still around, beating the odds against the inertia of obsolescence which is the hallmark of capitalistic enterprise.

Ovaltine, and Graham Crackers.

New products these days seem designed to capture and dominate a market, perhaps for no longer than a decade, then are bought and consolidated, disappear, or are transformed into a newer iteration. In our hurry-up culture, things don't last very long. We're impatient and easily bored, and want new stuff thrown at us constantly. Heaven forbid we should have to live with anything long enough for it to seem familiar. Familiarity in the marketplace can be fatal. You've got to move fast to keep the money flowing.

The marketing of mass-produced consumer goods goes all the way back to the early days of the Industrial Revolution. The major innovation of marketing theory in the 20th Century was the "invention" of demand through creative advertising, supplying a product that people didn't know they needed until they were "sold" on the idea first. People will buy anything--even a rock in a box--if you can con them into it. Value is a very fluid substance--it can be manipulated to apply to almost anything.

In the realm of gastronomy, early food "scientists" invented products that were sold on the principle that they were healthful--not just good-tasting, but good for you too.

Diets are strange. The human body is very adaptable to different kinds of diets. Our taste and cravings developed over time, suited to the needs of sustenance and the availability of certain kinds of nutrients. We respond to sweetness, apparently, because certain key nutrients we needed were contained in things that were naturally sweet, like fruits (which, in turn, developed carb sugars in order to facilitate their own reproduction). The human body didn't anticipate that one day food marketers would fill up otherwise "empty" foodstuffs with sugar, tricking the body into consuming them with no net gain in nutrition.

A lot of food products aren't any better for you than what you could otherwise obtain in cheaper, more natural forms. Apple flavored soft-drinks, for instance, aren't nearly as good as real, homemade apple cider--they're just more "convenient." Our ancestors probably had a primarily vegetarian diet, with only occasional helpings of meat. As the human tribe settled down, grains and nuts occupied a higher proportion of our meals. The diet we consume today appears to consist more of things that can be effectively preserved and marketed, than of things that might make us healthier, and longer-lived. What we eat today seems more a consequence of the efficiencies of the market-place, than any actual physio-chemical need. (Conservatives will say that the market is just responding to what people want, but I don't think serious people believe that hoary old myth, anymore.) Image- and taste-making are what consumption now revolves around.

Occasionally, enterprising souls have hit upon the idea of selling attractively appearing and tasting products which are also good for consumers. This seems a hard combination to beat. Eating something healthy that looks appetizing, and tastes good too! If advertisers had their way, we would never eat apples, but apple-flavored candy instead.

When I was in kindergarten, I remember we had afternoon "naps"--maybe they thought we were still babies, and needed more sleep. Most of the boys, as I recall, hated this part of the day, because we were bursting with energy, and wanted to have recess continue indefinitely. The girls were a little more tractable. I can't remember, but it was either just before, or just after, these naps that we had our afternoon "snack". It wasn't free. We had to bring "milk money" from home to be included, but I think everyone did. They gave us a little half-pint carton of whole milk, and a couple of Graham Crackers. The Graham Crackers were sweet, and easily breakable into fourths. They were just sweet enough to be considered a treat, but not so sweet as to be thought of as candy, and therefore unhealthy.

A little later, I picked up on Ovaltine, and began asking my mother to purchase the stuff at the grocery store. It came in those days in glass jars with screw-lids. The stuff didn't quite look like a flavor mix: It wasn't a powder, it was more like curly little brown flakes. Unlike canned cocoa powder, it didn't seem to want to mix well with milk, so you had to agitate it a good deal to make it. The best part was that the resulting liquid tasted very like chocolate milk. Parents didn't like to buy chocolate milk for their kids in those days (sweets! bad!), but they'd pop for Ovaltine every time.

Any referance to the origins of Ovaltine would involve a discussion of chocolate, or cocoa. Wikipedia has a long detailed entry on Chocolate, and on Ovaltine (or, as it was originally called, Ovomaltine, by the Swiss, who invented it). Cocoa (not to be confused with Coca, another plant which grows in South America, which has well-known (since pre-historic times) stimulative properties) had been used in Central America for thousands of years, before it was discovered by Western Europeans, who added sugar and fat and spices to it, to make it into the more familiar cocoa drink we know today. New World Indians apparently drank mixtures of unsweetened (or sweetened) cocoa which we'd probably think tasted very bitter indeed. They apparently thought the stuff would make them more potent--and there's nothing like the probability of greater potency to get a horny young chieftain's attention. Certain chemicals in cocoa do seem to have a soothing effect on the nervous system; but it's doubtful it was the Viagra of its day.

Cocoa beans on the tree

It wasn't until the turn of the 19th Century that cocoa was combined with malt and eggs to make Ovaltine, in Switzerland. To my surprise, the Ovaltine formula has not been fixed, and is still sold in several countries, in differing mixtures. In England, the factory that produced their version, even had a nearby health resort for disadvantaged children until the 1960's. There are versions sold today in Japan, Brazil, Hong Kong and Malaysia. It's become the world's poor man's milkshake, and shows no signs of going out of style. Products with this much durability are really rare.

The Graham Cracker story is different and less complicated. They were invented in New Jersey in 1829 by an enterprising Presbyterian minister, the Rev. Sylvester Graham, which was originally sold as a digestive biscuit. Digestives are foods, eaten after a meal, thought to aid in digestion. I don't imagine it was supposed to be a laxative, probably just a "soother" of the intestines. Today, Graham Crackers are frequently ground up into powder and used as crusts for pies and desserts. Graham flour is composed of fine-ground white flour, coarse-ground wheat bran and germ. It resembles, in color and texture, coarse-grained whole wheat bread.

I haven't had Graham Crackers in years, but we ate them often as children. I don't think we thought of them as health food, though the permission this claim created undoubtedly contributed to their wide popularity. Almost everyone knows about Graham Crackers.

The whole "natural foods" industry has been in full flower now for a quarter of a century, but its roots go back at least a century and a half. Controversy has evolved about labeling, whether or not certain foods can be labeled as "healthy" or "lite" (light on calories) or nutritious.

Lang Lang Langen-dorf bread! Builds strong bodies twelve ways! In the meantime, Ovaltine and Graham Crackers keep chuggin' along.

Paterno, Penn State & the Pedophile Case

What is now known about the Penn State Football program coach scandal is recorded in the following time-line (from the New York Daily News):

1969: Jerry Sandusky begins his coaching career at Penn State University as defensive line coach.

1977: Sandusky founds The Second Mile, a charitable organization designed to help at-risk boys in the State College, Pa. region. Second Mile’s website says that over 100,000 boys and girls from all Pennsylvania counties participate in the organization’s programs annually. Sandusky is also promoted to Penn State’s defensive coordinator that same year.

Jan. 1, 1983: Penn State beats Georgia, 27-23, in Sugar Bowl for Joe Paterno’s first national title; Sandusky is team’s defensive coordinator.

Jan. 2, 1987: Penn State defeats Miami, 14-10, in Fiesta Bowl for Paterno’s second national title; Sandusky is team’s defensive coordinator.

1994: Boy known as Victim 7 in the grand jury presentment released last weekend meets Sandusky through Second Mile at “about the age of 10,” according to grand jury testimony.

1996-98: Boy known as Victim 5 in grand jury presentment is taken to the locker rooms and showers at Penn State by Sandusky when he is 8 to 10 years old, according to grand jury testimony.

1998: Boy known as Victim 6 in grand jury presentment is taken into the locker rooms and showers when he is 11 years old and showers with Sandusky, according to grand jury testimony. Sandusky lathers up boy and says, “I’m going to squeeze your guts out.” When Victim 6 is dropped off at his home, he tells his mother of the incident and she reports the information to university police, who investigate. Investigators eavesdrop on two conversations between the mother and Sandusky, and after one conversation, Sandusky asks for forgiveness, even telling the mother, “I wish I were dead.” Then Centre County district attorney Ray Gricar ultimately says no charges will be filed against Sandusky.

Summer 1999: Sandusky announces he will retire from Penn State at the end of the season. He will have emeritus status, maintain an office on campus and have access to all Penn State facilities.

Dec. 28, 1999: Boy known as Victim 4, is part of Sandusky’s family party for the 1999 Alamo Bowl in Texas, according to grand jury report.

Fall 2000: According to grand jury report, Penn State janitor named Jim Calhoun observes Sandusky in university’s Lasch Football Building showers with a young boy, Victim 8, pinned up against the wall, performing oral sex on the boy. He informs janitorial staff members. Employee Ronald Petrosky cleans the showers at Lasch and witnesses Sandusky and the boy, whom he describes as being between the ages of 11 and 13, exit holding hands. Calhoun, a temporary employee, never reports incident.

March 1, 2002: According to grand jury report, Penn State graduate assistant Mike McQueary enters the locker room at the Lasch Football Building. He witnesses Sandusky performing anal sex on boy, known as Victim 2, whose age he estimates at 10. McQueary tells his father, who advises him to tell Paterno. McQueary meets with Paterno the following morning.

March 3, 2002: According to the grand jury, Paterno calls Penn State athletic director Tim Curley, and tells Curley what he was told by McQueary. Paterno’s version is that McQueary had seen Sandusky “fondling or doing something of a sexual nature.” Later that month, McQueary meets with Curley and senior vice president for finance and business Gary Schultz. McQueary says he believes he witnessed Sandusky having anal sex. Curley and Schultz never report the incident to authorities.

April 15, 2005: Gricar, the Centre County DA, disappears after a trip to Lewisburg, Pa. His car is later found parked in a lot and his computer and hard drive are found in the Susquehanna River. The twice-divorced Gricar, 59, is never seen or heard from again. “It’s literally a mystery,” Bellefonte Borough Police Chief Shawn Weaver tells the Daily News in 2011. “The man vanished, period. No human trace has been found. There’s only one of three things that could have happened to him — a suicide, homicide or he just walked away.”

2007: According to the grand jury report, during the 2007 track season, Sandusky begins spending time with boy known as Victim 1. Victim 1 stays overnight at Sandusky’s home, and later testifies that Sandusky performs oral sex on him multiple times. Sandusky also brings Victim 1 onto PSU campus even though he was barred from bringing boys to the university after alleged 2002 incident.

Spring 2008: Victim 1 terminates contact with Sandusky, while a freshman at a Clinton County high school, according to grand jury report.

2009: Then-Pennsylvania attorney general Tom Corbett begins sexual abuse investigation of Sandusky.

September 2010: Sandusky retires from day-to-day involvement with The Second Mile.

Summer 2011: Lara Gricar, adopted daughter of Ray Gricar, successfully files petition to have her father declared deceased.

Nov. 5, 2011: Sandusky is arrested and released on $100,000 bail after being arraigned on 40 criminal counts. Curley and Schultz are charged with perjury and failure to report the allegations.

Nov. 7, 2011: Pennsylvania attorney general Linda Kelly holds a press conference. She says Paterno is not a target of the investigation. Curley and Schultz surrender on charges and step down from their posts — Curley goes on administrative leave, while Schultz retires. State police chief Frank Noonan says there are “no heroes” in the investigation. Both Kelly and Noonan encourage other victims to come forward.

Nov. 8, 2011: Penn State cancels Paterno’s weekly press conference. Paterno tells reporters, “We’ll try to do it as soon as we can.” Reports swirl that Paterno will be ousted by Board of Trustees.

Nov. 9, 2011: Paterno announces he’ll retire at the end of the season. Late that evening, Board of Trustees votes to oust Paterno and Penn State president Graham Spanier in an announcement made by Board’s vice-chairman John Surma. Defensive coordinator Tom Bradley is named interim head coach. Riots erupt in the streets, as angry students throw rocks, tip over a TV news van and shout support for Paterno.

Nov. 10, 2011: University announces McQueary, a receivers coach with the team, will not be in attendance for Nov. 12 home game against Nebraska, due to threats the State College native has received.

Nov. 11, 2011: McQueary is placed on administrative leave.

Nov. 12, 2011: Despite late comeback, Penn State falls to Nebraska, 17-14, in first game since scandal hits.

It has been reported that Paterno was told about a clear incident of child molestation within the jurisdiction of the college athletic facilities in 2002, and that he reported this in turn to his superiors in the Athletic Department, allegedly equivocating somewhat about the severity of the behavior reported to him.

There's been a lot of hoopla in the media over Paterno's firing, Sandusky's arrest, Penn State's damage control, and the probable and/or suggested remedies. It appears there may be several plaintiffs contemplating suits against the college, its athletic department, or individuals connected with the "cover-up."

Let's speculate a little over how this mess may have developed, and how it might have been treated in a more constructive way, from the beginning. Fair warning: I'm not a big college football fan, though I watch professional sports on the media, and have followed professional football most of my adult life--not obsessively, but with some interest. I've been a San Francisco 49ers fan since childhood. Though I attended UC Berkeley and the University of Iowa, I was never much interested in their respective athletic programs or teams.

I have mixed (unresolved?) feelings about the violence associated with severe contact sports like football. As an adolescent, I didn't possess the physical strength and stamina to pursue heavy contact sports, and by the time I did as an adult, I was well beyond the point at which I might have engaged in such activities. You have to be driven, as well as physically capable, to play football or even basketball competitively at the high school or college level, and I was never motivated sufficiently in that direction.

Nevertheless, like most Americans, I have some interest in professional sports, and vicariously participate (as a fan) in the excitement and interest which the competition generates. Am I a little less than proud of this interest? Do I think I could spend my time more wisely? Do I have some personal stake in the perpetuation of the big money generated, and serious risk of injury, which are integral parts of professional football? Without a doubt. Much of what people do isn't rational, or practical. Professional sports is an entertainment. People crave it. Ultimately, it doesn't do society much good--despite the claims that are made for its charitableness, or the building of character, or as a demonstration project for the teaching of courage, cooperation or other supposed personal values.

Over the 20th Century, college sports grew from a modest pastime into a very big business. The division between (amateur) college and professional sports has become very vague indeed. The system of "athlete scholars" is mostly an open joke in our society. No one believes that college athletics is designed to turn out "well-rounded" individuals who improve their bodies along with their minds. That's all become a myth, if it ever had any validity to begin with. As fas as the career potential of college athletics goes, precious few of those who participate realize any permanent return on their investment. For the major market teams, college players are participating, unpaid, in a financial investment scheme designed to exploit them for the benefit of the institutions they nominally "attend."

The value of such programs to the financial stability of the institutions which run them, especially in a time of scarcening public resources for state supported schools, is obvious. Penn State receives tens of millions of dollars each year from its football team revenues--ticket sales, promotions, and media contracts. Would a wholesale repudiation of such support bring about some useful "cleansing" of the conscience(s) of the colleges which participate in this system? Having allowed this system of support to grow into the huge money machine it now is, should it be dismantled because of a minor morals scandal at a single institution?

What we have in the Sandusky case, is a retired coach who was allowed to use university property to lure young boys into a safe neutral location where he could interact with them in ways that might not be seen or interpreted as suspicious or questionable. That he was seen, out in the open, by employees of the facilities where these incidents took place, suggests that he may have felt he had "cover" or that what he was doing might conceivably pass as edgy, but not clearly illegal.

Pedophiles, according to the psychological history of diagnosis, tend to want to see themselves merely as expressing or experiencing "affection" as a way of defending their abnormal tendencies. Sandusky appears to have been a chronic, classic pedophile, with a long history of interactions. At some point, perhaps as early as the mid-1990's, Sandusky's problem had begun to be known. My speculation is that people who worked with him, including his boss Joe Paterno, certainly were aware of his tendencies. They knew he craved young boys, and a lot of people have to have known that his charity, Second Mile, was at least partly a cover for his interest, and a conduit to access to vulnerable boys. So this problem didn't just begin in 2002.

This is where the issue becomes cloudier. If Paterno knew that Sandusky was a pedophile, he might have been content to let Sandusky retire, and he may have hoped that Sandusky's activity would no longer be "associated" with the football program, or the University itself. Imagine what may have been going through Paterno's mind: Indeed, it's not been publicly speculated upon, but it's possible that Paterno even discussed the matter with Sandusky, and warned him, or threatened him with exposure, if he didn't stop using university athletic facilities to do it. Paterno had decades of his life invested in the high profile, successful football program. He has to have known that if and when Sandusky's activities were outed, he (Paterno), the team, and the university all would come under severe fire. Paterno was a football coach, not a lawyer. He may have thought he had no direct responsibility, lawful or otherwise, to make something like that public. We don't know what his personal take on homosexuality was, or how he might have viewed what Sandusky was doing. He may have thought it troublesome, but not rising to the level that would justify jeopardizing the school athletics program(s), the team, and his own career and reputation, by being a whistle-blower.

Once Sandusky retired from active coaching, his "association" with Penn State was a sort of courtesy only. Paterno, and others in a position of authority, may have thought that his ties to the university, and the team facility, were loose enough not to implicate them. And again, we don't know what efforts may have been made to influence Sandusky or to try to separate him from the place. It would be logical to see the university wanting to distance itself from him, and yet they apparently made no effort to do that, at least that has been reported. It's easy to condemn all the participants, in hindsight, for not acting in a less selfish and self-serving way. They may indeed have weighed the consequences of disclosure against the attractions of silence, and decided, as they apparently did, that the downside of going public was far worse.

In a pragmatic sense, what has ensued, and will continue to occur, will be a media circus, and a legal nightmare, in which the lives of perhaps as many as two dozen boys (now men, of course), will be dragged into the spotlight. Paterno (who is now a decrepit old man in his 80's), and others involved, have lost or will lose their livelihoods. Despite the fact that none of the participants in the program (other than Sandusky) bears any individual guilt (except perhaps as accessories), all will be tainted. And will any of this scandalizing improve the lots of the boys who were exploited, i.e., "raped" by Sandusky? In what sense is the scandal, and the public hand-wringing and immolation, going to heal or make right anything that occurred? Could Sandusky have been stopped, and prosecuted, in a way that didn't implicate the Penn State program?

Were Sandusky's crimes severe enough to warrant the shame and reactions which have turned Penn State upsidedown? I don't have an answer. I'm not much interested in defending Paterno, or the other people who turned the other way. In our media-drenched world, trying to cover something up, before the media can get a hold of it, usually ends up being the worse crime. How many scandals were never made public? How many Sanduskys are there in the world, who will never be found out, or exposed?

I experienced two instances of mild sexual exploitation as a child, one involving a grade-school teacher (a woman), and another by a customer on my paper route. I didn't suffer any permanent harm, at least that I'm aware of. The teacher had a real problem, and I have no doubt she continued to focus on little boys after I left. We tend to see same sex exploitation, particularly among men, as being much worse, ethically, than in cases of mixed sexual activity. In my previous post, The Lolita-Complex in the Work of Jock Sturges, I observed that sexual activity involving early pubescent girls was certainly common in "pre-historical" societies, and continues to take place among "primitive" societies around the world, to this day. Current morés reject these kinds of activities, and "child" ideation, as being abnormal, as indeed they are, in the context of the prevailing assumptions of our culture. The notion of concentrating one's sexual energy on children is clearly not only unproductive, but potentially destructive and devastating to the victims and their families. Sandusky knew what he was doing was bizarre and awful, and there's no doubt that it was. Non- or semi-consensual sex, in the modern world, is a kind of sin.

Could Paterno, and the others who did nothing with their knowledge, have done anything useful which could have saved the victims, while not damaging their own reputations? If Paterno, for instance, had gone directly to the authorities in 2002, would Penn State have avoided the scandal that has taken place? My guess is that he rejected that path, precisely because he saw no good would come of it. Faced with the myriad complications which we now see, it's easy to understand how he might have hoped he could end his career honorably (at least in public), keeping his private (guilty) knowledge to himself. Alas, no matter what we do to hide, or shove things like this under the rug, they have a tendency to come up and bite us. Sexual deviance is a volatile problem. Sandusky put his friends and associates into an untenable situation, in which their logical self-interest, and perhaps even their regard for him, as misguided as that was, only made matters worse.

O'Hara's “For Grace, After a Party”

Ted Berrigan once said that this was one of his favorite O'Hara poems. Berrigan, who could sound insincere when making pronouncements, had a very sentimental side to his nature, which seemed at odds with the ruthless rationality--or deeply cutting humor--with which he gauged reality. The Sonnets is both things, really, a deeply emotional and committed record of daily life, filled with affection and delight, but also an intellectual exercise in the formal manipulation of segments of language. Berrigan admired O'Hara's ability to write a seemingly casual and relaxed poem, whose formal technique was concealed beneath an apparently guileless surface of conversational statement(s). He probably would have said that there was no separation, that O'Hara's poem was simply a straightforward series of statements, and that there was no artificiality in its setting or "strategic" moves. But he would also, I'm sure, have acknowledged that everyone maneuvers, on an interpersonal level, and preconceives the effect that their words will have on a (the) listener.

For Grace, After a Party

There's usually a very nice, clear "high & low" tension in an O'Hara poem, between the high calling of the occasion of a poetic utterance, and the low(er) circumstance of the subject matter he chose. Sometimes it's funny, maybe even a little bit embarrassing--especially in light company--but other times it lifts the ordinary into warm illumination, becoming memorable. The tension in this poem, too, is between the speaker's exalted, and slightly exaggerated romantic emotional earnestness ("my most tender feelings/writhe"), and the quotidian facts of an implied "morning after" of waking up in bed with someone--perhaps a lover, or maybe just a close friend. The poem begins in a sort of petulant, passive-aggressive mood ("You do not always know what I am feeling") but also sets a mood of casual seriousness that sets the stage for deeper disclosures, a more personal revelation. It's a love poem, but a disarmingly down-to-earth one. And it's that familiarity--smoking in bed, someone making scrambled eggs in the same old way, the arrival of warm spring days--which allows the poet the permission to address the intensity ("the fruit of screaming") of his feelings--he's earned that with the unassuming way in which he broaches the topic. Those feelings--as often in O'Hara's work--may seem a little over the top, but there's almost always enough routine detail to balance the emotional thrall with the nagging distraction of physical realities. The ashtray and the eggs and the warm morning air anchor the poem's urgent outcry of affection, and allow us to share it, without having to put on a full suit of armor (or a wig) to appreciate it.

That "personal" quality in most of O'Hara's poems--he called it Personism--was a way of removing the traditional artistic barriers between author and reader (person to person), of suppressing the apparent tension of elevated purpose which all art implies, in order to engage in a democratic intercourse.

Like much great art, too, this poem feels "easy." And, like all things that are effecting, and seem easy, it isn't (or wasn't) an easy feat to bring off. I say the "apparent" tension of elevated purpose in the above paragraph, but of course no really good poem is ever an accident. The ingenuity of "For Grace, After a Party," is partly the shrewd invention of circumstance, thinking to write a poem as a description of a conversation on the morning after. We know that will be fraught with some kind of emotional freight . . . it's a moment of confessions, of acknowledgments and declarations. How could it not be, even if the content were otherwise conventional? Sunday morning--oh god, do I have a hangover!--probably not a work day. But the poem, of course, is not addressed to the reader, it's aimed squarely at the person who's in the same room with the speaker. It's a little playlet in which the previous night's behavior is being reviewed and summarized, and the speaker wants this other person to know why he behaved as he did, going on and on, at the party the night before, a little out of control, about some intellectual point of an argument, but driven, inspired by the affection he is feeling in the flush of physical exuberance, the way we always feel when we're in the thick of a new relationship.

The brief erotic or love lyric has a long history. Dante and Shakespeare and Donne and Marvell and Browning and Poe and D.H. Lawrence. O'Hara's poem, published in the early 1960's, conceived of it informally. Every love poem isn't a marriage ceremony, in which the participants make public vows with pomp & circumstance. Each generation redefines and updates its version of the form. O'Hara sees it in the context of a privacy in which each party's vulnerability turns on uncertainty. Poetry is a way of exclaiming what, under ordinary circumstances, may sound corny, trite or pretentious. Poetry itself is a kind of pretense, that anyone should think to talk openly about a private passion, in a way that anyone could share or appreciate second-hand. A love lyric is a window on a very private affair, the gist of which is that the poet either cannot contain his affection, or his distress, or his impatience, and uses the poem as a vehicle to get that out, into the world. But that process may occur without in any way injuring the object of one's affection, or of embarrassing them.

Is love an embarrassment? In some ways it is. In other ways, it is certainly not. No one should be embarrassed to express love, but of course passion and affection are always first private things, before they're expressed. Love makes the world go around, but our emotions are rarely sensible, or convenient. Love unrequited. Love ventured or lost. Secret loves. The range of affection is as broad as the ways we may think to describe it. O'Hara's lyric is a classic of its kind.

The Boat

I had wanted to write a poem out of the barest essentials of "deep image" inspiration. Then--in the early 1970's--it was still very much a preoccupation among poets and critics. The deep image, duende (as some referred to it), had derived from hispanic sources. Lorca had spoken of it, as a kind of "dark sound" of authenticity and power--"that mysterious power that everyone feels but no philosopher can explain." The duende may be a lyric, an image, or a design which stands for this feeling. In American poetry, Robert Bly had led a loosely defined group of poets for whom the deep image was an abiding element. Supposedly, South American and Spanish poets possessed the skill to evoke the duende, or to employ the duende. You could, accurately, say the duende was a sort of ghost or goblin, which hid in or haunted certain imaginative precincts, and that to capture this spirit in a work of art was to seize a little bit of magic in a jar. American deep image poems usually had generic settings, and the nominatives (nouns)--barns, wells, doors, clouds, echoes, etc.--usually were intended to have a resonance or evocative echo in the unconscious mind. Freud, Jung, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism--each played a part in feeding into the development of a deep image concept. Today, people don't remark the deep image movement much any more. Movements run their course, may be forgotten, or subsumed within the continuing evolution of artistic production. It was a style, perhaps, which ran its course.

The following poem was composed in the early 1970's, perhaps as early as 1973, or as late as 1976. I didn't intend it to be an imitation of any other writer's poems, but to try my hand at the genre (if one may call it that). I've come to think of it over the years as one of my more successful poems, though I feel a certain distance from it, since it's generic and hermetic (within its sphere of reference). I'm surprised now at how it functions as an exercise in linguistic metaphor--the act of naming, and what that process implies. Names may conceal at the same time they reveal. They may cover over reality with an apparent comforting surface, or divulge troublesome or frightening aspects. Names are ambiguous. I said once "naming is a sin" in connection with some of Gertrude Stein's works. She often seemed to want to disentangle names from things, to set words free from pure referentiality. In ordinary discourse, we don't want to do this, but in art, it's a way of releasing the power and suggestiveness of words. But in this poem, my use of words wasn't non-referential, it was primarily symbolic. My use of certain nouns--like the things in a house, or on a lake, or in a forest--were meant to invoke universals of things, rather than specific places, persons or objects. That universality seemed to me to be what the deep image poets did in their poems: A language of objects organized into a coherent whole, through the skein of words. A mobile of half-real, or imagined, relationships of objects which told some kind of story through them.

The Boat

1

Fists of water. You name each wedge of light,

let it wake you. The house splits

along the seams there, your body a boat

to it. There is dirt in the egg,

hard ground. The sheets ask for knives,

the door for a tooth. Names sink in the stream.

2

Boards cover a face. In the attic

are mountains. The boat begs to be let

in, wanting a name. Under the bed

a pile of dirt, water rising

in the other room. Near the well voices

saved and not saved. And not enough string.

3

The well rooted in darkness. You knew

skin of geese, knives found water

knotted. Fire shuns water (hissing), the word floated

on the surface, with the slime.

The soap blue-edged, morning halved.

4

The old houses bound in light.

Fathers prevent me on the stairway. The vulnerable

shark, I touch her panic, it is a lake.

Boards flying to windows, shore light.

Dawn aborted the boat.

Oars creak in the house.

5

Each road leads to a room. In the closet

water, the rudder. The loaf grows

patches of numbness, fingertips. The blankets (guests)

want names (rising), and the sleeves. In the

room, a forest, air. The fake rooms.

6

The boards want names. So a rope

holds a boat to shore. The lake is calm

tonight, she murmurs. He wants to know

where the road is buried, how

names bandage things with the invisible.

7

The door contracts. How light sheds dimension

on the house, breathing a little flame in.

How water rings the boat.

Being shy of wells, you climb dry rungs

to the boat, and rock. The house contracts

around you, for you have entered

it completely, though tethered to her.

--1973-76

Reading it again, it seems like the evocation of a haunted house, a house on a lake. Or of dreaming of being in a house on a lake, perhaps from one's past. Images of jeopardy, perhaps of conflict, foreboding.

Angry Babies

Can you recall what it felt like to burst into a crying fit, when you were very little, as young as 2 or 3 years old? Most people's memories don't endure from before about age 4; those recollections may still exist in deep memory, but they're hard to access. Perhaps this is nature's way of insulating ourselves against the stresses and traumas of infancy, when our emotional life was apt to consist of violent mood-swings, and intense physical pleasure or pain.

I do remember how it felt to be hurt, as in falling down or being struck hard. The reaction would begin as a sudden intake of breath, and an overwhelming wave of agony would explode out of my mouth, and blurry tears would gush out of my eyes. If I were separated from my parents, I would immediately turn to, or run towards them for safety and healing.

I wasn't an angry child, but I often felt threatened by circumstances or other playmates or adults. But the way I expressed this was usually by pouting, or avoidance. My brother seemed to have a similar nature to mine, when he was a baby boy--occasional crying, but usually not of long duration or intensity. We had the same parents growing up, so we had the same environment, for the most part, as children.

Over the last decade or so, I've increasingly noticed children screaming in public. Children between, say, the ages of 1 and 4--accompanied by a parent, or parents, sometimes with other siblings present. We're all familiar with crying babies, it's usually not a troublesome sound, though when you're raising a baby, it can get tiresome, especially if it's excessive. But what I've noticed, more and more these days, is kids screaming angrily, furiously, for prolonged periods, and even resuming with regained fury after being temporarily "comforted" by the parent. Almost anything may trigger this raging outburst--it hardly seems to matter what. The kid will start screaming at some provocation, demanding comforting, but even after this is provided, will continue to grind out wails like a banshee, red-faced, squirming (even hitting or flailing) with denial and frustration.

Reading a bit in the literature of infant rage psychology, I find that traditional diagnoses involve seeing such children as narcissists, displaying symptoms of megalomaniac impotence. All babies, apparently, initially feel omnipotent, unless this omnipotence is challenged. If a child is allowed to achieve results through threshold acting-out, s/he may come to believe it is successful behavior. Such children may fall into a chronic sense of isolation or neglect, as the frustrated parent(s) feel(s) less and less able to address repeated crises. This may be why they scream and act out tantrums, because they believe it is an expression of power (from need). Narcissistic rages may become habitual, and routine, extending into adulthood, where they're seen as abnormal aggression.

I used to think that people who were unbalanced in adulthood were expressing something that may have caused them some injury or embarrassment in childhood. But I'm beginning to think that some people are simply born with this kind of capacity for rage, which shows up early in their lives, and can never be really bred or trained out of them. Such people may have trouble with authority or relationships all their adult lives. A lot of traditional (and even "pop") psychology is built around understanding one's tendencies and behavioral traits, the better to manage them. But emotional explosiveness may simply be a part of one's mental genetic thumbprint. Some people may just be born angry, and are incapable of learning to be peaceful.

When I see these angry babies in public, it's embarrassing for innocent bystanders, whose activities are hugely distracted. But the parents hardly ever seem concerned. They seem to have become accustomed to the "anger" part of the routine, and it doesn't concern them a bit. They've learned they can't really do anything about it, and there's no point in going into a panic, or being excessively apologetic to others. In fact, they seem to ignore the tantrum. I used to think this was selfish, or indicative of neglect. But now I'm not so sure. Are these kids acting this way because their home life is all screwed up, or have they just inherited the "angry baby" gene?

Dry Ice - Sophisticated New Cocktail

Dry ice is interesting stuff, and it has practical uses of which I was unaware, until I seized on it as a name for this cocktail. About all I know about it is that when you put a "soft" object into it--like a rose, for instance--it turns it brittle as glass! The gassing off appears as a "smoky" or simmering cloud, as if it were hot. But it's very, very cold! At atmospheric pressures (on earth) it is -109.3 degrees Fahrenheit! That's cold. You have to handle it with care, since if it touches you it can cause "freeze burns" of frost-bite. That's what happens to people who climb mountains in the Himalayas! Ouch!

But more to the point, tropical drinks are designed to cool you down. It's true that alcohol actually has the opposite effect when ingested. But in the eye of the overheated customer, a cool drink with lime overtones has an irresistible attraction. Which is why so many citrus cocktail drinks are consumed during the hot summer months.

Crystal structure of dry ice

So here's my version of a rather dry, but seductive Summer lime flavored cocktail, measured out, as usual, by proportion, rather than as a total (don't want to encourage an unnecessary inebriation!).

4 parts white rum

1 part cachaca

1 part créme de bananae

1 part limoncello

juice of 1 1/2 whole fresh lime

--shaken vigorously and served up in a chilled cocktail glass.

I guarantee this will make you think of the Bahamas, or of Mazatlan, or of the Cook Islands. Or perhaps of British India during the height of the Raj. We all have our orient of the imagination.