David Kirby
The Higher Pantheism
“Ernest is in jail again,” my father said of the
elderly man who did
yard work for
us on weekends, and when I asked why,
said he’d shot up the house after he came home and found his wife
in bed with a
guy, and I, who was 12 and had
an inkling already but wanted to hear my father say the words, asked,
“What were
they doing in bed together?” and he said,
“Well, I don’t think they were discussing the Higher Pantheism!”
What was my father’s idea of love? Something like
that Petrarch sonnet
“Blest Be the
Day” in which the poet blesses the hour
and moment and “lovely land and place” where first he found himself
imprisoned by
two pure eyes! My dad would’ve have liked all that,
if not Petrarch’s vanity—would have liked
Dante better, who played down
his emotions
in his great poem, though he and Petrarch
both were sustained by their love for good women, for Beatrice and Laura,
as my father was by his
for Miss Josie, quite the beauty in her day,
quite the
object of desire, at least until my brother and I
came along and ruined everything and they began to live apart,
though in the
same house. If, as Pascal said, all
the unhappiness of mankind comes from one thing, which is not to know
how to sit
quietly in one’s room, then I think my dad
was pretty happy: love had its day, then no more
higher pantheism for him.
And my mother? Hard to
say, since even my dad’s terse utterances
were voluble
compared to her distracted silence.
They were silent together, though, which, as Bruno
Bettelheim says
in The
Uses of Enchantment, is the whole idea
of companionship: to take what he calls “the
sting”out of solitary existence,
which is why
Snow White has her prince, Hansel his Gretel,
and in fact my folks did live like brother and sister, first amorously
and then contentiously but
with genuine affection when they were alone again
in late life
to go out for big meals and court each other
sexlessly.
The other day I turn to page 682 in the dictionary I’d shared with my dad
and find he
had added an entry in his own hand
for “Love-bug (Plecia
nearctica Hardy).
Diptera: Bibionidae.
Also
honeymoon fly, telephone bug, doubleheaded
bug, united bug,
marsh fly, etc.” and think, My father
interested in insects, imagine that.
David Kirby
Ndoki
The celebrated naturalist is telling me
this
heartbreaking story about the chimps
who were taught sign language until the funding
for that
project dried up, so the chimps were sent
to medical labs, including ones where
they were
given the
AIDS virus, but since they could sign,
the chimps would say "Please don't do this to me"
or "Please
don't hurt me again" when the scientists
came at them with their needles, and I’m saying,
Didn’t the scientists think about what they were
doing
or did they
know what they were doing and just not care,
and the naturalist can see I’m upset about this,
so he tells
me the full story is in a book
by Eugene Linden called Poor Relations
and I remind
myself to remember this so I can tell
my students about it since they’re always complaining
that I'm
always "reading too much into" a poem, a play,
a story, their papers, their excuses, their lives,
and I say that's my job, that I get paid to read too
much
into things,
even if I don't get paid too much to do it,
and they say, "That is not what I meant at all,"
not knowing
they're quoting Prufrock,
and when I tell them that's who they're quoting,
they say they
weren't, they don’t even know who
Prufrock is, they were just saying the same
thing
he said
without knowing it, and why do I always have to
accuse them of reading things they haven't read?
I blame it on their boyfriends, guys always giving
advice on
diet and exercise, correcting pronunciation,
expressing disbelief that their sweethearts
don't know as
much about current events as they do,
reporting on magazine articles they've read,
analyzing the
failed defenses of various sports teams,
saying "Studies show . . . ," explaining how movie heroes
have
committed errors that they, the boyfriends,
would never commit, not in a million years.
Still, I say, you have to know how to think,
and when they
say wrong, they're business majors,
I say Look, suppose your company was, I don't know,
a pillow
factory, and let's say you got this contract
to make pillows for prisons, and assuming
the prisons
would pay you whatever you make normally
for normal pillows, would you make these pillows
thinner to
punish the prisoners or would you figure
prison is punishment enough and prisoners are entitled
to pillows as nice as
those on which rest the heads of ministers,
politicians,
and housewives? Or would you feel sorry
for the prisoners and make their pillows thicker
and fluffier?
And if the pillows were thinner,
would you charge less, or if thicker, would you charge more?
What
would you do, I say. Huh? What, even though,
when I think about all the things people have tried
to explain to
me that I still don’t understand—cricket,
Labanotation—I realize I'm no gene
splicer myself.
When I get the Eugene Linden book,
I find that
its real title isn't Poor Relations after all
but Silent Partners, and the celebrated naturalist’s story
about the
chimps' piteous pleas wasn't true at all,
that without constant stimulation, even the smarter chimps
didn't do
much more than ask for extra fruit,
and even they stopped after a while. And I
thought,
why couldn't
I figure this out myself? These were monkeys,
for God's sakes, not Disney creatures with little squeaky voices.
And then I began to wonder about the other stories
the
celebrated naturalist had told me, like the one about
Ndoki, “the last Eden," the part of the Congo
where
the few
remaining members of an endangered species of ape
lived and that journalists and scientists kept a secret until a Time
writer
learned that
a team of Japanese primatologists was going in
anyway
and broke the story. Or how, in the Antarctic,
"ground
blizzards" allow you unlimited vertical vision
but keep you from seeing a person or thing that might be
a few feet in front of you
even though you can see
the blue sky
overhead. So I checked it out, and, yeah,
there really are ground blizzards,
so that you
might be making something with your hammer
and put it down and not find it, and you'd have to use another tool,
and that’s
what you’d have: confusion swirling all around you,
the unfamiliar tool in your hand,
cold worse
than anything you’ve ever imagined,
the voices of people you can’t see, and, overhead, what?
David Kirby is the W. Guy McKenzie Professor of English at Florida
State University. His next book is entitled What Is a Book? and
will be published by the University of Georgia Press this fall. |