The Arrogant Emu

Oh yes, I enjoy being a smart-ass as much as the next anti-social freak.

So I just went out and saw the second Spider-man movie and have had yet another of my truly wonderful and devastatingly brilliant ideas. (Unfortunately to execute this one I would have to have more of a background in superhero comics, dang, they is always a catch!)

A comic book about the support group formed by the wives and girlfriends and significant others of superheroes. A combination action comic, intricate examination of personal emotional growth, and affectionate send-up of social groups of young wives and mothers. We could call it “The Superwives Club”.

So, all right, who knows “Fiddler on the Roof?”

I have, two years two late, a truly brilliant idea that would make for the greatest Johnny play (if handled right) since “The Johnny Bride”.

“Philosopher on the Roof!”

No plot yet, of course, but a few lines from the opening song…

Who day and night must write away to grad schools,
Finish up their essays, try and find a job?
And who has the right as longest in the school
To drink the beer for free at Prank?
The seniors… the seniors!
Tradition!

Who must know the way to drink a can of beer,
A case of beer
A keg of beer?
Who must run Reality and buy the beer
So we can slog through seven weeks of Kant?
The juniors… the juniors
Tradition!

In fall I failed Ancient Greek
In spring I failed Math
I hear they’ll disenable me on the committee
The sophomores… the sophomores
Tradition!

And who do tutors teach
To listen, speak and learn?
Preparing us to study
Before we crash and burn?
The freshman… the freshmen
Tradition!

Ah yes…

St. John’s College
St. John’s College
Overworked, overread St. John’s College
Where I know everyone I meet
St. John’s College
St. John’s College
Intimate, obstinate St John’s College
Where else is New Year’s every week?
Soon I’ll be in grad school at Chicago U
Searching for an old familiar stu-
Dent.
From St. John’s College….
etc.

Anna and I have a song about Kansas. Actually much of our trip tended to the form of the musical.

Maybe we’ll eventually have videos; I’m hoping this month to get arrogantemu.com as a personal website type thing.

Several new pages in “Seducing the Unseduceable”. It just keeps on taking shape.

Also, hospitality is not dead. I had long dismissed it as a virtue lost to the exigencies of modern life. You don’t need to house the stranger, anyway, there are motels for the express purpose of doing that.

(Singing “The Stranger Song” with Mirabai!)

And does seeing people in person really matter so much any more, now that we’ve got internet ’round the clock, and we can speak into a box to our sundered kindred any time we please? I, as I said, underestimated hospitality.

What a difference it does make, to have seen and been with people! And the great thing is that it doesn’t destroy the pleasure or benefit of reading people’s blogs, but adds to it. When the words become a person’s words, and you still carry that person’s generosity in your histpry.

The bond between guest and host may no longer be guarded by the vengeful gods, but the bond is there. I’ve eaten your food and drunk your drink and slept under your roof, I’ve accepted generosity, and that’s more than transaction and more than transcription.

As usual, isn’t a bad idea for me to be writing on very little sleep, but like drunkenness, tiredness wears away inhibition.

One of most interesting things about America is the positively greedy speed with which it is attempting to assimilate events into history. At the national parks, for instance, there was museum space devoted to the museum itself! Lodges desginated historic monuments! As much attention paid to the roads as to the mountains they pass through!

For a long time I thought that this was an isolated peculiarity which pertained only to America’s lack of the kind of history its European forbears boasted, that America was weaving its events into history as quickly as possible in order to cover her nakedness. But it’s very intimately connected with the speed of American life. That’s where we expand when we want to expand; we have more space than we know what to do with and a blissful confidence in our own power to always obtain more if we start feeling cramped. It’s speed that we’re after, speed so we can cross all that distance. The speed of travel, the speed of communication, the speed of entertainment. In its own way, it’s an edifice as remarkable as a ziggurat.

“Your - husband?” I gawked at her; she couldn’t have been more than fifteen and the youth atop the ammunition barrels no older.

“Yes, we in the rebellion marry early. And often, if mutual survival rates warrant. One thing you can say for, you do get a higher instance of ’till death do us part’.

Since I am now getting too tired to think, I shall blog the scribblings which I wrote in darkness one night in California when words came back to me after their long absence. You must bear in mind that I am writing this half-asleep, my head on the picnic table, my eyes nearly closed, night well fallen, and nearly intoxicated with sleepiness.

It is the hallucinatory time of the evening, where I cannot see my own words on the page. Freedom, then, like the freedom of shouting into the wind, almost line the freedom of the closed eye and the silent mouth, comes upon us. Exhausted to the point of inebriation, it seems sometimes as if you are here with me, like a fragment of song or a repeated refrain:
I hear the owl’s patient cry
But who are you and what am I?
But what are you and who am I?
But who are you and what are you
And why?

I am querulous and disjointed like a Dostoevsky hero, and I see you still before as invisible as the words on the page. I can see them, but I cannot read. Homer had nine muses, but I make do with four. My unfolding women! Five, six. The muse of hymns, the muse of drinking-songs, the muse of love-song, the muse of narrative, the muse of dance, and the muse of silence. My second person, my second people. And who are you across from me at that table, whose face is as dark as the words in the candlelight?

I shall melt into threads like the mosquito in the wax. I shall lift and crumple like the Waterpocket Fold. Paul Atreides had nothing on me! I shall slice through the world like the Virgin River, and come to you, small hands, for your sweet self-possession and rest. I shall disperse into the sky with the exhaust, I shall accumulate in the air and whisper my secrets to the clouds. Course and change, coarse and change, there was a time when my soul was not all words. I snap and spark with the lightning, I crumble into the water. If I said I was an exchange student from Artifice, would God forgive me then?

I feel my country within myself, it’s crowding the middle ages. The long stern history of the mind that carries me with it like a grain in the flood. I am a point on the coordinate plane, the X axisis nation and the Y axis is hisotry. So we spread words over a page. I ripple in the wind. I soar from solid ground to fathomless air. I circle myself, and the slow beating of black wings fills my mind.
The secret things, the brightest things, are kept within
Was any geode ever as proud as I?

I fossilize. I petrify. I am walking on the plains and my footsteps are thunderclouds. I burn, I fade, I freeze, I nourish and kill with equal pleasure.

Morality stretches across me like lines across the coordinate plane.

I am the invisible waves in the air. I am the currents of the sea. Year by year I straighten, and I am filled with the murmurs of baroque frogs. I do not praise God. I am the praise.

The bird falls
The sea surges
The land has no need of breath

I who am larger than myself also understand

So, now we’re home, in CT, and I can expect a month of eddying thoughts as I prepare to leave for Benin. Had some rather amusing trouble getting back over the Canadian border. In fact, let me describe it to you…

We, in Michigan, thought to ourselves that cutting across Ontario would be a faster way back to Hartford than dropping down and taking the toll highway I-90. So far so good, n’est-ce pas? Without much difficulty we cross the Canadian border, though the guard at the gate is bored and slightly hostile. We are queried rather sharply about our trip, but explain that we are returning to Connecticut from a trip across the country.

And so on through the farmlands of Ontario. The differences in physigonomy from region to region in North America are slight, but does it seem to you that Canadians seem, on the most general of bases, to be built on a slightly larger scale than Americans? I’ve never seen so many tall strong people concentrated carelessly into one place, thought I as I watched folks en promenade along the shores of Lake Ontario.

A three-hour traffic jam at the Niagara bridge. Is it always like this, or is this just the weekenders going home to New York? Inch by inch we progress across the bridge toward customs. I’ve got the laptop open and am typing blissfully away on “Seducing the Unseduceable” (The Unseduceables: The Practical Woman) Anna’s driving the car. She’s got her passport out, I’ve got my driver’s license. The Boston college guys next to us have their laptop out and are playing episodes of “South Park”.

At last, with sunset lighting the evening sky, we pull up to the booth.
“Citizenship?” snaps the person inside.
“US”, reply Anna and I in rough chorus.
“Photo Ids,” snaps the official, who seems to have had a long day.
We hand these over.
“Where are you coming from?”
Anna pauses. “Michigan,” I answer.
“How long were you in Canada?”
“Four hours.”
“What were you doing?”
“Driving through.”
“Why?”
This stymies us for a bit. Anna looks at me. “We’re going back to Connecticut?”
“What were you doing in Michigan?”
The tenor of these questions is positively accusatory. Justify yourself! Ten seconds.
“Camping.”
“Are you from Connecticut?”
“Yes,” says Anna, who is.
“I’m from Maryland,” say I, whose car is registered in that illustrious state.
She frowns in a most suspicious manner, scribbles something on a piece of yellow paper, and hands it to Anna. “Over there,” says she, gesturing to the customs building. “The man will tell you where to park. You need to go inside and answer some more questions.”

Anna and I look at each other, aghast. “Our IDs-?”

“You’ll get them back in there,” says she, “if they give them to you.”

“And don’t have computers open at the border!” she snaps at me, as I pull away.

So we drive up, and, wondering what we’ve done or said wrong, park and walk in, bearing only our slip of paper that must bear, in some arcane cipher, our crimes.

The building was not designed to be hospitable, indeed rather the opposite. The light is dim and neon. The walls, floor, and ceiling are prison-grey. Our steps clank on the tiled floor. No one is waiting behind the brilliantly lit white desk, and freight elevators crawl up and down behind glass walls. Anna and I wait at the desk for about five inutes until a burly securityman comes out and demands to know whether we’ve got our processes done yet. Receiving an answer in the negative, he tells us to sit and wait. We do this for about another half hour, casting significant glances at each other, looking at the darkening sky, speculating about the reasons for our detention, and laughing quietly, but merrily.

Perhaps our good humour renders us suspicious. Another securityman, after having dealt with another family who’d come in while we were wating, turn to us, and demnds in the same aggressive tone whether we’ve been attended to or not. Upon receiving a reply in the negative, he looks at us very disapporving, demands sotto voce of his colleague what we’re doing here, and recieving a shrug in return, proceeds to fire questions at us. How old are we? What are we doing here? Where did we live? Were we employed? Where were we employed? Did we live with our parents? What were we doing in New York? So we didn’t know where we were going? Why were we in Canada? Why were we in Michigan? Why were we going to Connecticut? Where were we from?

Now, Anna is four years younger than me and lives in Connecticut, where we are travelling. My residence, liscence, and car are all from Maryland. It must be a principal of officials, and indeed of all people who are very conscious of the gun they wear on their hip, never to offer reasons, neither for their questions, nor for why they needed that information, nor for why we were being detained at all. Anna, faced with official hostility, becomes slightly flustered and finds it difficult to collect her thoughts. I, on the other hand, become defensive like a little fighting rooster. “You want information? I’ll give you information! You know where I’mn gonna give you information?” I’m so tempted to say, every time an official person demands proof of my identity “You show me yours, and I’ll show you mine.”

More absence, and then all of a sudden the guard reappears, carrying our IDs.

“Oh, so you’re SISTERS!” says he, in a disapproving, reproving tone, as if our failure to mention this fact had been a grievious omission, and that this deduction had been reached, at great cost to the civic purse, by trained technicians speculating on the possible relationship of two people who bore the same last name, were born four years apart, and who looked alike.

With no further explanation, we were given leave to depart.

“You know what?” said I, “I wish I’d been wearing my headscarf, just for the sake of spitting in their eye a bit. I mean, if we’re going to be stopped anyway… as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb.”

And we headed on, now in the decided darkness, to make camp and dinner as best we could, back in our native land and country of citizenship.