Prayer at Breakfastime

   I was upset some weeks ago when President Obama spoke at a prayer breakfast in Washington. I was upset when he felt compelled to say how much he depended upon his Christian faith in his life and work. I was upset that he felt called upon to declare any kind of faith at all-- unless it were something like this little speech to the breakfasting prayerful politicians that I have composed for him here. Perhaps it will also make me feel better. Here it is:

ESSAY

  In what furnace was thy brain?

                                 Blake

   When things are as bad as they are these days, when even good people line up as Volunteers against the basic human decencies, it is useful to have something immense, remote, and beautiful with which to divert ourselves, something to muse upon without any nervous responsibility for its disposal. I need something crazy and wonderful, nicely beyond my daily worries, something that will in the end take care of itself and leave me to enjoy myself and to ponder, however uselessly, the imponderables.

   I turn to Language for permission to pursue this or that obscurity with questions, questions quite beyond the limitations of my mind. But, I ask them anyway. Language bids me go ahead, ask away, and relax.

HOW IT ALL BEGAN or How a Nation's Youth May Be Corrupted

                                         

    It was after morning recess in Mrs. Winter’s sixth grade class at Mapleton School. I remember the moment precisely, when the boy behind me, right in the middle of the lesson, leaned over his desk and my shoulder to whisper in my ear that if I’d take a nickel down to Woolworths at Broadway and Pearl, I could buy this fishing “thing” with which I could catch lots of fish out at East Dagues Lake.

Another Old Hymn on the Social Network

“I love to tell the story of unseen things above

because I know ‘tis true

…‘Twill be my theme in glory

To tell the old, old story”….

(the same old story)

    My, how we did sing that hymn in church of a Sunday!  …”of unseen things above”. Little did we know how those unseen things would become “ the cloud” up there where every thing from this computer can be networked-- with apps-- into a heavenly storage and returned to us with a blessing. And that, they say, is what everybody is talking about.

THE RING OF EGYPT

    The old hymn rang out with, “Faith of our fathers, living still /  In spite of  dungeon, fire and  sword.” I remember how gladly we sang  how earnestly. But not any more. The old faith has taken blow after blow in the last half-century and in many places is down nearly for the count.

  Now in Egypt the new digital technology, the Social Network, has come fully into its own. A generation of dispossessed young people accomplished in a week social and political change that in the past would have taken years if not decades to bring about. Those young Egyptians left their father’s faith at home and went “wired” into the streets of Cairo to organize a revolution.  

    The electronic instruments they held in their hands turned out to be the  most democratizing  technology since the advent of the automobile. Those protesters were at all times intimately in touch with each other and under the immediate  direction  of a brilliant  leadership.

    Among our ancient fantasies is that of the magic ring that gives its wearer power over all the world. In Wagner’s immense music drama , “Der Ring des Niebelungen”, a ring made of gold stolen from the Rhine did the trick.

    Oxford’s Professor Tolkien  used the idea in his monumental fiction, The Lord of the Rings. We hold that fantasy in common of slipping a magic ring on our finger and enjoying complete power over our circumstances.  But where to get one?

   When I was a child, the “Little Orphan Annie” radio program at 5:30 every weekday evening, pulled us enchanted listeners into the fantasy by offering us just such a magic ring for ten cents and the seal from a jar of Ovaltine. Following the ring-- now get this-- the program offered a decoder pin, all glistening gold, a star, that we could bravely wear and have ready to decode special, secret  messages sent us by the radio broadcast.  It felt like power, to be hooked up in this way to a great confederation of listening kids like me.

   Just like Egypt.

   I confess, I still have my decoder pin, and can still believe in it-- at least as much as I can believe in my childhood.

   So, little wonder that kids, young and old, are fast in the thrall of these new and miraculous electronic devices.  There can be no doubt but that they give a sense of power and  personal magnitude. They proclaim the order of the day’s march. 

   The kids have high-jacked the technologies of their elders in order to realize the fondest of all the dreams of youth: that of side-stepping those same elders into their own new life.

    The final utterance in King Lear is, “We that are young shall never see so much nor live so long.” Now, in my very old age, I can, all of a sudden, see why this moving line of Edgar’s is both right and wrong. The kids will never know what we know--except perhaps in sudden little insights from out of nowhere. True enough. But. I must believe that those same kids may be entering on quite a new world, opened to them by the great E technology where I can never fully play. I think I must be resigned and keep out of the way.

   In a sense, a sense at once melancholy and thrilling, our children will never come home again. And I say nothing about those terrific Rings which always, in the end, lead to cataclysm. Or maybe to a new Egypt. A new Middle East.

 

                                    Be Advised

   I had accumulated five hunting stories that I wanted to tell, but had not, because they each contain a peculiar, and personal violence apart from ordinary hunting.  But they finally got the best of me, and I invented a third gazette, after The Boulderceek Angler and its twin The Bouldercreek Actor. The third was to be, as you might have guessed, The Bouldercreek Hunter. I sent out four stories in four paper editions of  this new gazette.

    Now, I am unable to hold back on the fifth story. All of them had been as near truth as I could get them, but this last one, the one here posted on this obscure blog, is not a tale of  killing
deer, antelope, ducks,  pheasants, or  grouse. It is the tale of killing a Man.

                                    Be advised.

In any case, this is the end of my hunting stories. I have no more. It’s enough.

From

The Bouldercreek Hunter

Hunting Story Number Five

The Death of Ken John

1925-1982

Occasional Verses

        A Eulogy

On Saturday, January 22, 2011

In the Key of flat/foot

Sad old Saturday newspaper,

The Camera all about itself,

An exercise in public mourning,

A cultural draw-down.

Our dear old Camera,

The jewel in the town,
Local, independent, complete.

A real genuine American newspaper

Daily at my door,

The record of my Boulder life.

Out to the Eastern wastes it flies,

Lost and forgotten out there

In trash offices in trash buildings

Not even space for its morgue--

Its library-- that holds all Boulder.

A computer or two now will do.

No pressmen left down town,

Inked and grumbling about reporters,

No reporters prowling the town.

Now a clutch of stalled young people

Waiting for stories.

Poking at their resumes.

Hoping for escape

To a patch site at AOL

On which to grow a career.

Bred, as they have been

On the soured milk of social indecency

Ignorance, violence, and greed,

They write it down,

Spice it with banalities,

Never too banal, of

Flat-footed local stuff like that.

Get the paper out of town!

Those kids taking down

The Sign of the Camera,

To haul away-- to somewhere.

Some day, odds on, to become

A single sheet inserted weekly in the Post.

The NEW CAMERA,

Claiming a bright new day of

Public service--meaning corporate profit.

Dear old, poor old, sad old Saturday paper.