JFK's birthday

When I was a child, of two or three or four, I had a suspicious dream, a recurring one. Perhaps it is a variation on the dream of falling, as if about to land flat on one's back (related to the growth of the nervous system, maybe.) I remember it being like riding forward on a long perfectly smooth peaceful line, in something, a vehicle, quite like an open automobile. And then suddenly, something happens, and then another something happens, and then I am broken, and cannot be fixed, and yet perfectly conscious all the time, even as I am monstrously broken. In a situation in which no one, not even a grown-up, is able to help. I remember my Dad taking me and holding me as he sat in a chair, dozing tiredly in the night, comforting as I stopped heaving with what was inside me.

Later on, as child nightmares subside into growing pains, one learns of life and death. A schoolboy's books tell of great men and adventures. And eventually, down the line, in modern America, you learn about assassinations. You learn that things come to an end. One day, looking down upon the event, the sunny color images of the Zapruder film, in all its eerie silence, horror and inevitability, come across the mind, a man taken as if from the grace of the womb itself, sitting, wife beside him, at the height of his powers. And we know, broken, still alive in some sense, yet unfixable, they took him to a hospital. I'll leave it at that.

Kennedy, in life, in his vigor and eloquence, broadcast his thoughts, in words, to the world, to the whole world. He spoke to man, woman, and child, of all nations, of all ages, of all parts of the world. It wasn't just all policy and law-executing. He left behind a body of work.

And writing, along with writing being what makes a great speech, is a very serious business. The world desperately needs wise men and women and children, people who may have outgrown the rigidness of a particular belief or creed, yet still utterly sensitive to religion's work toward understanding the nature of reality. (I have an economist friend who tells me that this is really not possible, as we will never know.)

Every kid is capable of writing something that sets the world back aright, more so, from its actual wrongs. Every kid can open, can tune into powers of thought and expression, and it seems, from experience, that the main problem holding one back is simply the right attitude. When confused, look to a tree, a plant that grows, slowly, surely until it offers the world great comfort.

It being appropriate that we acknowledge Irish descent when we speak of President Kennedy, the lines of Yeats, Under Ben Bulben, come to mind:

II

Many times man lives and dies,
Between his two eternities,
That of race and that of soul,
And ancient Ireland knew it all.
Whether man die in his bed,
Or the rifle knocks him dead,
A brief parting from those dear
Is the worst man has to fear.
Though grave-diggers' toil is long,
Sharp their spades, their muscles strong,
They but thrust their buried men
Back into the human mind again.


Melville tells us that legs will lead a man to water. And so a growing brain reaches out for things, as I did reading, like all kids do, one hopes. I would pull out the double album of JFK speeches and listen with head phones in the Amherst music library, let them wash over me, let them sink in, something beyond their particular words, as if listening to pithy Latin intonements to later interpret, comforted by the fact that I was not at all far away from where he delivered when of his finest and most meaningful addresses. How could I not be moved by them?

"Go and write, children of the world. Write for me what I now will never be able to write, now that I have started, but not allowed to finish. Go and rise up and be the philosopher poet artist king I never got to fully be. Admit your sins, as you will sin, as truth sometimes, initially, is uncomfortable to admit. Keep your work your business to yourself if need be, lest others take you as a fool or mad. Make your own contribution, your own unique one, based on what you have found to be true."

There is perhaps a certain poetic appropriateness that Hemingway's letters and manuscripts rest in the JFK Presidential Library, for the little unique that each man learns to contribute to the world.

As the happier of JFK's anniversaries approach, his birthday, May 29, let us remember the man's graceful effort and the family that brought him to us and nourished him, carrying on with his work.

Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!