April 14

Thursday, June 5, 2008

Night at the Theater

He waited there passively, in the end,
looking down upon the stage.
He may have wished it was Shakespeare,
Hamlet, Cordelia, Macbeth passing through his mind,
a grave digger, Yorick's skull.
'And the more pity that great folk should have
count'nance in this world to drown or hang themselves
more than their even-Christen.'

It was instead some third rate hack play
perfectly worthy of going down in memory solely
by the one line heard before the fateful moment, as in
'You can't say Dallas doesn't like you, Mr. President,'
ha ha ha.

And so the action upon the stage, the words,
the spoken lines, presumptuous,
could not stop, could not delay
for a moment, a moment to think,
the actor on his way to the President's box.

And there the old man sat of fifty-six.
After the long nightmare
at last able to be hopeful
tender with his wife again,
a carriage ride, a spring day,
the sweet thought went through his head
that all our sorrows
are our joys, our greatest moments to be proud of.
And all his sorrows,
alone, on a horse,
in the rain,
all had become joys for him.
He had regained the proper smile
he'd kept all along.

And the actor stepped in, crept in,
and raised the gun
and the man had all his dreams
and all his memories
going on in his head,
of old New Salem
and countless towns
and then he heard a bang
not from the stage, not at all,
but from behind him.

And who will be kind enough
to lead the nation
to be the good and forgiving father,
hating violence most of all?

Across the street they took him
and he did not remember,
being carried so, except the strange voices, darkness,
a flash of light.
They laid him out,
diagonal on the bed,
and in his mind somewhere
his own voice remarked, within,
yes, this is what it will be like
to be in my coffin, arms across my chest,
the story ended,
as God wills,
as God wills.

Posted by DC Literary Outsider at 10:51 AM

It is 5:25 AM, and like a college student who has stayed up writing a paper, one hears the chorus of birds has started, high, something like crickets, but at the very beginning of the day, spring as opposed to fall. Random thoughts go through a mind. Was it Burroughs, who observed of Kerouac, a guy, in a statement to define him as well as any observer could, who loved to sit in a chair in the corner writing away. That's it; that's all you need for a good understanding of the man we know as Jack Kerouac. A man writing in a notebook, even as stuff was 'going on' around him.

And maybe if you stop and think about it, life sort of needs that exercise, or the constant attention to that possibility, that real need, to sit down in the rocking chair in the corner, to look down and somehow, pad, pencil, pen, whatever, typewriter, laptop, (though I would find these latter two tending to come in later in the process) and write. Any way you pleased. Say what you will of anyone's faults, but if they sit down and write, I think they deserve some credit, some admission into the group of acceptable people, honorable people and the like.

Do our brains spin faster these days, revved up higher, than they have before? Probably not, the biological speed and capacity of the brain being pretty constant in the short span of humanity's presence on the planet. People and all our ancestors have had the same rush of thoughts and suppositions. Less safety valves? Less chance to sit down and read The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot?

If you stop and think of death, I wouldn't imagine it's a bad thing. It's not morbid, it's not unhealthily provocative of depression and sadness. It's that life, after a certain point, has to end. Maybe one of the great lessons we will learn as individuals, via the death of a parent, or of a cat, or of a time in life. Two plus two equals four. In any historical figure, there is the arc of life, and of course, at the end point, there is death, and then that life is whole and complete as it ever will be. And if we are ever to get close to that life again, we are imaginatively recreating it, as we do when we read a letter, though we are doing the same thing when we bring to life a blank moment, a moment that we know, from experience, is full of lots of thoughts.

So, to wit, what is one thinking when he sits on a towel in the summer sun with a girl he likes but hasn't made out with after a swim? What idle Wordsworthian thoughts go through the mind? And later on, how will the Larkin in our mind reimagine and come to understand that once fresh and lived-through moment? And what was Abraham Lincoln thinking about as he looked down upon the stage that night? Was he just tired, and 'let's get on with it?' No, it seems he enjoyed the theater, even though we've all been through, endured, plays when are minds were elsewhere, rebelling against interest in the recited dialogue and laughter on the stage. What can you do? Each play is an experiment in capturing consciousness, the fleeting multifarious buzzing stuff in our heads that yet seems to always ask for that sensitive and decent narrator to come forward and lead, as if to conduct the symphony and all its spilled-out spilling out themes.

And so, all these thoughts, we can imagine, Lincoln had floating around in his head, and any mind would have a very hard time escaping the litany of battles, military and political, and still, on top of it all, there would have been some voice telling a narration, keeping it all together, all attached to the present moment and basically telling him to be, well, not dissatisfied with it all. Or maybe some sort of shrug, 'what can you do?' learned from early life, deaths from milk sickness, and what not.

What would have occupied Lincoln's mind at that point, that day, maybe even those last moments, but a care for, if you will, the prose of life, that narration that is necessary, and often a concern for the art of it, the art of it, sensed at an instinctive level, being the one basic way we can tell if something is worthy of holding the experience of life. The play was coming at him, and up until those last moments, while remaining quiet just as everyone else, but for a very sweet word to the wife he loved (something like 'oh, they won't think nothing about it {our holding hands for a moment like this}') he was full of thoughts, beaming them right back at the stage and at everything from small things up to the necessarily national moment he was always living in now. The old man, well, he was quite deservedly fond of his own narrations of things, and his belief in that very ability coming up from somewhere inside and of course from experience was integral to him and well-founded. The habit increased his even-temperment, which then in turn allowed for a more gracious narration to go with events.

While what he said and wrote in life is full enough to satisfy one in need of a lasting sense of the man and the times (take the Second Inaugural), he was, of course, cut short in one moment of a too real violent act. In perfect silence he clung to life, a vessel with more to say, more to think, more to narrate until the morning when his own death was the greatest thing to observe, and which is still to this day something we do observe, as if out of an instinct as deep as migration.