by Thomas Lynch
But well-made poems outlive their makers and slip the restraints of ordinary time to become confluent with language at its source, all those tributaries of the human voice, in all its dialects, vernaculars and patois; wellsprings that rise to the species’ thirst for metaphor.
Last month in a schoolhouse on the edge of the ocean in West Clare a student raised his hand to ask me, “Sir, what age did ye get your poetic license?” His classmates giggled, his kindly teacher grinned and blushed. But the boy himself was dead serious. He knew it was something that gave you privileges and special powers, like driving the tractor or fishing the cliffs, or serving the priest at Sunday Masses. I told him I was born with it. I told him he was too—born with it—and he should never lose it, his poetic license, his voice, his ear for this life’s griefs and meters.
I said he would have to exercise it, “use it or lose it” is what I said, and I could see he liked the sound of that, the oozes and its, the affirmation. I told him to listen closely, to talk to himself, to say it out loud. I told him to read or write something every day, a poem, a paragraph, a letter, and be wary of distractions and diversions.
And every day it seems a game of chance. A clean page, another version, new griefs and meters, a fresh deck of possibilities. In Reno it is played as if there’s no tomorrow. We look like robots, humanoids putting tokens in machines, waiting for the payoff, hoping for a sign, or killing time until our time kills us.
But we could all be alive tomorrow and if so we’ll need some better answers than these games afford us. After a long night of winning or losing, it’s good to have a desert close at hand into which one could do worse than to wander, like holy ones of old, to listen for the voices in the air or to raise up songs of thanks or to curse the luck or praise the name of whatever is out there listening, or isn’t.
from
BOOKING PASSAGE
We Irish & Americans
INTRODUCTION
The Ethnography of Everyday Life
The center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life at the University of Michigan invited me to present at their recent conference, “Doing Documentary Work: Life, Letters and the Field.”
Where I come from, upstream on the Huron from smart Ann Arbor, we rarely offload words like ethnography unless we are appearing before the zoning board of appeals or possibly trying to avoid jury duty. All the same, I thanked the organizers and said I would be happy, etc., honored, of course, and marked the dates and times in my diary.
To be on the safe side, I looked it up—ethnography—and it says, “The branch of anthropology that deals with the description of various racial and cultural groups of people.” And anthropology—I looked that up too—is “the study of the origin, the behavior, and the physical, social and cultural development of human beings.”
Anthology—“a gathering of literary pieces, a miscellany, an assortment or catalogue”—is on the same page as anthropology. It comes from the Greek, as students are told, for “gathering flowers.” As the man in that movie about the big fat wedding says, everything comes from the Greek for something else.
Dictionaries are like that—you go in for a quick hit of ethnography and come out with flowers by the bunch. Two pages east and you’ve got Antigone, “the daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta, in Greek mythology, who performed funeral rites over her brother’s body in defiance of the king” at Thebes. That ancient city’s on the same page as theater and theatre, which have several definitions all derived from the Greek “to watch.” Think of “the milieu of actors and playwrights.” Think Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Think Sophocles.
At the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, just last week, a new version of Antigone called The Burial at Thebes opened to great reviews in the Irish papers. One commentator claimed that Creon the king was like President George W. Bush, caught in a conflict he’d a hand in making. How’s that for ethnography and everyday? How’s that for life, letters, and the field?
I avoided the quagmire of milieu, suspect as we are lately of anything French, but looked up human and human beings and got what you’d guess, but came across humic, which sent me to humus, which has to do with “a layer of soil that comes from the decay of leaves and other vegetation and which contains valuable plant food.” It is a twin of the Latin word—because everything in our house came from Latin, except for the Kyrie—for soil, earth.
Which put me in mind of a book I’d been reading by Robert Pogue Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead, in which he speaks about our “humic density”—we human beings, shaped out of earth, fashioned out of dirt, because we are primally bound to the ground our shelters and buildings and monuments rise out of and our dead are buried in. Everything—architecture, history, religion—“rooted” in the humus of the home place and to the stories and corpses that are buried there.
Thus was I shown, in my first days in West Clare years ago, the house and haggard, hay barn and turf-shed, cow cabins and out-offices, gateposts, stone walls, fields and wells and ditches, forts and gaps, church and grave vault, names and dates in stone—all the works and days of hands that belonged to the people that belonged to me, all dead now, dead and gone back to the ground out of which arose these emblements of humic density.
The awareness of death that defines human nature is inseparable from—indeed it rises from—our awareness that we are not self-authored, that we follow in the footsteps of the dead. Everywhere one looks across the spectrum of human cultures one finds the foundational authority of the predecessor. . . . Whether we are conscious of it or not we do the will of the ancestors: our commandments come to us from their realm; their precedents are our law; we submit to their dictates, even when we rebel against them. Our diligence, hardihood, rectitude, and heroism, but also our folly, spite, rancor, and pathologies, are so many signatures of the dead on the contracts that seal our identities. We inherit their obsessions; assume their burdens; carry on their causes; promote their mentalities, ideologies, and very often their superstitions; and very often we die trying to vindicate their humiliations. —The Dominion of the Dead, pages ix–x, Robert Pogue Harrison
Isn’t that just like people? Ethnographically speaking? Or anthropologically? To think of the place where their ancients lived and worked, fought, believed, and are buried as sacred, central to their own identity.
So we’re back to burials again—Antigone and Thebes. Creon and Bush. Do you suppose that humus is good for flowers?
Such is the trouble with the everyday—one thing leads to another. You start out with ethnography and end up with flowers, like the paperwhite narcissus my true love grows every Christmas from bulbs she buries in a kitchen pot, or the crocuses that press through the litter of old leaves, pine needles, melting snow, and warming soil every year in April up here at the lake. The everyday, predictable, measurable truth assumes a routine that we think we can study: how the seasons change, the moon runs through its phases, the sun rises earlier every day. “April showers,” we say, “red sky at morning.” Monday begets Tuesday, which in turn begets . . . well, you get it. We make our plans upon such reliable sciences. “Home by Friday, with the help of God,” I tell my darling on the way out the door.
MAYBE YOU WANT to know what I said at the conference?
I said it looked like “a paradigm shift.” (They were paying me a handsome honorarium.) I said it looked like a paradigm shift, from a sense of holy ground and grounding, to a kind of rootlessness—spiritually, ethnographically, anthropologically speaking, humanity-wise. At which point in the proceedings I removed from my bag and placed upon the table by the lectern from which I was holding forth, a golf-bag cremation urn. Molded, no doubt, out of some new-age resin or high-grade polymer, it stands about fourteen inches high and looks like everyone’s idea of the big nut-brown leather bag with plump pockets and a plush towel and precious memories in which “Dad” or “Grandpa” or “Good Old [insert most recently deceased golf-buddy’s nickname]” would have kept his good old golf clubs. The bottom of the golf-bag urn is fashion
ed to look like the greensward of a well-maintained fairway. So the whole thing looks like a slice of golf heaven. There is even a golf ball resting beside the base of the bag, waiting for the erstwhile golfer to chip it up for an easy putt. The thing is hollow, the better to accommodate the two hundred-some cubic centimeters, give or take, most cremated human beings will amount to.
I confess that the idea of the urn only came to me at the last moment, because I wanted to see the looks on their faces. It’s a character flaw, based upon my own lack of scholastic pedigree. Except for an honorary doctorate in humanities from the university I never managed to graduate from—though the Dear knows I paid for many classes—I hold no degree. I’m not bachelor, master, or doctor of anything, and though I was “certified” in mortuary science by a regionally respected university, a battery of state and national board exams, and the completion of a requisite apprenticeship, I’m self-conscious about standing before a room full of serious students and scholars. It is this fear—surely every human has it—of being exposed as a fraud that makes one eager to supply a diversion. Thus the urn: if I could not earn their respect, I’d . . . well, never mind.
Still, I wanted to see the looks on their faces when I presented, as an article of documentary consequence, as an anthropological artifact, as a postmodern relic of a species that had accomplished pyramids, the Taj Mahal, and Newgrange, the ethnographically denatured and, by the way, chemically inert, plastic golf-bag-shaped cremation urn. It’s one of a kind. It came from a catalogue. There’s also one that looks like a pair of cowboy boots—a “companion” urn for “pardners”—and one that looks like a duck decoy for hunters or possibly naturalists: variations on the theme of molded plastics. So I wanted to tell them about the paradigm shift that it signified.
I came up burying Presbyterians and Catholics, devout and lapsed, born-again and backslidden Baptists, Orthodox Christians, an occasional Zen Buddhist, and variously observant Jews. For each of these sets, there were infinite subsets. We had right old Calvinists who only drank single malts and were all good Masons and were mad for the bagpipes, just as we had former Methodists who worked their way up the Reformation ladder after they married into money or made a little killing in the market. We had Polish Catholics and Italian ones, Irish and Hispanic and Byzantine, and Jews who were Jews in the way some Lutherans are Lutheran—for births and deaths and first marriages.
My late father, himself a funeral director, schooled me in the local orthodoxies and their protocols as I have schooled my sons and daughter who work with me. There was a kind of comfort, I suppose, in knowing exactly what would be done with you, one’s ethnic and religious identities having established long ago the fashions and the fundamentals for one’s leave-taking. And while the fashions might change, the fundamental ingredients for a funeral were the same—someone who has quit breathing forever, some others to whom it apparently matters, and someone else who stands between the quick and dead and says something like, “Behold, I show you a mystery.”
“An act of sacred community theatre,” Dr. Thomas Long, writer, thinker, and theologian, calls this “transporting” of the dead from this life to the next. “We move them to a further shore. Everyone has a part in this drama.” The dead get to the grave or fire or tomb whilst the living get to the edge of a life they must learn to live without them. Ours is a species that deals with death (the idea of the thing) by dealing with our dead (the thing itself).
Late in the twentieth century, there was some trending toward the more homegrown doxologies. Everyone was into the available “choices.” We started doing more cremations—it made good sense. Folks seemed less “grounded” than their grandparents, more “portable,” “divisible,” more “scattered” somehow. We got into balloon releases and homing pigeons done up as doves to signify the flight of the dead fellow’s soul toward heaven. “Bridge Over Troubled Water” replaced “How Great Thou Art.” And if Paul’s Letter to the Romans or the Book of Job was replaced by Omar Khayyam or Emily Dickinson, what harm? “After great pain, a formal feeling comes,” rings as true as any sacred text. A death in the family is, as Miss Emily describes it: “First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go.”
Amidst all the high fashions and fashion blunders, the ritual wheel that worked the space between the living and the dead still got us where we needed to go. It made room for the good laugh, the good cry, and the power of faith brought to bear on the mystery of mortality. The dead were “processed” to their final dispositions with a pause sufficient to say that their lives and their deaths truly mattered to us. The broken circle within the community of folks who shared blood or geography or belief with the dead was closed again through this “acting out our parts,” as Reverend Long calls it. Someone brought the casseroles, someone brought the prayers, someone brought a shovel or lit the fire, everyone was consoled by everyone else. The wheel that worked the space between the living and the dead ran smoothly.
Lately I’ve been thinking that the wheel is broken or gone a long way off the track or must be reinvented every day. The paradigm is shifting. What with distanced communities of faith and family, the script has changed from the essentially sacred to the essentially silly. We mistake the ridiculous for the sublime.
Take Batesville Casket Company, for example. They make caskets and urns and wholesale them to funeral homes all over the globe. Their latest catalogue, called “Accessories,” includes suggested “visitation vignettes”—the stage arranged not around Cross or Crescent or Star of David but around one of Batesville’s “life-symbols” caskets featuring interchangeable corner hardware. One “life-symbol” looks like a rainbow trout jumping from the corners of the hardwood casket, and for dearly departed gardeners, there is one with little plastic potted mums. There is the “sports dad” vignette done up like a garage with beer logos, team pennants, hoops, and hockey skates and, of course, a casket that looks a little like a jock locker gone horizontal. There’s one for motorcyclists and the much-publicized “Big Mama’s Kitchen,” with its faux stove, kitchen table, and apple pie for the mourners to share with those who call. Instead of Methodists or Muslims, we are golfers now; gardeners, bikers, and dead bowlers. The bereaved are not so much family and friends or coreligionists as fellow hobbyists and enthusiasts. And I have become less the funeral director and more the memorial caddy of sorts, getting the dead out of the way and the living assembled within a theatre that is neither sacred nor secular but increasingly absurd—a triumph of accessories over essentials, of stuff over substance, gimmicks over the genuine. The dead are downsized or disappeared or turned into knickknacks in a kind of funereal karaoke.
Consider the case of Peter Payne, dead at forty-four of brain cancer. His wife arranged for his body to be cremated without witness or rubric, his ashes placed in the golf-bag urn, the urn to be placed on a table in one of our parlors with his “real life”—which is to say, “life-size” golf bag standing beside it for their son and daughter and circle of friends to come by for a look. And if nobody said, “Doesn’t he look natural?” several commented on how much he looked like, well, his golf bag. The following day, the ensemble was taken to the church, where the minister, apparently willing to play along, had some things to say about “life being like a par-three hole with plenty of sand traps and water hazards”—to wit, all too short and full of trouble. And heaven was something like a “19th Hole,” where, after “finishing the course,” those who “played by the rules” and “kept an honest score” were given their “trophies.” Then those in attendance were invited to join the family at the clubhouse of Mystic Creek Golf Course for lunch and a little commemorative boozing. There is already talk of a Peter Payne Memorial Golf Tournament next year. A scholarship fund has been established to send young golfers to PGA training camp. Some of his ashes will be scattered in the sand trap of the par-five hole on the back nine with the kidney-shaped green and the dogleg right. The rest will remain, forever and ever, perpetual filler for the golf-bag urn.
&nbs
p; Whether this is indeed a paradigm shift, the end of an era, or, as Robert Pogue Harrison suggests, an “all too human failure to meet the challenges of modernity,” is anyone’s guess. But we are nonetheless required, as he insists, to choose “an allegiance—either to the posthuman, the virtual, and the synthetic, or to the earth, the real and the dead in their humic densities.”
“So, which will it be?” I posed rhetorically to the audience (which seemed oddly fixed upon the objet de mort). “The golf bag urn?” (read posthuman, virtual, and synthetic) “or some humus—the ground and graveyard, village, nation, place or faith—the nitty-gritty real earth in which human roots link the present to the past and future?”
They looked a little blankly at me, as if I’d held up five fingers and asked them what the square root of Thursday was. There was some shifting in seats, some clearing of throats. I thought I might have numbed them with the genius of it or damaged them in some nonspecific way.
I thought about wrapping up with a little joke about a widow who brings her cheapskate husband’s ashes home, pours them out on the kitchen table, and begins to upbraid him for all those things she asked for but he never gave her—the mink coat, the convertible, etc.—but thought better of it and closed instead with an invitation to engage in a little Q & A on these and any other themes they might like to pursue. A man in the second row, whose eyes had widened when I produced the urn and who had not blinked or closed his mouth since the thing appeared, raised his hand to ask, “Is there anyone in there?”
“Why, no, no, of course not, no,” I assured him.
There was a collective sigh, a sudden flash of not-quite-knowing smiles, and then the roar of uneasy silence, like a rush of air returned to the room.
The director of the Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life hurriedly rose to thank me for “a thought-provoking presentation,” led the assembled in polite applause, and announced that the buffet luncheon was ready and waiting in a room across the hall. Except for a man who wanted to discuss his yet-to-be-patented “water-reduction method” of body disposition, there was no further intercourse between the assembly and me.