Tuesday, April 24, 2012

The Story of our Story

What record is left of the lives, aspirations, tragedies, and desires of the early members of our species? A footprint in beach sand, some bits of bone.These uncommunicative folk crept up out of Africa and percolated across 5 continents leaving only mysterious piles of stones, sharpened flint fragments, and a genetic heritage still evolving.

Finally one of the more garrulous offshoots of the westbound throng babbled some frolicking buffalos onto the walls of a cave, the first step toward the New York Times.The Style and Financial sections still a long way into the future.

The first record keeping on a manufactured medium was a grocery list.Since the medium was manufactured out of clay it is easy to understand why they didn't get chatty with it, but still, they left a lot of details about their life and times to the imagination and deduction of graduate students past, present, and unborn.

By and by somebody found a sheepskin and wrote some bible stories on it.Word spread about this miraculous feat and others strove to duplicate it.This was progress.These stories related details about people: kings, prophets, generals.Even some mention of women; colorful women to be sure, like Jael and Deborah and Ruth. But as to their domestic arrangements or childhood diseases, hobbies, food fads, all of this is largely lost in the mists of time.

As time passed literacy spread beyond the scribes and clerics and before you know it people were writing diaries and books and poems. Many of these offered glimpses into the thoughts and lives of their authors.This private information was supplemented by pictures, paintings by young men with no useful skills. In general, the authors were men, since literacy was not high among the women and they were probably kept busy mending the Master's shorts and tending to the croupy babies and choosing an appropriate snood for tea with the bishop. Thus we have only the masculine account of life's annoyances and triumphs not only because most of the accounts were written by men but also because women had no voice except for the occasional queen or significant mistress. For this reason the conditions of childhood are virtually unknown, since children were entirely invisible, along with their nannies and the numerous mothers who were not queens or mistresses.

Before long, however, literacy began to spread, starting with the rich or at least the comfortable who didn't have to work 16 hour days, and soon the feminine slant emerged in the form of stories of romance: handsome brooding heroes and sensitive heart-broken heroines with a tendency toward the vapors. We get a good long look into the details of the household – what the upstairs maid did, what went on in the scullery, who slept with whom and what happened next.

The next phase of our plunge into self-revelation was the appearance of the penny-dreadfuls and the ladies magazines, closely followed by the confessional magazines, crime stories, specialized periodicals dealing with every imaginable interest: cookery, home décor, automobiles, pets, electronics, science, antiques, literature, travel, soft porn, baseball, agriculture, knitting, warfare, hard porn, and the intersection of any or all of these.Not to mention the movies and the TV shows, the miles of celluloid capturing interviews and stories and the behavior of giraffes. It is impossible to imagine that anthropologists of the future would have the slightest trouble finding out anything at all about Us and our world in the middle of the 20^th Century.

One dares to hope that the trend has peaked with the recent spate of public airings of a startling variety of personal flaws and peculiarities ranging from certain bizarre misunderstandings of the law as revealed to Judge Judy to the barely credible psychological kinks retailed on the many salacious interview shows in which seemingly normal people tearfully reveal to the panting viewing public their most private and embarrassing problems and perversions.

And then, among all this, there came the internet, and the slow rise of the online access to almost anything, and suddenly these media have started slowly slowly to transplant themselves from the grocers' shelves and tape libraries to The Cloud, byte by byte shifting from prime shelf space to some humming, windowless server farm, from a tangible, curatable object to electrons. All of the juicier segments from Dr. Phil and Oprah are currently available on YouTube and subscriptions to most of those special interest print publications are available online, with the rest either soon to follow or soon to fold.But where will all this information be in 20 years? 50 years? Files created less than 30 years ago on an obsolete computer and stored on the 8" floppy disks common at the time are gone. It is impossible to guess what improvements in operating systems or storage media will render today's archives unreadable, but for all our hypercommunication, social media, widespread literacy, online news outlets, it is entirely possible we have come full circle. That we will leave behind no more evidence of our lives for the archaeologists of the future than our forebears in the stone age. Such a tragic loss to Posterity that our descendants 100 or 1000 years hence will never know of our struggles to achieve orgasm, to cope with hair loss, to stamp out the evils of socialism. Will be denied the timeless wisdom of Geraldo and Rush Limbaugh.

Saturday, April 21, 2012

A Dream of Junklessness

There once was a time when I could carry on a conversation in a noisy, crowded place and hear what was said back to me. I could also eavesdrop on gossip nearby and understand enough that I could reconstruct the salient details for later analysis over coffee with other interested parties. One of the many disappointments of the aging process is that hearing loss not only turns down the volume on ambient sound, but also blurs the boundary between one sound and another, not only making it tremendously difficult to snatch titillating fragments out of saturated air but also to understand what is being said on television under the competing music.
This same principle also applies to the visual arena. Where once I could scan a packed closet, a cluttered desk, an overstuffed drawer and immediately find the green scarf, the felt-tip pen, the Philips head screwdriver, now it becomes an afternoon's project to find something, scratching through drawers and cupboards, upstairs and down and finally finding it someplace I already looked twice. Glasses do not help. They just add crisp definition to the clutter. It is a cognitive impairment as much as a visual one.
It is easy to follow a conversation where one person is speaking in a quiet room, or anyplace where there is no auditory clutter. Similarly it is easy to find your glasses when they are the only thing present on the table where you normally put them. The trick is to arrange your environment so that this is possible. Even occasionally.
Not so long ago when I was resting between donating 3 boxes of books to the library and a large bucket full of kitchen implements to Goodwill I tried to think of a better means of lightening the load. Some way to offload great heaps of stuff all at once rather than by one stingy carload at a time, but yet retain things I still want or need. I considered garage sales I had passed that looked like the house had vomited onto the lawn. Perfect. I wondered if that would work for me, here, 2 miles down the worst dirt road in Vermont. I close my eyes and imagined the process.
Easy things first to get a start. Drag out that bit of plywood the plumbers cut out of the counter 12 years ago for the drop-in sink and clean off the dead spiders and lumps of caulk. I knew it would be useful one day. Extract a gallon paint can that feels heavy from behind the kerosene. Open it to find half a gallon of completely fossilized dark red paint. Ponder it, trying unsuccessfully to think what there is or ever was around the place that was ever that color. Put it in the driveway and get another. This one is too light. A quarter gallon of light grey - floor of the back bedroom, last painted in the 70s maybe? There is a slime of linseed oil on the surface, but no useful paint left. Put it in the driveway. Continue this until there are 5 such cans in the driveway, and finally a partial quart of something dark with a skin that can be penetrated with a sharp stick. Remove the skin and stir what remains. Blue. Thick but serviceable. Get out a small, completely rigid, paintbrush and laboriously inscribe on the sink cutout "Garage Sale" in dark blue lumpy letters. Prop the sign against the heap of discarded cans in the driveway to dry.
Now for the main event. Since I am already in the garage, might as well see what's here. On the shelves there are a lot of partial containers of various kinds of lubricants. Nope – might need them for the lawnmowers or something. Someday. Several bags of mulch on top of something. I want the mulch and they're too heavy to move right now. Assorted lumber. Nope. Chicken wire. Nope. Huge pile of nested cardboard boxes. Must try to remember to take them to the recycle. Meanwhile too many to move right now to look underneath. Sickle bar! The sickle bar I have been tripping over since 1992. The one that goes with the Gravely tractor out in the barn that is about my age and stopped working in 1993 and is gradually sinking into the dirt floor. We have much in common. There's a good possibility, along with the tiller attachment I know is back there under the chicken wire. But what if I managed to drag it out along with all its rusty attachments and nobody wanted it? Then I would have a Gravely tractor out there as a lawn ornament for the rest of my life, surrounded by its attendant accessories. I'll think about it. Firewood pile. Nope. That's it for the garage.
Walk around the sign, noticing idly that the "l" has dribbled, and around the back to the porch. The cat chair! Perfect! Move a bench, a ladder, a ShopVac, and some birdseed and rassle it out of the corner, through the door, across the deck and around the side of the house, leaving 2 parallel gouges in the grass and a lot of organic material stuck to the chair. Put chair next to the paint cans and sink into it, gasping for breath.
When fully recovered, cruise through kitchen, scooping up an armload of extraneous plastic bowls and pots from the back of the cupboard, a toaster with a dysfunctional element and the one-speed blender. Who would want all those cottage cheese containers? Eight mismatched glasses from broken sets. A dish drainer. 42 kitchen gadgets acquired by many past and present residents of this house and used at least once. Livingroom yields an apple box full of neglected books, a stack of plastic flower pots. An abandoned TV antenna, and an old AM radio. A vase, a candlestick, and a completely useless oil lamp. Cats still use all those bald catnip mice, and I have to sit on something.
The attic. The motherload. Surveying the cascades of objects here, stacked by size and shape in places, by relative fragility in others, I realize what I really need to dump is my acquisitive nature and the crippling notion that any of this stuff will ever prove useful to me. I scoop up a random armload and carry it down to the driveway. Then another and another. I prop the sign, which is now nearly dry, and at least no longer dripping, up against the newspaper box and sink back into the cat chair. I look around at this eager young landfill growing around me and anxiously await the first customers.
I open my eyes now before I can imagine the dust from passing traffic settling on the sprawl of extraneous goods clogging my driveway, or the mess resulting from an unexpected afternoon rainstorm. I sigh and comfort myself with the thought that I saved myself all the effort and frustration of dragging all that junk out to the driveway, and instead peer dispiritedly into the downstairs closet in case there is something there I can offload onto the Salvation Army.

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Hamlet Reconstructed

Last Wednesday I went up to the Town Hall Theater for a thoroughly captivating production of Hamlet as conceived by 3 elementary schools working in collaboration. Mary Hogan Elementary got Acts I, III, and V, while Leicester Central got Act II and Shoreham Elementary got Act IV. Each of the 24 scenes was presented by a different group of students thus providing the opportunity for every 12-year-old in 3 towns to have their moment in the spotlight.
It would have been a great advantage to have come with a clear idea of the story line. We were not far into the first act before I really wished I had read the play more recently than high school, as only about 1 in four of the players could be clearly understood. Among these were a couple of players who demonstrated a striking theatrical talent in their 45 second appearance before the footlights. Another 1 in four was completely incomprehensible. The rest scattered their lines like confetti in a snapping breeze and only if you were paying close attention could you hope to snatch some of the words out of the air. Not that understanding the lines was of primary importance since the fun lay in the overall flavor of the production.
The continuity was supplied by the costumes. Hamlet, for example, was provided with a sort of loose-fitting black velvet jacket with brass buttons. This garment was worn by each of the 18 Hamlets who appeared during the play and who were clearly chosen for their particular scene by some criterion independent of size. The smallest of the Hamlets looked like a comic strip sorcerer with the trailing sleeves getting tangled in the props and the hem nearly dragging on the floor, while the largest Hamlet wore it like a raggedy castoff long outgrown.
Many of the costume swaps took place tastefully offstage, but from time to time Hamlet or Horatio or whoever would freeze in place, dagger held high or deer-in-the-headlights stare, while his replacement jogged in from somewhere, snatched the clothes off his back and assumed the same dramatic stance while the original child faded off stage.
Claudius, the fratricidal king, was distinguished by a flowing green cape with gold spangles that was cunningly constructed so that any motion would cause it to balloon like a spinnaker sail. Nine of the ten Claudiuses reveled in this grand effect and swept expansively on and off stage followed by their retinue of queens and courtiers tripping on their own hems and sleeves and tassles like the royal barge pursued by geese. The tenth Claudius was clearly underrehearsed and spent much of his scene first getting himself wound up snugly in all that yardage and then thrashing his way out of it like a turtle hatching.
None of the nine Gertrudes had a clear understanding of or a good fit for their drapey gown or the odd little headpiece (I think "hat" gives it more credit than it deserves) which signaled her presence. One little moppet, in fact, looked more like a clothesline than a queen of the realm.
The 8 Rosencrantz-and-Gildensterns – 4 of each – were done up in matching vests and straw boaters and came and went as a soft shoe routine, their perfidies and sorry end enacted with lighthearted flourish.
There was one memorable scene where a be-draped young thing, fidgeting with anxiety like many of her fellows, had arrived at center stage for her scene with Hamlet. Looking nervously around at the conspicuous absence of Hamlet, she bravely started speaking her lines anyway, arriving at last at a place where Hamlet was supposed to say something. After a few beats and he was still absent she shouted crossly, "Hamlet, get out here!" in a voice that carried clear back to the cheap seats and out the door. Soon there was the patter of little feet and Hamlet tumbled onto the stage struggling with a sleeve of the Hamlet jacket.
Finally after much clashing of swords, sharp words mumbled toward the back of the stage, the arrival and departure of various unidentified persons, and the histrionic death of pretty well everybody, the lights dimmed and the corpses fled for the wings.
Following a brief uncertain silence there was loud applause that gradually swelled to thunderous as the parents in the audience spotted their offspring filing onto the stage. And then, of course, as is obligatory in the State of Vermont no matter how good or bad the performance, we all rose to our feet. There were 109 elementary school students listed in the program from named characters like Hamlet and Gildenstern to unspecified persons such as "Grave diggers" and "Hamlet's Thoughts." All of them dutifully emerged from the wings along with the numerous teachers and stage managers and technical directors resulting finally in a mob the like of which that poor old stage had never before sustained.
What gave this production such a high entertainment value was its sheer unpredictability. Even a detailed knowledge of the original play would offer no hint as to the nature or character of the next scene, each one a unique little surprise. I am already wondering what they will undertake for next year. I am not sure Waiting for Godot would be suitable, but it would be fun watching all the costume switches.