Independence Day with Robert Frost's "Mending Wall" and a Touch of Thoreau

On a day for celebrating America, I tried to find some Whitman I could stomach and came up both empty and overwhelmed by gas. So let's try a spiffy aphorism from Thoreau and think about America in the midst of urban sprawl: "I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion."

I don't think I'm forcing the issue by offering a companion piece--a companion by contrast: one of Robert Frost's best and best known poems, "Mending Wall."

I don't want to humbug the holiday--as if I could--by wondering aloud whether Americans have a new, definite, almost hostile craving for walls between themselves and their neighbors. But I think I see and hear it almost daily, and I know of ways I'm guilty of it. Surely one of the most obvious patterns in American history, and in Frost's poem, is the country's dislike for barriers, the way earth itself dislikes walls and over time destroys them.

To re-state the obvious, every immigrant group who's come here after the first colonists has been walled out by those who came earlier. Africans, Chinese, Italians, Irish, and on and on goes the list until it becomes a cliche no one listens to, regardless of its obvious truth. Apparently we want to stick to conversations and people we know rather than what is new and interesting--and maybe challenging.

Frost's earth and its people (the hunters, for example) don't like walls, and apparently we still don't. Despite all the appearances to the contrary, our walls are temporary. However, there must be hostility, sadness and even bloodletting in the short term. Walls don't fall in a day; they crumble over time (excuse the soap box).

"Mending Wall" is much more personal as a poem than it is historical or political, but I think the comparison holds: over time, the United States hasn't tolerated walls any more than the earth has, and that might be the nation's most singular, defining characteristic. As the ground and gravity mess with the stones and bricks a little every day, they slowly but inevitably overturn the obstacles to change, especially the chunks and wads that are man-made.


Mending Wall


Okay, now let's get that beer and hot dog. Or Kielbasa? A side of hummus? Woo Dip Har? Pad Thai? Tandoori Chicken?


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MOVIES, COMICS, POETS

An attentive audience?



What's your take on Sarah Silverman? I cannot dismiss her as a raving psycho, though part of me is tempted to, when a person has to be always on the edge the way she is. Does every boundary she crosses need to be crossed? Violated? Slaughtered? It seems an unwritten code for stand-up comedy these days. Bill Cosby didn't need to go there, and I think he accomplished far more than, say, Lenny Bruce in terms setting a standard and creating a meaningful legacy. On the other hand, do the gross-out comics test the limits because the rest of us lack the gumption--or the intelligence, perceptiveness, and courage--to notice that some dubious boundaries exist, need to be tested? And yes, this comes from a (moderate) New Critic, looking somewhat at context in addition to--not instead of--the work product alone.

Silverman can be needlessly gross, but she is funny and full of insight, so maybe the targets of her satire deserve what she gives them. I’m thinking of a scene in her 2005 movie Jesus Is Magic, where the camera “is” a baby and Silverman imitates the typical doting, goochy-goo routines people engage in—well, let’s be honest, routines more typical of women than men. I’d never envisioned such . . . affection? . . . from the infant’s point of view. Now that I have, I have to suggest it's no wonder we're all rather disturbed and scared. No wonder we don’t want to hear new ideas or be challenged in any way. We prefer a calm, dark cave, and that's with no intention of reinventing Plato—just please keep us safe from that contorted face, that voice.

I’ve recently developed the notion that stand-up comics, the 1 - 5% with real merit—genuine cleverness, creativity, plus some substance, some content worth disseminating—have much in common with poets. Naked and alone before an audience, squeezing the world and themselves for every possible subtlety and precision of language and timing, every gram of substantive personal and social content, yet the guise of naturalness: “Why, of course, this is my real psyche, my real voice—yea verily, though it sometimes lapses spontaneously into iambic tetrameter or a pause for applause (Oh! I can’t stop rhyming! Make it stop!). Of course I’m visited by muses and demons . . . .”

On top of that business of rhythm and timing, the comics have to make us laugh as they stand there, lit up, sweating in a spotlight, naked, earnest, begging, and narcissistic, “Listen to me. Something is making me do this, though I don't know what. I will pay a price, so please listen.” What could be more like a poet?