Bloodline

Daniel considered himself a civilized person.  He couldn’t imagine hurting anyone physically, yet he knew hurting someone emotionally could be even worse.  Nevertheless, that was his plan.  Maybe not directly, but his decision to quit college would have the same effect.  It would hurt his dad.

Daniel dreaded going home so he tried to hang on for another semester, which turned out to be a mistake.  He was distracted, in a way, already gone.  He went to class only half the time, didn’t study, didn’t even read.  When midterm finally rolled around, Daniel packed up his things and loaded his pick-up truck.  He was ready to lock the apartment when his roommate Tyler showed up.

“I’ll send my part of the rent for next month,” he said.  “That’ll give you time to find another roommate.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Tyler said.

“I’m going to.  It’s only fair.”
Tyler stared into Daniel’s face for a moment then he said, “Are you sure you’re doing the right thing?”

Reflex

Renae stood over a white porcelain stove with her back to Jarrid cooking a hot breakfast he hadn’t asked for and didn’t want.  He thought his wife was beautiful, even wearing her favorite threadbare robe and her hair a mess.  She flipped the eggs expertly, clanking the iron skillet with an egg turner. Bacon sizzled in another skillet filling the little kitchen with a steamy, wet smell that made Jarrid sick.  He wasn’t hungry, but he was glad she was with him, taking care of him before daylight, just before he had to leave.  He didn’t want to go rock climbing.  It was Renae’s idea.  She thought it would do him good to join the boys and do something manly.  She didn’t put it that way, but that’s what she meant.  Jarrid felt pulled along like a stone sliding off the edge of a cliff.  Renae never suspected that he had a fear of heights.  He was too embarrassed to tell her, because her dad and brother were iron workers.  Jarrid pictured them skipping along nonchalantly on eight-inch-wide I-beams hundreds of feet above the ground.  He couldn’t tell her that he had frozen on the rock the first time out only thirty feet up.  However, he figured she knew.  Maybe Renae’s brother had told her behind his back; Luke was like that.  When it happened, Luke had tried to smooth it over, told him that he would get the hang of it, but Jarrid knew he wouldn’t.  Whatever the reason, Renae kept after him to go back out and try it again.  The thought occurred to Jarrid that she was ashamed of him.  So, when Luke called and invited him to give it another shot, he reluctantly said okay.

The Lincoln-Logan Line

The Lincoln-Logan Line

I was born in West Virginia

in the spring of ‘49

I grew up a bare-foot boy there

on the Lincoln-Logan Line

Could have lived in West Virginia

But they closed the Big Creek mine

moved away from Broad Branch holler

and the Lincoln-Logan Line

I was born in West Virginia

on the Lincoln-Logan Line

when I die take me back there

leave the flatlands far behind

Blast a hole inside the mountain

tell my friends I’m doing fine

drop me down inside the bedrock

on the Lincoln-Logan Line

         

Let me lie inside the mountain

tell the Lord that I decline

I have found my piece of heaven

on the Lincoln-Logan Line

The Last Standing Anarchist

The Last Standing Anarchist


When it first came out, there were lots of nonbelievers. Nevertheless, it quickly spread across the state, then the country, then to the hinder most parts of the world. It wasn’t long before everyone was on board except one man. The fool. It really worked. No question about that. Yeah, there have been snake oil peddlers for as long as there’s been sickness and lame people limping around or being carried around in beds by their friends and breaking through roof tops. But only one true healer ever lived. So, naturally, when a small pharmaceutical company came up with the so-called miracle tonic, there was lots of skepticism. But then it spread like wild fire. Overnight, the FDA became outdated, insignificant. Screw the FDA. Everyone was drinking the stuff, and it worked. If a dead man could drink it, maybe it would have raised him from the grave. Lots of people tried, don’t worry about that. They sloshed it down the loved one’s throat and jiggled it around like CPR, but not one soul was raised from the dead that way. No one questioned what was in the medicinal tonic. That’s not the point. It was cheap to produce. Think about it, the creators could have made a killing. But, that wasn’t the point. The point was, well let me put it this way, if you had a quick and painless cure for everything, wouldn’t you share it with the world for the healing of the nations? So, they did.

Can you imagine? All diseases eradicated overnight. Amazing. No downside that could be imagined. Except maybe people didn’t need to pray as much. But that wasn’t a problem because their prayers turned to praise. So, that wasn’t a problem. No break down on the spiritual side of things whatsoever. Also, since large populations were free from pain and suffering and other distractions that the flesh has when it’s being tormented, people could focus on spiritual things even more clearly, and the arts.

King Lear

An important theme in the play King Lear is the relative influence of “nature” vs. “nurture” in determining an individual’s personality and character.  Which is more influential heredity or environment?  Even today sociologist and psychologist cannot agree.  King Lear, predictably, does not settle the question definitively.  The play seems to support both sides of the argument. Nevertheless, it will be entertaining and worthwhile to explore this theme as it appears in the play King Lear.

         

To help narrow the focus we need to ask a fundamental question: “Was King Lear a good father?”  And also, “Was Gloucester a good father?”  This is the nurture side of the coin of fate. Since for many nurture-brained individuals the answer to this question is directly related to how the children turned out, it provides a systematic approach for discussing this theme which can be accomplished simply by examining the children of King Lear and Gloucester.   The nature side of the coin will be juxtaposed against the nurture side and will be examined also.  Getting back to the question of whether or not King Lear was a good father and whether or not Gloucester was a good father, we will quickly see that this question cannot be answered either by deductive or inductive reasoning.   That is to say, some of the off-spring turned out bad and some turned out good.  Nevertheless, it is fun to speculate why this happened and explore the possibility that Lear and Gloucester  probably  influenced their children’s character and personalities.  Therefore, the rest of the discussion will focus on the daughters of Lear: Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia; and the sons of Gloucester: Edgar and Edmund.

Birches

When I was a boy growing up in West Virginia we would often spend the entire day exploring the beautiful green hills and playing tree-tag.  A pack of dare-devil boys would find a grove of sapling trees and commence climbing those beleaguered trees to the top and then “ride em out," landing softly on the ground.  The imagery in “Birches” is very familiar to me, as well as a pleasant remembrance.  It seems to me that Frost must have recalled the gleeful experience of swinging in birch trees and initially that was the primary impetus for the poem.  Thus the title of the poem is “Birches” rather than “yin and yang.”  Perhaps it began that way, but rather quickly, “Truth broke in” and Frost uses birches as a vehicle to help compare and contrast gleeful spirited living to merely surviving mundanely in a painful world.

         

The first two lines of the poem contrast birches to the other trees:  “I see  birches bend to left and right across the lines of straighter darker trees” (1-2).  This describes the variety in life that the birches represent contrasted with the conventionalism represented by the other trees.  Then Frost briefly introduces the gleeful image of boys swinging in the birch trees (line 3).  However, at this point (line 4) “Truth” breaks in and the poet begins describing an ice-storm.  The ice-storm is a beautiful metaphor for life’s trials and tribulation.  However, contrasted to the gleeful play of boys, it is destructive as shown in the following lines:  “But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay/ As ice-storms do” (4-5).  Nevertheless, in life, troubles do pass as shown in the following lines:  “Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells/ Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust/ Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away/ You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen” (10-13).  However, troubles can sometimes be so devastating that it does feel like heaven has fallen on one’s head.  In which case, mere humans, though they be incredibly resilient, they do not completely recover:  “And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed/ So low for long, they never right themselves” (15-16).  At this point in the poem (line 21) there is a natural break and Frost gets back to describing the more carefree form of tree bending.

         

The ice-storm represents the conventional lives that most people live.  It is the matter-of-fact troubles and tragedies people must endure routinely (22).  However, Frost prefers the gleeful spirited living:  “But I was going to say when Truth broke in/ With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm,/ I should prefer to have some boy bend them” (21-23).  Frost continues comparing and contrasting the conventional to the unconventional in lines 25-26:  “Some boy too far from town to learn baseball (conventional)/ Whose only play was what he found himself” (unconventional).  The next several lines of the poem describes the fact that even the exuberant non-conventional boy still has to live life practically and pragmatically.  He “subdues” and “conquers” his father’s trees, until, “not one was left/ For him to conquer” (31-32).  Certainly these lines refer to the boy learning to farm, learning to provide for his family, and learning to live in society.  I think the term “father’s trees” should be considered in the broader context as referring to society and civilization, as well as the specific reference of a boy learning how to live life from his own father.  For example, the boy learns to be prudent and not to be rash:  “He learned all there was / To learn about not launching out too soon/ And so not carry the tree away/ Clear to the ground” (33-35).  He matures and exercises self-control:  “He always kept his poise/ To the top branches, climbing carefully” (36-37).  However, and quite happily, Frost returns to gleeful, youthful exuberance and re-establishes the yin/yang theme of the poem:  “Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish, / Kicking his way down through the air to the ground” (39-40).  Line 41 is another natural break in the poem and it is where Frost inserts himself into the poem and begins to nostalgically reminisce.

         

When Robert Frost wrote the poem “Birches” he was forty-two years old.  Undoubtedly, by that time he had suffered many of the hardships life has to offer.  Beginning in line 41 of the poem Frost recalls his boyhood exuberance and he longs to go back:  “So was I once myself a swinger of birches./ And so I dream of going back to be” (41-42).  Like so many adults in mid-life, he has become “weary of considerations” (43).  In line 44 he says that, “life is too much like a pathless wood.”  He compares life to being down on the forest floor struggling along through a wood thicket:  “Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs/ Broken across it, and one eye is weeping/ From a twig’s having lashed across it open” (45-47).  He longs to be high in the tree tops where perhaps he can survey the forest floor and discern the right path and maybe get back on track:  “I’d like to get away from earth awhile/ And then come back to it and begin over” (48-49).  Nevertheless, because “Earth’s the right place for love” (52) he does not want to die.  It is clear that he loves life.  The earth is a sensuous place.  He does not know if heaven will hold these pleasures:  “I don’t know where it’s likely to go better” (53).  Perhaps Frost was familiar with the following biblical passage which seems to imply that heaven is not primarily a sensuous place:

Jesus answered and said unto them,

ye do err, not knowing the scriptures,

nor the power of God.

For in the resurrection they

neither marry, nor are given in

marriage, but are like the angels

of God in heaven.

But as touching the resurrection

of the dead, have ye not read

that which was spoken unto you

by God, say,

I am the God of Abraham, and

the God of Isaac, and the God

of Jacob?  God is not the God

of the dead, but of the living.

(Matthew 22:29-32)

         

Coming to the conclusion of the poem Frost continues his allusion to death in the following lines: 

I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,

And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk,

Toward(sic) heaven, till the tree could bear no more,

But dipped its top and set me down again.  (54-57)

        

The “black branches” represent the doctrine of universal sin, and the fact that one’s actions may not always be pure.  We all sin.  However, the “snow-white trunk” represents the concept that motives can be pure.  Nevertheless, though one strives “toward” heaven, no one is good enough to climb to heaven on the black branches of impurity, which is shown in lines 56 and 57.  Frost may have had a passage from the Book of Job when he wrote lines 55-57:

If I wash myself with snow,

and make my hands never so clean;

Yet shalt thou plunge me in the ditch,

and mine own clothes shall abhor me.

For he is not a man, as I am,

that I should answer him, and we

should come together in judgment

Neither is there any daysman

between us, that might lay his hand

upon us both.  (Job 9:30-34)

        

Even though Frost seems to imply that attempting to reach heaven through one’s own efforts is doomed to failure, i.e. “set me down again,” the attempt still has merit because it helps define and sustain civilization.  Furthermore, though an imperfect path, it is superior to thrashing around in a “pathless wood.”

Stones

Stones

Heavy, smooth, egg shaped

the size of an apple

thrust to the temple

Am I my brother’s keeper?

Five water worn stones

from the Jordan River

one for Goliath

four for his four brothers