[lit-ideas] Re: Twofer Sunday
- From: David Ritchie <ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 13 Dec 2009 09:09:42 -0800
for the other emily, who wrote the first line
real eyes realize real lies
uncertain tea gots milk
sir prize turned out not to be quite what he seemed
but lost in a yarn with a twist of silk
to the Finnish well or station we jump up start
and ask not what you can do for the oracle of your heart
nothing like coal is ever as it seams
but soft it rests under duress
undress your vest and breeches
run the beaches of your dreams
for what you know is always more or less
advice like eyes bobs cold upon the lake
and uptown girls sing rising for the wake
who will give a dam will ever give anon
sell for cheap along the long horizon
or bang nonsense gongs to ward confusion
five cents and that will dissolve all monetary illusion
for there is a hole in the bucket you realize
and the whole is a hole not ice
i'm watching pbs sell with peter paul and mary and there's an ethical
question here which i've never quite resolved which is what do i
think of we shall overcome when first i sang it long ago around
campfires at atlantic college's orientation exercise in the breacon
beacons with vivek haldipur beside me long before he got meningitis
and died of a near-drowning accident which may have been suicide the
smartest fellow i think i ever knew singing ve shall overcome back
then he didn't know he wouldn't overcome he was really into it but
even at the time i think i was a wee bit cynical re who was
overcoming what exactly in the breacon beacons in leaky tents
dedicated to international understanding
i have a different attitude now which is that any group of people
which gets together to sing such a song has come from places which
need maintenance cost money and took some building up and so these
people have left things undone and possibly they have forgone stuff
in order to be in that place and to stand up for that cause so no
matter how cloudy headed they may be if they're all singing the same
song and all facing the same direction and if they're not banging
heads and breaking windows then let them be as sappy as they wish
because this does not harm humanity
having grown up just down the road from richard gordon who wrote all
kinds of books about doctors well one kind really because all doctors
in his world were rugby playing white men and the only issue was who
had the power and the answer was a toss up between the testosterony
or pimply white kids and the bluster of men who patrolled the
boundaries of their authority like big dogs so this was the
background to last week's hospital dinner where there were still
people of that generation but what interested me greatly was the
mixing of the gene pool that has happened since richard gordon wrote
with white women marrying asian men and asian women marrying white
guys and black marrying well i don't need to spell all the variations
out the point is that lots of bright people who looked different from
one another and who came from all kinds of backgrounds had decided
that the mind was the thing and they had done the thing and given
birth to kids
which is to mutter a small hooray for human evidence that maybe we
shall overcome something some day
and at the trumpet's call if i find in that winding line vivek
haldipur i'll be right happy to say
you told me so you sung it so
David Ritchie,
Portland, Oregon
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