PHOTO: RITA CURTIN
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Time it was when all we had to remember was yesterday, if that. Then as the years passed, yesterday grew into the double-faced mystery of time that keeps us looking backwards and forward, trying to remember and trying to forget to remember, and remembering truly and falsely, as we wonder in the eternal present what’s coming next.
We can’t keep time, for it is a riddle beyond all grasping, mocking our pretensions. Time-bound creatures that we are, we are taught to tell time at an early age but never know what we are telling. In that regard, it is not much different from everything we are taught that we repeat by rote.
The boys pictured above were fast friends from before the age of seven when they made their First Holy Communion together. The place was St. Brendan’s Parish in the north Bronx in New York City. The year 1951. St. Brendan was an Irish monk (c. AD 484 – c. 577) who was a sailor known in legend for his voyage to find the “Isle of the Blessed.” Some say he reached North America. As with all legends and often memories, the truth concerning his life is hard to determine, since not just legendary characters but all of us are walking contradictions, partly truth and partly fiction, to paraphrase the remarkable songwriter Kris Kristofferson. As the patron saint of sailors, mariners, travelers, elderly adventurers, and whales, Brendan brings to mind that other Irishman, the poet William Butler Yeats, who, as he aged, wrote in his poem, Sailing to Byzantium:
An aged man is but a paltry thing,A tattered coat upon a stick, unlessSoul clap its hands and sing, and louder singFor every tatter in its mortal dress,Nor is there singing school but studyingMonuments of its own magnificence;And therefore I have sailed the seas and comeTo the holy city of Byzantium.……………………………………………………….Once out of nature I shall never takeMy bodily form from any natural thing,……………………………………………………….
Or set upon a golden bough to singTo lords and ladies of ByzantiumOf what is past, or passing, or to come.
Soul clap its hands and sing – yes!
A few days ago I found the above photo in an envelope while unpacking after my wife and I had just moved from our home of thirty-eight years to another, a journey I found very hard. I was lost at sea. Shipwrecked. Although the ocean we crossed was two-and-a-half blocks, leaving our home felt to me like Brendan crossing the Atlantic in his little animal-skinned wooden currach. I am ashamed to admit this when so many are homeless and literally lost at sea, seeking shelter from unbearable conditions.
I had never looked closely at the photo before, and there it was just when I, for some uncanny reason, was thinking of Arthur’s life and death. I wonder if my look conveys an early sense of “transcendental homelessness,” in the words of the philosopher György Lukács. And Arthur’s sly grin, did it foretell his life and strange death to come?
October in far western Massachusetts. Dazzling colors ushering in falling leaves in a dying land. Halloween, football and war, all souls drifting down in the crepuscular light of late October, the approaching Days of the Dead and All Saints and All Souls Days and the coming November remembrance of Veteran’s Day, once called Armistice Day and named Remembrance Day in Commonwealth countries, when the mad slow slaughter of World War I – the war to end all wars with millions dead in rat infested trenches – is commemorated, as if anything has changed and such a war memorial is not a secret celebration of the heroic sacrifices the gullible make for their masters. As for the civilian victims, whose numbers vastly exceed the military, aren’t we told by the hyenas with polished faces posing as leaders that they are just “collateral damage,” whose deaths are a small price to be paid for “victory”?
War is a racket; the ultimate racket. Surely the Fall.
The dead never disappear from our lives, no matter how hard we try to erase them. They are there throughout, and not just at Halloween when the Grim Reaper and ghosts appear in costumes and dead leaves fall, swirling through the air, drifting with the dead in the wind as we wonder whether we are being tricked or treated.
We are surrounded by the dead, despite injunctions not to talk about them. If we say anything about them in our antiseptic language, we say they “passed on,” unconsciously suggesting the reverse – that death might be a failure we could avoid. The Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen wrote a play in 1899 called “When We Dead Awaken.” He was referring to us, “the living.”
When do the dead awaken? Perhaps not until we see through the charade of social life and realize the masked performers are not just the costumed children having fun on Halloween, or the nihilistic phony politicians and celebrities, not only the professional actors and the corporate media performers, but us – every day. As Holden Caulfield says in The Catcher in the Rye, that quintessentially fall book now celebrating its seventy-fifth anniversary, “They didn’t act like people and they didn’t act like actors. It’s hard to explain.”
José Ortega Y Gasset tries in The Revolt of the Masses:
Take stock of those around you . . . hear them talk in such precise terms about themselves and their surroundings, which would seem to point to them having ideas on the matter. But start to analyze those ideas and you will find that they hardly in any way reflect the reality to which they appear to refer, and if you go deeper you will discover that there is not even an attempt to adjust these ideas to reality. Quite the contrary: through these notions the individual is trying to cut off any personal vision of reality, of his own very life. For life is at the start a chaos in which one is lost. The individual suspects this, but he is frightened at finding himself face to face with this terrible reality, and tries to cover it with a curtain of fantasy, where everything is clear. It does not worry him that his ‘ideas’ are not true, he uses them as trenches for the defense of his existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality.
Halloween’s symbolism, despite its horrendous commercialism, explains social lying and playacting more than a thousand factual articles. It explains the warfare police state and adults’ refusal to defiantly oppose it. It explains the nihilistic underpinning of American society and children’s fears and wishes to use a magic wand to change the world to one that celebrates life, not death. That is the true treat that their playacting seeks. But the candy the adults give them conceals the poison of denial that the adults can’t face. The poison they have ingested.
Faces, yes. To face the masked faces that we face. At what age do we learn to don the primary masks? For persons are, by definition, masked, the word person being derived from the Latin, persona, meaning mask. Another Latin word, larva, also means mask, ghost, or evil spirit. Halloween, the day of double-masks. The living masks light up for me as I think of ghosts, the dead, all the souls and spirits circulating throughout our days, drifting like dead leaves in the breeze. People speaking sweet nothings through the mouth holes in their masks (Latin personare “to sound through). “Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.”
I remember my pal Arthur Nickerson, shot dead by a New York City cop with a bullet to his back.
I remember a job I had when young. In my early naïve twenties, I was working nights in the 42nd Police Precinct in the Bronx, interviewing arrestees in holding cells at night. There I learned that many were framed by the undercover cops who planted drugs on them; that the precinct had a hoard of illegal drugs for that purpose. Thinking I was his ally, one cop from my neighborhood told me this, and that “we have to get these dirty fucking bastards off the streets” (by which he meant black and Puerto Rican men). This was 4-5 years before the honest, courageous NYPD undercover cop Frank Serpico, another pal, was set up by other undercover narco cops to be shot in the face because he wouldn’t take drug money. A few years later, the movie Serpico, starring Al Pacino, was made about him. The film made Pacino famous but the real man is the one to honor. The man who couldn’t be bought, Francesco Serpico, so unlike all the corrupt cops and slimy politicians in Washington, D.C. who are nothing but bought.
Although Artie’s death had rattled me and the news accounts didn’t make sense, it wasn’t until working in the police lockup that a veil started to fall from my eyes.
One night as we were eating dinner, you asked me why I was having so many dreams of being lost as we were moving. You said you thought that this was the first and only time I ever felt lost. I tried to explain. It was hard.
Memories. For years I remembered an incident from the August before I started college. I had just turned 18 years-old. Unlike many of my friends, I had never drunk any alcohol when in high school. Just the smell of it repulsed me, and being in shape for basketball was vitally important to me. But my friends convinced me to meet them at a bar for a little going away party before we all went off to college. The bar was called The Web and was near the corner of Fordham Rd. and Webster Ave across from Fordham University’s Rose Hill Bronx campus. And as young guys tend to do, we made fools of ourselves and got drunk. Somehow I got home late that night and my father came out and picked me up from the porch where I lay on my face. I remembered the smell of the grey porch paint and my mother standing in the doorway looking forlorn behind him. I remembered him helping me to my feet and into the house and up the stairs to my bedroom. For years I remembered many small details. It was all so vivid.
One day long after when I was with my elderly mother, we got to talking about it and she reminded me that my memory couldn’t be true because by that time we had moved from our original house with the grey porch to another. We both remembered my getting drunk, but my memory of the aftermath couldn’t have occurred as I remembered it, although for decades I was sure of it. Yes, “partly truth and partly fiction.”
Are you keeping some sort of record?
“All things are entangled, ensnared, and enamored,” said Nietzsche, including memories. We are tangled up in time’s web, sometimes blue, sometimes grey, and sometimes ravishingly joyous and blithe.
A few years after the photo of Arthur and me was taken between the church and the rectory, we were walking home from school and found two grey cardboard boxes by the side of a house near the sidewalk. They seemed to be for the garbage man. We checked them out and one box was filled with hundreds of round thin discs a few inches wide. The other box had smaller discs. We figured we could use them for some fun and so took the box with the larger discs to my house. There we stood on the wooden porch which was raised up a dozen stone steps high above the street and laughingly skimmed them like flying sauces down and out. Soon my father came home and saw them flying and the cars and street covered with the discs. He immediately told us to stop and go collect them. Then he asked us if we knew what we were doing, what the discs were. We said no.
They were, he told us, the hosts the priest raises at the Consecration during Mass when the bells are rung and he says, “Hoc est enim corpus meum” (For this is my body), meaning that the bread has become the body of Christ.
We never again sailed hosts. We learned our lesson. I later learned from Leonard Cohen’s song, Suzanne, that “Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water.” And the years have taught me that the body of Christ is broken over and over again and the blood of the innocent shed perpetually. The ghosts of fall and Halloween return again and again to remind us of what we may have forgotten or wish not to see.
“Whenever I take up a newspaper,” Ibsen added, “I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sands of the sea. And then we are, one and all, so pitifully afraid of the light.”
I recently found an old New York Times report from July 10, 1961 about Arthur. I remembered how at the time I found the reports of his death incredulous, and I still do. If you open the link, expand it, and read it closely for its logic, it might strike you the same way. It’s an old story, a cop shoots a teenager in the back and the media report it as simply justified. The report has no by-line, so one must assume it comes from the cop’s report. That, I guess, “is all the news that’s fit to print.” The patrolman says he stopped Arthur, who is reported to be eighteen years-old at the time (I think 17), at the traffic light uncannily right near the Web bar on Webster Ave. and Fordham Rd. The reason: for driving a car with “bad lights.” Arthur’s companion was a friend who was an Army private. The car was allegedly stolen. The Times report claims Arthur then tried to kill the cop by running him down. That is the standard go-to excuse for shooting an unarmed suspect, especially in the back, as a highly decorated, renown NYPD detective has confirmed for me. Deconstruct the Report. Eight shots fired. Revolver with six bullets. Time sequence. Suspect springing out of an alley gets shot in the back after the cop fires four more times for a total of eight rounds. Update it to today and it will sound familiar.
I am sure Arthur was no saint. How could a seven year-old with that mischievous look be one? How could a boy who flew Jesus-to-be flying saucer hosts all over the street be one? How could I?
Everyone eventually disappears. Gone. And are often forgotten. But that doesn’t mean they forget us while we are living. We are haunted by ghosts. It is uncanny. Did you ever sense that they are lurking in the shadows all around, urging us to tell their stories? To remember. To be nostalgic for the future, theirs and ours.
Let’s stop pretending. At a certain stage and on the stage of life, masks are lies. It’s not hard to explain.
“Do you not know there comes a midnight hour when everyone has to throw off his mask?” warned Kierkegaard long ago. “Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked? Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight in order to avoid this? Or are you not terrified by it?”
Where is Brendan’s Isle of the Blessed? Do you know?
Between us, I swear, it is here and everywhere, if we make life a treat for everyone.
Soul clap its hands and sing – yes!