POEM: END GAME

End Game

Absurdly thick custard snow

on the hood of your car.

An icy sherbet, a creamy border

draped across the fence

as you drive by.

Ice sculpted sugar-white

on the windowsills of the houses

like a birthday cake’s sentimental frosting.

It’s the season’s final snowstorm

but no more than a jest of winter,

barely a tickle, a taunting gesture or reminder.

Or perhaps it’s a comic warning from winter’s clown

telling us that winter is not quite ready this time

to pull up stakes and move on.

And there’s a tug in the back of your mind,

a distant honking,

a banana peel slipped on,

a dashing of pride and knowing.

And you’re suddenly chilled

and not quite so sure now

that there aren’t more tricks in store there

than you ever cared to imagine

FOR SOME REASON I WANTED TO HAVE A POEM that had snow in it. I guess it’s S.A.D. that I’m combating. So I got my shovel and dug out of the back porch where all the snow poems are buried (actually, I did a word search of my digital poetry file; it took me three or four seconds, but I thought the picture of me hard at work digging out this frozen treasure would endear the reader to me.) It has a certain bite of nostalgia for me. I won’t go into details, but it’s from a time when I worked at a place I no longer work at, and re-reading it for me is a bit like when you stick your tongue out and touch an icy metal post in January. Kind of a stupid, why-the-fuck-did-I-do-that feeling, and something that makes you want to rip away from it quickly, even knowing how freaky painful that will be. Oh well, here goes.…

THE POEM is cute with all those sugary pastry images and I guess I had a case of the munchies when I was writing it. It suggests, in our complacency, how easy it is to see the world around us like it was some sweet treat that we can just gobble up at our leisure. We sit in our warm, comfortable homes, drive in our cars, and look out upon the beautiful winter scene before us, as if we are not a part of it; as if it were there for our viewing enjoyment;  as if we are not affecting it daily by our use of fossil fuels and our profligate lifestyles. The world is our sundae, until its not. And the clown imagery in the poems' later lines reminds us that behind those smiling faces can lurk darker things capable of turning the tables on us in the most unexpected ways. At the carnival, we're enjoying the wildest, craziest roller-coaster ride in history. But all of us have got to remember that the tracks ahead are breaking down and unless someone makes repairs right away, we need to get off before it's too late. We need to remember that what we build today may not be sited on land suitable for our structures, and that our foundations may be weaker than we imagine. And carrying the metaphor a little further, what we build, our grand gestures of edifice,  may no longer be what we need to build. Perhaps it simply comes down to a matter of scale? Time will tell.*   
"Endgame" has pretty obvious ecological theme , as do many of the poems I write, I’ve found, and there's a warning being sounded loud and clear. Kind of like the approach of a thunder storm, when you’re not sure whether  to step outside and watch the show, or duck under the covers and pray you’re not going to be turned into a crispy fry! Or a third option might be to  do something about it. (Do something about what? (Our planet, our population, our pollution, our....) When? (Now) Where? (Everywhere) Who? (You, me--everybodee) How? (Any way we can) Why? (If you can't answer this, just bend over and kiss your ass goodby!) Gosh—we need to figure it out soon, people!)

I was going to (painfully) go through my various doodle files to find some sort of illustration that would be suitable (hopefully) to add here, and instead decided on this group photo of my father and his colleagues. (They look like a bunch of reprobates, don’t they? Don’t bring this crew home to meet the in-laws!)

It’s winter time in northern Ontario. And it looks freaking cold out there! The photo was probably taken in early 1940s, I’m guessing, when my dad had gone up, either before or after university, to work on a survey team for Ontario Hydro, when they were building canals around Lake Superior to bring water down south to power the turbines that today go around and around and around....

My dad is the dapper, mustachioed rake at the left edge of the hut, 2^nd row.

 AND ON A COMPLETELY UNRELATED TOPIC: On CBC‘s The Current today there was an interview with Merve Emre,  author of  The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing. This is the mother-daughter team whose work in the early 1900s brought in personality testing and interview formats that are still used today by corporations to gauge the mettle of potential employees. The test is called The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), named after the two women. Suffice it to say that Emre’s take on such testing is critical, and she suggests such tests are not in the testee’s best interest. They serve corporate interests and only superficially seem to be any sort of 'aid' or 'guide' in assessing your personality. (There are only certain types of cogs that work well in the machines of industry.) I think we’ve all taken such tests at some point or other:

“You are walking in a park pushing your baby along in her pram. Suddenly, a bear comes out of the woods and charges at you. What do you do?

a)   Phone your daycare provider to say you won’t be needing them anymore

b)  Charge the bear and offer yourself as a sacrifice to save your child

c)    Push the pram at the bear and run away

d)  All of the above

[If you answered either c) or d) then you are corporate material. C is the most logical, and suggests you are a pragmatist. (Why should you and your child die, after all?) Pragmatism is a personality type needed in the amoral world of corporate thuggery. A indicates you are cool under fire and can take the heat generated in the drive by shooting spree environment of today's business world, and at the same time are capable of offering cheeky repartee a cocktail parties. D indicates you are a budding sociopath, capable of intricate lies and deceptions (what happens in the park, stays in the park), as well as having an appropriately skewed set of moral values, and are therefore premium ‘corner office’ material. As for B, well…]

But one interesting quote from Katherine Cook Briggs (1875-1968) is the following;

“I sometimes feel that science lacks the data that the soul possesses.” (I don’t know when she made this comment: maybe she had a change of heart? Or like the tin man, found one?)






*AND HOW MY BRAIN WORKS (if this true working be) is that William Blake's famous poem, "And Did Those Feet in Ancient Lands", just up and strolled into my hoary, old head. Whether it's appropriate here or not, it matters not to me, for where beauty doth lay, so layeth I:
 

And Did Those Feet in Ancient Times

And did those feet in ancient time

Walk upon Englands mountains green:

And was the holy Lamb of God,

On Englands pleasant pastures seen!

And did the Countenance Divine,

Shine forth upon our clouded hills?

And was Jerusalem builded here,

Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold:

Bring me my arrows of desire:

Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!

Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:

Till we have built Jerusalem,

In Englands green & pleasant Land.

William Blake

Born: 28 November, 1757 
Died: 12 August 1827 
      

ONE THING THAT STRIKES ME is that whatever "Jerusalem" might mean to Blake, it stands to reason it's currently sited "[a]mong those dark Satanic Mills"; and that whatever good might arise there is thwarted by the dark structures surrounding it, and thus the work of building it amid, "Englands green & pleasant Land" (if such still exists), is a work in progress, and it's still a work in progress, today. And if I may be an architecture critic for a moment, the recent additions to London's skyline of The Wheel, The Shard, The Gherkin and the proposed Tulip, suggests to me that those 'Satanic Mills' are alive and well and being built hand over fist, with more on the drawing board as we speak! I think Blake's cautionary message about the need to continually combat the Satanic Mills ("I will not cease...") is often lost, especially when we hear the rousing choral singing of Blake's immortal words, where the message seems to be one of We Did It! We're the New Jerusalem! or like the 2003 "Mission Accomplished!" speech for all you George W. Bush fans. (Kick that one into the hole made by the latest roadside bomb in Iraq.) Though when I was watching the YouTube video of the 2012 Last Night of the Proms performance at the Royal Albert Hall in London the other day, I was ready to grab a golden spear and start hacking away at anyone or anything standing in the way of such a project! Grrrrr! Damn you! You  Satanic Mill, you! At least I felt that way for a little while. Problem is, with so many SMs rearing their ugly heads you hardly know where to start! 
     I wonder about people a few hundred or a few thousand years from now. When they look back upon such scenes of self adulation (if that were at all possible), or when they view the remains of our egocentric, absurd buildings, will they be transfixed in awe, or will they recoil in horror, or will they merely be perplexed?
     I am also reminded of the famous phrase "A city upon the hill," that was used across the pond in America. It's a phrase originally from the bible, specifically from Jesus's Sermon on the Mount, and from Matthew 5:14:

You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.

Here, being a town set upon a hill suggests that as someone who stands out as a follower of Christ, you are exposed to the scrutiny of the world, and it therefore behooves you to act as a model of Christian values as they were then being developed in the decades following Christ's death.

      In 1630, Puritan John Winthrop's gave a lecture entitled, "A Model of Christian Charity" in which he uses the phrase "a city upon a hill" to describe the newly-founded colony of Massachusetts, and how it must stand the scrutiny of on-lookers, and similarly lead an exemplary existence, in this instance, as a model of sober, Puritan living. The “city on a hill”—while it comes with rewards gained from hard-won battles—is a place that must constantly align itself with the core values and lessons it acquired during that long, upward climb.
AS AN ASIDE, I'm a little uncomfortable with imagery that suggests 'the top is tops!' so to speak. Being a good person or country or whatever shouldn't have anything to do with elevation! I'm being a bit cute here, granted, but without mountain tops, the lowland plains and their soils wouldn't exist. (I know, it’s not a complete ecological picture, or even an accurate one, but go with the flow, man.) At the same time, where would mountain tops be without all that lay beneath them?
IT IS INTERESTING in modern times, that American presidents John F. Kennedy, Ronald Regan, and Barrack Obama all use the image of America as a city upon the hill, but in the sense that America has already become Blake's Jerusalem, that it is the beacon guiding the rest of the world because it has already achieved the highest standards possible. (And I do not mean to belittle the many great things that the United States has accomplished in its nearly two and a half centuries of existence, other than to say: as with every balance sheet, there are debits and credits to factor in when tallying up the totals.)
      In a speech on the eve of his presidency, on November 3, 1980, Ronald Regan calls America "a shining city on a hill" to suggest the golden promise of a chosen land, and as a senator in 2006, the future president Obama says:

I see students that have come here from over 100 different countries, believing like those first settlers that they too could find a home in this City on a Hill—that they too could find success in this unlikeliest of places.

PERHAPS it’s when we start thinking of ourselves as finished, completed structures or entities, both as nations and as individuals, perhaps then we truly are finished, and thus need to make way for those who will come after us, who will build their structures and lives atop the remains of our works and days.