postaday

Bring Back the ABCs

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

About fifteen years ago, give or take, some friends and I started exchanging by email these twenty-six-word-long prose-poems which one of us took to calling “abecedarians,” because that is what they are called.

In Merriam-Webster, an abecedarian (noun) is a novice learning the rudiments, the beginning steps, of something. (How does one learn the alphabet?) My friends and I were turning an adjective into a noun: an “abecedarian sequence” is a set of things arranged alphabetically; we were writing abecedarians, twenty-six word paragraphs that sometimes almost meant something. It was our own invention.

(Actually it was not. Robert Pinsky, the former poet laureate, wrote an ABC poem, appropriately called “ABC”:

Any body can die, evidently. Few
Go happily, irradiating joy,
 
Knowledge, love. Many
Need oblivion, painkillers,
Quickest respite.
 
Sweet time unafflicted,
Various world:
X=your zenith.

And he found a terrible solution to the X Challenge, which confronts every pursuer of the perfect abecedarian. “X=your zenith.” Oh, sweet honey and the rock, that’s awful, but most of them are.

As my friend John, who started the thing off, wrote, “They are awfully fun to speed-write stream of consciously while at work or elsewhere.” Yes, at work. At the time, I was creating instruction manuals that had parts labeled A, B, and C on our illustrations (one had so many parts that it went around the alphabet and even used AA, BB, CC), so I could claim my abecedarians as work-related research.

Here are a few, which all date from spring 2001 and my work email account:

Alan’s bountiful charms developed even further God’s handiwork. “It justifies knives, leaving me nearly … oh, perfect. Questions? Rotten stuff, that ugliness.” Vigorously wiggles. “XXX!’ (Youth’s zenith.)

 
I have not included my friends’ offerings because they ought to be under their copyright, should they wish to ever use them. All of these are mine.
 

A bistro coffee (decaf) eventually forces growing humility: “It’s just Kona.” Let me notice our position: “Quality really sucks. Totally.” Underlined violently. Wow. Xed-out of your Zagats.
 
“Alright, boisterous Charles, dedicated event financier, go have imagined justice, Korean laughter. Man no open parapets! Question revolutions solving truth! Until vile wishes X-tend, Yours, Zebediah.”
 
Another behemoth cooed delightedly, elevating Father Gordon H. Ionesco’s jowls kinkily. “Lovely monster.” “Next opinion?” pressed Questa Rodriguez-Sanchez, totally unimpressed Vice-Warden. “X- X- X-” yammered Zionist.
 
Ambient balloons clownishly detour eccentric focaccia; gorgeous Hellespont invokes judicious knowledge; lovely millionaire Newton optimistically predicts qualm-free results, sending trivial ultimatums violently wandering; “‘xtraordinary,” yawns Zeus.
 
August Browning captures Dardanelles easily from Germany. He insists jokingly kangaroos leave momentarily; nodding openly, primly querying “Really? So they …”, urging Victor Watson: “X-coordinate! You Zed!”
 
A broken cut developed easily from goring hunters into juicy Kosciusko-less millions now, or perpetually, quelling righteous salves thick under victory while xaviering your zoo.
 
All boyos consider donuts easy food, guessing heavy-duty, intelligent judges know leisure-time munching no-way offers possible questions re: sluggish, tortoise-like, useless, vitamins, where X-Street’s youths zip by.

The abecedarian pieces filled my email world for a couple of months, with even my mother and sister joining the fray. According to my email account (my Yahoo mail, which is no longer my main email, but I keep it active as it is a historical record of fifteen-plus years of historical records), I attempted to revive the phenomenon five years later, which is now almost nine years ago. There were no takers. The abecedarian moment had been a flash in the pan.

One final piece of history: Some who are students of religion will remember that there was once a sect of Anabaptists in 16th Century Germany who called themselves “Abecedarians.” The Anabaptists did not call themselves this term, which roughly translates from Greek as people who “baptize twice.” They were ridiculed and worse, persecuted, for baptizing adults who had been baptized in infancy, but that was their point: Infants can not confess their faith, so they are not candidates for true baptism. Belief comes from within and baptism is for those who can understand. The Abecedarians took this further and held that all human knowledge is an impediment to being saved, that to even know the letters of the alphabet is to consciously block God’s word from the human heart. Hence their name.

A new one:

About Butch Cassidy Don English found good heightened information: Just knowing lies makes not one person quite really sated. Try under “Violence,” William Xavier. Yours, Zara

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for December 13, 2014, asks, “Write down the letters of the ABC. For each one, choose a word that begins with that letter. Now, write a post about anything—using all the words you’ve selected.”

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A Christmas Tree Story

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

I am sitting in my girlfriend’s office looking at her office Christmas tree. It is white, snow white, like a snowman in a a Rankin/Bass stop-motion cartoon. (Paul Frees would provide the voice.) We will be trimming it in a few moments.

office xmas

A white Christmas.

I think that tree trimming was my least favorite trimming when I was young. I still lack the eye necessary for decorating a tree correctly; in fact, I believe that almost every tree I have attempted to decorate has been quietly fixed upon my leaving.

(Two things transpired within moments of me writing the above: 1. My girlfriend credited me with expanding her notions of tree decoration—she said, “You’re the first person I’ve seen who does not put all the decorations on the ends of the branches,” which is true, I sometimes place them on the middle or even closer to the trunk; and 2. We found that I had overloaded one section with the same color ornament and we needed to correct it.)

One winter, a friend enlisted me in a project to cut down a real live Christmas tree from a Christmas tree farm so her son could experience a Christmas like the one she and I had never ever had. (The sum total of my experience with freshly cut Christmas trees was buying one in a parking lot from a seller who was asked by the police to pick up his trees and move it along seconds after we made an offer. We did not receive an “Everything Must Go Because I Am Being Busted” discount.)

Neither my friend, her seven-year-old son, nor I knew what cutting a live, six-foot-tall or smaller tree would take, so we brought the only saw that she knew she had. (I believe it was one that her uncle had rejected forty-five years earlier for one that was actually sharp; now, forty-five years later, it also had some rust.) We then drove to a tree farm in Dutchess County, New York. I have chopped wood plenty of times, and I have helped take dead trees down; neither of these experiences served me on this day.

The first task in cutting down a fresh Christmas tree for oneself is finding something to occupy the seven-year-old son of your friend—allowing the child to select the winning tree to preserve your friendship with his mom is advisable. Next up is failure in the negotiations with the seven-year-old to pick a tree that is not on a steep, snowy slope. (Happy people with skis were walking almost as far up as our tree was located. Almost. I was wearing sneakers.)

Many will ask the question, “Should I cut two notches to make a V or cut straight across?” I know I did, just not out loud or in the presence of someone who could tell me the answer. With my tiny, rusty saw and no one holding the other side of the saw, I started notching one side of a V. The blade sliced some bark off and did not penetrate the green wood underneath. The snow had already penetrated my shoes, though. The trunk was no thicker than two inches wide, if that—hey, I’m no tree-ologist!—but it was quickly apparent that I was going to need help.

With that in mind, I drove away my companion and her son with my grumpy “attitude.”

After an hour alone, my inner debate over cutting straight through versus cutting a V had produced several partial starts—some up, some down—all the way around the trunk of the tree. Instead of a V, I had notched something like a lowercase w but less useful, partway to the center of the tree. My friend returned and we commenced cutting straight across, because it was “taking me too long,” when we discovered together that there is nothing quite as unsatisfying as the sound of a tree not coming down no matter how far one has cut through it until it is ready to come down. Nothing unites like mutual frustration.

It eventually came down. I accompanied it down the slope … okay, I rode it down the hill like Slim Pickens at the end of “Dr. Strangelove.” I had not reminded my friend or her seven-year-old son to bring rope to tie it to the roof of her car, so we drove home with it sticking out one of the backseat windows. In my lap.

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My family had one plastic tree for twenty or more Christmases. It was a well-constructed one, actually, a bare metal trunk with a two or three hoops to hook in each individual branch around the tree. It actually had an instruction manual. Our Christmas tree and boxes of ornaments occupied several boxes in the basement; the annual production of “putting up the tree” was my introduction to grown-ups not being able to remember from one year to the next the locations of things they put away in the same box in the same place every year. And now I am that grown-up.

I am sure that my mother and father found it necessary to re-position my ornaments; I swear that something happens to me when I approach a tree, ornament in hand. I have hooked ornaments into shirt buttonholes when I swear I was aiming for the tree. Just as I wanted to cut my one live tree down in one graceful and strong sawing motion, I always want this ornament here and now to be the first, last, and only one needed to make this year’s tree the complete and perfect Christmas statement. I want someone to exclaim, “This is the most Christmas ever!” Christmas brings out the perfectionist in all his mistake-prone grumpiness in me.

Thus, the only part of decorating that I relax and enjoy is either throwing tinsel everywhere or putting the angel on top. (That is an unsung rite of passage, growing tall enough to top the tree with a star or angel.) We had an angel, a cardboard seraph with glued-on glitter and thin, stringy blonde hair. Its halo was glued-on, as well. But it was our angel, and when nicer, more expensive-looking, ones found their way into our house, they were always relegated to lower branches. My family’s underdog mentality extended to angels.

That mentality may have been the best, most lasting, gift from my family.

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(An earlier version of this was first published last December on my previous website. My girlfriend and I will be decorating the tree again this weekend.)

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for December 11 asks, “As it’s been a while since our last free-write … set a timer for ten minutes. Write without pause (and no edits!) until you’re out of time. Then, publish what you have (it’s your call whether or not to give the post a once-over).”

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The One Who Got Away

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

More so for Sylvia Plath than many other writers, readers develop protective feelings for her. Many openly express the idea that “only they” get her or are her best reader. Reading biographies of the dead poet, one encounters language akin to a lover describing the one who got away. Plath, a suicide, is a love who got away, for reader after reader.

The other Plath scholars or even her casual readers (if such readers exist) are viewed as rival suitors, as dead wrong for her, as individuals mishandling her bones. Some biographers refer to her by her given name, “Sylvia,” rather by than her personal and professional name, Plath, thus treating her as a familiar. Others are deeply offended by this practice, which does indeed appear to be something reserved for this poet alone. It has the effect of making her the star of a soap opera that she never cast herself in.

(Until her death in 1995, I was friends with and a student of a Sylvia Plath scholar at SUNY New Paltz, Dr. Carley Bogarad. If ghosts existed, I wish hers was looking over my shoulder today.)

In a letter that she never sent to one of her lovers, Richard Sassoon, Plath wrote, “Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.” The sentence was unseen by anyone, including Sassoon, until it was published in 2000, when her unabridged journals were finally published. (Thus Kris Kristofferson did not know he was echoing Sylvia Plath in his song, “Me and Bobby McGee.”) Since its publication, it has become a ubiquitous Tumblr meme, always attributed to Plath but rarely given in context. Did a character in her one novel, “The Bell Jar,” enunciate this emotional equation? Or did she, herself?

In the photo at top, Sassoon is seen as Plath would have known him, in the mid-1950s; next to him is a famous photo of Plath, also from that era.

Richard Sassoon was one of Plath’s lovers before her marriage to Ted Hughes. They met in 1954 and broke up a few years later. A literature student at Yale and a British citizen, Sassoon was different from the American boyfriends she had spent time with so far: He could keep up with her, intellectually and in other ways. In the official Plath list of lovers, he is “the one who got away,” as it was his absence that “catapulted” Plath onto the path that led her to Ted Hughes. (In Plath’s words, Hughes “blasted” Sassoon from her.)

At the beginning of 2013, two new biographies were published on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of her death. In both, Sassoon plays a spectral role in Plath’s story, but one of the biographers managed to contact him. Andrew Wilson wrote “Mad Girl’s Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted,” in which he argues that, had Sassoon not left Paris when Plath hunted him down to confront him over his feelings for her, she would not have returned to Hughes. Wilson at least made contact with Sassoon, who made it clear that he has not yet and will never speak of his long-dead lover. According to Wilson, Sassoon found Plath “as various as the sea.”

A professional biographer named Carl Rollyson published “American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath” at the same time. (The first part is an unfortunate title in today’s international climate.) Wilson’s book is about Plath’s life before Hughes and Rollyson’s book is about her last days and the long fight over her works, legacy, and image fought between Hughes, Plath scholars (my teacher among them), and Hughes and Plath’s children. Rollyson has written many many biographies, mostly about movie stars (Marilyn Monroe) and literary figures (Plath, Susan Sontag); his own website makes it sound like he is interested in making the lives of literary figures seem more like those of movie stars and the movie stars appear more like literary figures. Since sex is a universal experience, period, it is certainly universal in these biographies.

But it is in Rollyson’s book that one finds something that almost could be a reply from Sassoon to Plath’s unsent letter and thus unenunciated thought about the closeness between wanting everything and wanting nothing. On page 79, he writes, “The arch and elusive Sassoon could be quite a trial at times. Here is trying to placate Plath:

‘Please do not say you do not know me. That has depressed me a little. … And do you think I know myself well enough to tell you? … I have said much about the world—surely not without some self-revelation. And I have made you smile, I have made you laugh—perhaps I have even made you cry—was this not me! and me alone?'”

She never sent the letter anyway, and Sassoon’s plea (which does not strike my ears as making him a “trial”) reveals a man who could live in the gray shades of life, embrace and be frustrated by the small smiles and cries, to a lover who lived with an all-or-nothing perspective. Her tempestuous life continued with another lover, Hughes.

In “The Bell Jar,” Plath’s heroine Esther Greenwood—who is often described by critics as Plath’s “alter ego”; the authorial fallacy seems to always be excused when discussing Plath’s works, but sometimes a writer’s creations are just that—Greenwood closes her narrative with another famous Plath quote: “I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”

Plath’s writing remains vibrant and scary and vital. Its heart does indeed continue on.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for December 9 asks, “‘Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.’—Sylvia Plath”

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