Monday, January 03, 2011
He was a friend of my older brothers
He was a friend of my older brothers, hung around the house, I didn't know him well. In fact, he was pretty annoying back then because he was a big guy who never cut me any slack in the casual, all-ages touch football games we played in the street. But clearly he was curious about the location & mental state of my oldest brother, who is not inclined to acknowledge much less exchange Christmas cards. "I'm sure you made him smile," I wrote. I also wrote, in brief, a couple of anecdotes, about my brother's lifelong patterns of behavior & the sorry state I found him in 8 years ago & was helpless to alleviate. What help I could offer, my brother wouldn't accept.
"I'm a poet," I wrote, "we deal in memories." Which isn't true. There are great poets that never reference personal experience in their art. My own poems, so far as they are appreciated, aren't known for probing, autobiographical insights they don't contain, but for their variety of topics & how I end them, my "dismounts."
I learned long ago that myself & three siblings have very different memories & interpretations of people & events. All siblings do. But these vary more widely for us because we are all Adult Children of an Alcoholic, & only two of the four acknowledge it is true & accept what it means. I also believe my oldest brother has two layers of PTSD, one from childhood & the other from Vietnam. The latter derailed him from dealing with the former. He needed more time to grow up. Because of the draft & its system of deferments, Vietnam was selective in who it ruined. If you skipped college or dropped out to think things over, you had make up your mind about that war, & do it fast. The first, painful choice - you had to set aside your parents WWII memories to make a decision, My brother was drafted before the lies were exposed & anti-war feelings took hold in our part of the middle class. Subsequently, to protect his own hard experiences in a losing cause (being "shit-scared for a year" is how I put it). my brother concluded we could have won the war. I still disagree. Now I feel the same way about Afghanistan. I've felt that way about every war since Vietnam except The Falklands, which I considered worth fighting over only as a British favor to the Argentine people, to discredit & undermine a military-fascist government that had been torturing & "disappearing" thousands of their own citizens.
My "poetic" sense of memory coexists with the historical, supposedly more "objective" sense I osmosed from my dad. His method - which was then rarely used by academics - was to recreate historical conditions as much was possible, & re-imagine events from the ground up. But the intellectuals were beginning to catch on. The movie Patton, which I watched again in part yesterday, incorporates this kind of thinking. Patton may have known more "book" history than any other field commander in WWII. But for decades, as a hobby & for self-education, he had been walking himself through history's great battles on the very terrain they were fought. That was how my dad studied war, although he never fought in one. Considering how he thought, I was baffled that he never projected his insights on Vietnam & came to the same conclusions I had. Nationalist hubris trumped reason. It still does.
A family is a battleground of competing "scripts," with one entrenched, dominant script, an intertwining of maternal & paternal heritages two or three generations old. All four siblings in my family have them. but I'm the only one who routinely put mine in writing. I favor the paternal script, the Catholic side. My sister, while she personally prefers our dad, mainly uses the maternal, protestant one. I claim accuracy only in the broadest details, in poems, letters & diaries, not all of which I have anymore. I burned a large cache of letters over 20 years ago, in a fireplace in Wheeler Park, Linden, NJ. Those letters were to & from a former girlfriend in the early Seventies, while she was away at school (I usually carbon copied my typed letters, she hand wrote, often late at night when she was exhausted & unburdening herself with brutal emotional honesty). The letters documented not only my own screwed-upness, but also my mother's worsening alcoholism, my oldest brother's increasingly strange behavior, & my sister's shaky first marriage. Later lengthy letters to & from poet David Cope, with few family details & lots of literary chitchat, are deposited in the University of Michigan library storerooms, unlikely to pique any scholar's interest. My typed journals are obsessively about me, interesting only for also being scrapbooks of newspaper clippings & concert stubs. My many small hand written notebooks are unreadable even to me, mostly scrawled WFMU music sets, grocery shopping lists I forgot to tear our & bring to the supermarket, & poem "prompts."
I reassured my brother's old friend that he was safe & well-provided for. A harmless soul, a high intelligence that never found creative outlets. I'll never understand why. I read through his library, listened to his records, & they became part of my early education in the arts. His current friends, underclass retirees, probably consider him quite special.
I wrote, "He needed the kind of tight embrace our family didn't provide, where someone is not permitted to escape."
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
"I'm a poet," I wrote, "we deal in memories." Which isn't true. There are great poets that never reference personal experience in their art. My own poems, so far as they are appreciated, aren't known for probing, autobiographical insights they don't contain, but for their variety of topics & how I end them, my "dismounts."
I learned long ago that myself & three siblings have very different memories & interpretations of people & events. All siblings do. But these vary more widely for us because we are all Adult Children of an Alcoholic, & only two of the four acknowledge it is true & accept what it means. I also believe my oldest brother has two layers of PTSD, one from childhood & the other from Vietnam. The latter derailed him from dealing with the former. He needed more time to grow up. Because of the draft & its system of deferments, Vietnam was selective in who it ruined. If you skipped college or dropped out to think things over, you had make up your mind about that war, & do it fast. The first, painful choice - you had to set aside your parents WWII memories to make a decision, My brother was drafted before the lies were exposed & anti-war feelings took hold in our part of the middle class. Subsequently, to protect his own hard experiences in a losing cause (being "shit-scared for a year" is how I put it). my brother concluded we could have won the war. I still disagree. Now I feel the same way about Afghanistan. I've felt that way about every war since Vietnam except The Falklands, which I considered worth fighting over only as a British favor to the Argentine people, to discredit & undermine a military-fascist government that had been torturing & "disappearing" thousands of their own citizens.
My "poetic" sense of memory coexists with the historical, supposedly more "objective" sense I osmosed from my dad. His method - which was then rarely used by academics - was to recreate historical conditions as much was possible, & re-imagine events from the ground up. But the intellectuals were beginning to catch on. The movie Patton, which I watched again in part yesterday, incorporates this kind of thinking. Patton may have known more "book" history than any other field commander in WWII. But for decades, as a hobby & for self-education, he had been walking himself through history's great battles on the very terrain they were fought. That was how my dad studied war, although he never fought in one. Considering how he thought, I was baffled that he never projected his insights on Vietnam & came to the same conclusions I had. Nationalist hubris trumped reason. It still does.
A family is a battleground of competing "scripts," with one entrenched, dominant script, an intertwining of maternal & paternal heritages two or three generations old. All four siblings in my family have them. but I'm the only one who routinely put mine in writing. I favor the paternal script, the Catholic side. My sister, while she personally prefers our dad, mainly uses the maternal, protestant one. I claim accuracy only in the broadest details, in poems, letters & diaries, not all of which I have anymore. I burned a large cache of letters over 20 years ago, in a fireplace in Wheeler Park, Linden, NJ. Those letters were to & from a former girlfriend in the early Seventies, while she was away at school (I usually carbon copied my typed letters, she hand wrote, often late at night when she was exhausted & unburdening herself with brutal emotional honesty). The letters documented not only my own screwed-upness, but also my mother's worsening alcoholism, my oldest brother's increasingly strange behavior, & my sister's shaky first marriage. Later lengthy letters to & from poet David Cope, with few family details & lots of literary chitchat, are deposited in the University of Michigan library storerooms, unlikely to pique any scholar's interest. My typed journals are obsessively about me, interesting only for also being scrapbooks of newspaper clippings & concert stubs. My many small hand written notebooks are unreadable even to me, mostly scrawled WFMU music sets, grocery shopping lists I forgot to tear our & bring to the supermarket, & poem "prompts."
I reassured my brother's old friend that he was safe & well-provided for. A harmless soul, a high intelligence that never found creative outlets. I'll never understand why. I read through his library, listened to his records, & they became part of my early education in the arts. His current friends, underclass retirees, probably consider him quite special.
I wrote, "He needed the kind of tight embrace our family didn't provide, where someone is not permitted to escape."
Labels: growing up
