The Samurai Next Door

Occasionally I volunteer my meager skills as a bicycle mechanic to the local bike clinic, run by Brian, who takes donated bicycles, renders them serviceable and passes them along to homeless indigents. The repair shop shares a large driveway with a halfway house where residents can undergo their probation and presumed transition into an enlarged realm of commerce and normalcy. One can easily imagine that the shop is frequently the theater of some raffish characters and lively conversation, much of it encouraged by Brian who readily engages them, transients and habitues alike.

On a recent weekend, as I was busily truing a wheel, the door opened and in walked a short, grizzled stocking-capped fellow in his 50s, I'd guess, a generous walrus mustache beneath a broad nose, an outmoded bit of eyeware above it. Brian recognized him from some past visit and promptly asked after his general well being. The following transcription is a true and reasonably accurate version of the ensuing conversation:

Brian: How are you? Haven't seen you in a while.

Protagonist: I just got out of jail.

B: Oh - what happened? Why were you in jail?

P: Well, back in December I moved into an apartment. On December 21st, pretty early in the morning there was a loud banging on my door. So I went and opened it but there wasn't anybody there. Then about 20 minutes later it happened again. Nobody there. I'm looking around and my neighbor walks over and asks if somebody was just banging on my door. I says yeah, somebody did it twice. I think it's the guy on the other side of you, he says. So I go back inside. Third time, bang bang bang - nobody. So I walk over to the guy on the other side and I knock on the door - hey, was you just banging on my door?

B: So what'd he say?

P: He says, yeah, turn yer goddam music down.

B: Oh, were you playing music?

P: Yeah, I was listening to some CDs.

B: Oh.

P: So I go back and shut my door, and he comes back over and bangs on it again!

B: Uh oh.

P: Yeah. So I get out my samurai sword and I go back over and he comes to the door, and I say, Do you know what this is? So he just says, Aw, put that effin thing away, you ain't gonna use it.

B: So what'd you do?

P: Well, I kinda poked it at him.

B: You didn't stab him did you?

P: Nah, I just kinda tapped him on the chest with it.

B: You didn't draw any blood.

P: Nah. I don't think so. Anyway, he called the cops.

B: So what happened?

P: I got a month in jail. They charged me with assault and menacing with a deadly weapon. And brandishing a deadly weapon. So now I owe three thousand five hundred in fines plus another fifty dollars for my probation.

"Gotta have my tunes."

Biography in Flannel

 A quarter-century ago when I first took up cohabitation with my wife, she sewed me a wonderful lightweight robe in a bold red-and-blue flannel as an apt and thoughtful welcoming gift. And I am still wearing it in good health and connubial joy. What could be better? It is a part of the warp and weft of my days, so to speak, enfolding me in another morning of my quick passage through this vale of light and shadow, like a familiar arm across my shoulders, a comfort in my dotage, my accustomed armor against the chances of another sunrise. 

Naturally, as it's cotton and not chain mail or rubber, it's worn thin in places over the interim. In fact a detractor might call it downright shabby. Each morning I tie around my waist its third belt. It drapes loosely now, the fabric in places a mere tissue, in other places it is no longer. It fails to cover everywhere, it is copiously patched until now there is no patching it since the flannel no longer has the structural integrity to hold the patch. It is in short become a classic, like the thousand-year-old kimonos that are a palimpsest of the time and labor of forgotten souls, ancient narratives of alien fabrics, repairs and loving reinforcements.

But now, within a scant quarter-century I hear murmurs of replacement, gentle yet persistent urgings from the other room to look at a new fabric (how about a nice gray plaid for a gray head?). So what, I protest, that the seat has been patched thrice, that the front is worn through, that the shoulders are so attenuated that they will not support the rest of it on a hanger, or even that the patch across the back is worn through again? It has been only twenty-five years; no need that it should last a thousand. It's fine. I'm fine. I don't know what I would do if I couldn't crawl back into it each morning. It has shared my morning surliness and my unfocused negativity ever since our first halcyon days in one another's company.

At a certain age, different I suppose for everyone, a person acquires a personal museum - a mental catalog of favorite things, or moments, or friends, departed pets, a favorite bicycle or doll or song, perhaps one's signed copy of The Critique of Pure Reason. An iconography of the self. In my own museum this robe will hang in the entrance hall like the feathered cape of a Kwakiutl chieftain or the leathern armor of Genghis Khan.

4.28 Monday (Diminution of Agia Elisaveta)

"The Elizabeth Warrens"

This past week, on one of my endless daily drives through the Rattlesnake Belt, having reached that point of blank distraction at which even the basest form of cultural diversion would suffice, I turned on the car radio. The instant jackpot was a political talk show, the topic was banking regulation, the sympathies of guest and host alike were faith-based conservative free marketeering. 

The guest was a spent intellectual force from American Heritage Action who began reasonably enough by pointing out a shared perception that the "banking industry" has perpetrated high crimes and misdemeanors with no consequences to itself. But if anyone were hoping for a bit of home truth about rigorous new regulation or strict oversight of an institution gone haywire, the speaker quickly volunteered that he did not agree with "the Elizabeth Warrens." A palpable relief emanated over the broadband (which Miguel still thinks of as "the airwaves.")

Now I confess I was ignorant of any other Elizabeth Warren in political life or in the public notice, not to mention several of them. Who were these other Elizabeth Warrens, I wondered, that he had even heard of them, could know their views on regulation, could know of their universal agreement on the question? And why would these women, all sharing a name, necessarily agree in questions of banking policy? Isn't it at least conceivable that, of the set of all women named "Elizabeth Warren," at least one might have landed on the side of the free market angels?

Oh, Miguel (I chided myself), always too literal minded. I had at last spotted the rhetorical coup de grace, the trick of diminishing a policy or argument by reducing it to the name of its proponent (Marxism, Keynesianism), then reducing the proponent to a type; the implication is that there is not a single individual named EW, no such person exists in her own right, no one individual capable of advanced and clear thinking.

There are only "the Elizabeth Warrens," which is to imply a set of clones or nested Russian dolls or kittens, all singing the same monotonous mechanical tune without a single functioning consciousness. An ideology requiring no counterarguments.

In a more positive vein, one might speak of "the Ronald Reagans" as a single functioning consciousness.

 "The Ronald Reagans"

Critic's Notebook: Rhapsody in Cement

Ever since Alamos became a part of the weird world of Telenovela, the town has become self-conscious. So now with some regularity in concert with the local music festival a new bit of statuary appears amongst the derelict vehicles abandoned along its cobbled streets. Last year it was the unobjectionable likeness of a Mexican composer, a bronzed bust in the traditional style.

The latest installation was unveiled just down the street to sedate speeches and muffled applause in a small ceremony (Mexico is a country of ceremony) preceding the current festival. It is a larger-than-life full length of Albert Ortiz Tirado, another native son, the founder of the festival and a late local luminary. Ortiz was a doctor by profession, and the Festival Alberto Ortiz Tirado (FAOT) is his longstanding cultural bequest to Alamos. 

About seven decades ago I went on a school field trip to a museum, a re-creation of an 18th century farm in upstate New York. On display in a shallow open pit was the fabled Cardiff Giant, a crude bit of limestone carved in the 1860s by an upstate farmer and "discovered" by him buried in a field. It was a sensation - a demonstration of the biblical claim that there were indeed "giants in the earth" - and it duly made the rounds of local fairs, carnivals, tent revivals, mall openings and press conferences. Gazing at the crude likeness of El Ortiz I was reminded of my childhood foray.

This latest chunk of  plastic art is a mixed genre - "Brutalo-Impressionism," might serve to capture its various subtleties. It seems cast in cement which lends it a particular stasis, a lack of dynamism, a dearth of expressiveness. An aesthetic hole filled with concrete.

As the eye slides down the slab-like contours, the first thing one notices (after its resemblance to Mussolini in party dress) is the absence of any visible means of locomotion, like an anthropomorphic hovercraft. And of course the large snake clutched to his waistcoat, oddly evocative of some juxtaposed bit of anatomy, presumably a medical reference to the caduceus. Rather than holding it as one might hold a large snake, he is fingering it as though it were a saxophone, the digits spatulate rather than gripped.

The unsettling bit is the fact that the snake has a microphone where its head should be, tucked just at the good doctor's bow tie; an older style of microphone that Harry or Etta James might have tooted or crooned into. This seems an unfortunate mixing of metaphors, a transgression of artistic license. 

The silver lining in this intrusion on my good taste is the fact that it has engaged my civic spirit. If something like this should happen to the memory of Maria Felix, I'll take to the streets in protest.

 

Flights of Fancy

 I thought this post from 2016 might bear a re-post.

"Only the insane take themselves quite seriously." - Max Beerbohm

Logic 101: Lesson One

"Heat is in proportion to want of knowledge."  -  Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy

In the summer of my sixth year, it must have been, I was lounging on the linoleum in my grandparents' sunny dining room while my grandfather plied his barber shears along the scrawny neck of another neighborhood elder in receipt of pretty much what he had paid for. My grandfather was an inveterate amateur barber whose tonsorial efforts veered from overweening enthusiasm for his tools into the realms of asymmetry. Over the years he had cut the hair of five sons and, from the gallery of family albums, the golden tow of even more grandsons. In his dotage he proffered his ministrations to some of his contemporaries, and the old fellow now seated in the dining room was a regular taker.

I remember this fellow in particular because as his hair was being trimmed, he was engaged with my grandfather in conversation, and specifically in what must have been a theological discussion. They were mining the subtleties of a hardshelled Presbyterian theology, probably some finer point as to whether good works were merely a signal of divine grace bestowed, or whether they were more like redeemable chits along the road to redemption. As points developed and various counterpoints parried, the pace of the conversation became brisker, the volume gradually increasing, until my grandfather in some heat and in complete exasperation said (a pretty direct quote), "Lyle, if you're going to sit here and say that then you can get out of my house!"

"Now George . . ." his interlocutor cajoled, and so the matter was put to rest, followed by an uneasy silence, some further harrumphing and clearing of throats, until one of them opened another gambit - along the lines of which of the McBurney boys had married the Carrothers girl with the walleye after one or another of the wars ("the war" being a principal signpost in the communal memory, exactly which war always a matter of context or pure supposition).

But even at the age of six I knew of a certainty that my grandfather, for all his heat, had just lost an argument. In the ensuing decades I have treasured this memory; it has enabled me to add a completely new logical fallacy to the pantheon of hoary old chestnuts cataloged by Aristotle and his medieval disciples. I call it the argumentum ad domicilium, and place it in its own niche in the catalog alongside such venerable groaners as the argumentum ad batulum ("If you maintain that position I and several of my friends and hirelings will beat you within an inch of your worthless life"); or the argumentum ad populum ("You may wish to maintain your position, Madam, but I fear very much that your friends and neighbors may henceforth shun you"); or the argumentum ad hominem ("I should have expected such an opinion from one like you who shares the embraces of his wife's chiropodist"). I could go on.

But to clarify: the argumentum ad domicilium is what I call the argument from the ownership of a private residence or business. It is a time honored favorite of bartenders and publicans ("Keep your voice down, pal, or I'll chuck you out"). But it, like any fallacy, cannot bear the weight of argument. The threat of force, or ridicule, or minority in opinion, or lowness of character has no bearing on the opinions or conclusions proffered. To such interlocutors, silence in a rhetorical opponent is tantamount to acquiescence. Their first premise is merely "Shut your gob."