April 27: Become a Dilettante, John Keating, What We Stay Alive For

Merton being chastised for wanting to be a writer . . .

It was not the first time I had met Mrs. Pearce, the headmistress of Ripley Court.  She was a bulky and rather belligerent-looking woman with great pouches under her eyes.  She was standing in a room in which were hung several of my father's paintings.  She had probably been looking at them, and considering the error and instability of an artist's way of life when Aunt Maud mentioned the fact that we had been talking about my own future.

"Does he want to be a dilettante like his father?" said Mrs. Pearce roughly, surveying me with a rather outraged expression through the lenses of her spectacles.

"We were thinking that perhaps he might become a journalist," said Aunt Maud gently.

"Nonsense," said Mrs. Pearce, "let him go into business and make a decent living for himself.  There's no use in his wasting his time and deceiving himself.  He might as well get some sensible ideas into his head from the very start, and prepare himself for something solid and reliable and not go out into the world with his head full of dreams."  And then, turning to me, she cried out, "Boy!  Don't become a dilettante, do you hear?"

I was received at Ripley Court, although the summer term was almost over, more or less as if I were an orphan or some kind of a stray that required at once pity and a special, not unsuspicious kind of attention.  I was the son of an artist, and had just come from two years in a French school, and the combination of artist and France added up to practically everything that Mrs. Pearce and her friends suspected and disliked.  Besides, to crown it all, I did not know any Latin.  What was to be made of a boy who was already in the middle of his fourteenth year and could not decline mensa--had never even opened a Latin grammar?

So I had the humiliation of once again descending to the lowest place and sitting with the smallest boys in the school and beginning at the beginning.

But Ripley was a pleasant and happy place after the prison of the Lycee.  The huge, dark green sweep of the cricket field, and the deep shadows of the elm trees where one sat waiting for his innings, and the dining room where we crammed ourselves with bread and butter and jam at tea-time and listened to Mr. Onslow reading aloud from the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, all this was immense luxury and peace after Montauban.

People don't understand the artistic impulse.  Merton, being the son of an intinerant painter, is immediately suspect.  The arts--whether visual, written, spoken, musical--are not considered serious pursuits.  Instead, they should be saved by pastimes, those hobbies responsible people indulge after they have completed their "real work" in a business office, medical practice, retail store.  The arts are frivolous.  The arts are expendable.  (Certainly, the current administration in the White House has made this belief core to their budget proposals, slashing funding for anything to do with truth and beauty and education.)

Me?  I subscribe to John Keating's philosophy from Dead Poets Society:

We don't read and write poetry because it's cute.  We read and write poetry because we are the members of the human race.  And the human race is filled with passion.  And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life.  But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.

That's why I stay up until midnight reading novels and poetry.  Why I tap away at my keyboard for a couple hours every night.  Not because I need something to fill my "empty" hours.  No.  Because I need these things to sustain me for the next day, when all the business of scraping a living from the belly of the world absorbs me.  If I didn't write these blog posts and scribble in my journal, I would undoubtedly be ready to take long walk off a short rooftop.

If you're reading this blog post, you probably already agree with me.  There is something about writing and poetry that fills you up in some way.  Gives you something that Wheel of Fortune or 60 Minutes does not.  It may be a secret obsession that you hide from family and friends.  That's okay.  You can still be a part of this Dead Poets Society.  Just be sure to leave your tie and suit jacket at home.

We are dreamers here.  Hopers for a better tomorrow.  We reject practically everything about our present-day world.  The hatred and waste and greed.  Instead, we embrace love and beauty.  That is what I live for, why I punch time clocks, drag myself out of bed at 4:45 in the morning.  It's all about poetry.  The sonnets and lyrics of everyday existence.

Saint Marty is ready to haiku off to bed now.

June 22: Dreamers, Joy Harjo, "Invisible Fish"

I'm thinking a lot about dreams this morning for some reason.  Maybe it's because I've spent the last couple months preparing for and witnessing my daughter's high school graduation.  There's a whole lot of talk about dreams and ambitions during these moments.  You can see it in the kids' eyes, too.  Their gaze is focused somewhere on the horizon, where the future exists like some wavering scene from a favorite movie.  Star Wars: A New Hope or Raider's of the Lost Ark.

I have a poem about dreams from the newly named Poet Laureate of the United States.  I love Joy Harjo, because so much of it contains this beautiful, almost-dream imagery.

Saint Marty has his eye focused on the horizon today, as well.  He sees Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

Invisible Fish

by:  Joy Harjo

Invisible fish swim this ghost ocean now described by waves of sand, by water-worn rock.  Soon the fish will learn to walk.  Then humans will come ashore and paint dreams on the dying stone.  Then later, much later, the ocean floor will be punctuated by Chevy trucks, carrying the dreamers' descendants, who are going to the store.

September 11: Dreamers, Poet of the Week, Gabriela Mistral, "Tiny Feet"

Since it is Nobel Prize season, I've selected Gabriela Mistral as Poet of the week.  In 1945, Mistral was the first Latin American writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. 

Mistral was a Chilean educator and diplomat.  In particular, she concerned herself with the plight of children in her work, placing hope in the youth of the world. 

She seems like a voice of reason for the United States at the moment, where the future of thousands of immigrant children and young adults hang in the balance.

Saint Marty salutes Dreamers this evening.

Tiny Feet

by:  Grabriela Mistral

A child's tiny feet,
Blue, blue with cold,
How can they see and not protect you?
Oh, my God!

Tiny wounded feet,
Bruised all over by pebbles,
Abused by snow and soil!

Man, being blind, ignores
that where you step, you leave
A blossom of bright light,
that where you have placed
your bleeding little soles
a redolent tuberose grows.

Since, however, you walk
through the streets so straight,
you are courageous, without fault.

Child's tiny feet,
Two suffering little gems,
How can the people pass, unseeing.

June 9: On My Way, Just Keep Swimming, Dreamers

I could go.  I could simply angle off the path, take one step after another, and be on my way.  I could walk to Point Barrow, Mount McKinley, Hudson's Bay.  My summer jacket is put away; my winter jacket is warm.

It's a lovely thought that Dillard has.  Put on a warm jacket, open the door, step outside, and just keep walking.  She goes as far as Point Barrow (wherever that is) and Mount McKinley and Hudson's Bay.  Her imagined escape does not sound easy.  It's steep and treacherous and cold.  Yet, she would be away from her day-to-day stresses, and that is the point.  (She may also fall off a mountain, but that's a subject for a different post.)

Yes, I'm sure everybody thinks about escaping.  Every day, on my way to work, I think how easy it would be to simply keep driving down to the beach by Lake Superior and staying there to watch the sunrise and wait for a moose or deer to walk by.  Maybe another escapee from life would sit next to me in the sand, and we would talk about our dreams.  "Ralph" would listen to me describe a place with books and a desk and a view of a lake or mountain.  How I would sit in that room and read and write poems or stories or the Great American Novel.  Ralph would nod and say, "That sounds pretty damn good."  (As you can tell, I've put a little thought into this escape fantasy.)

Of course, I will never follow through on this desire.  I'm a little too responsible and Catholic.  I would be tortured by guilt and an overwhelming desire to recite ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys as penance if I aimed my vehicle toward the Big Lake on a workday.  I am the main income for my little family.  A day or two off from work sometimes means the difference between making a mortgage payment or not.  Too many people depend upon me.

Please don't think I'm feeling sorry for myself.  I'm not.  I just finished my first week at my new job.  It was good.  I was surrounded by friends, and I felt needed.  My coworkers kept telling me how glad they were to have me back.  I am not complaining.  It's just my inner Dory speaking.  You know the scene from Finding Nemo, where little blue Dory comes gliding by Marlin, and she's singing, "Just keep swimming, just keep swimming."  Unfortunately, I'm more of a Marlin than a Dory, worrying about the possibility of every calamity.  Car problems.  Heart disease.  Kidnappers.  A Donald Trump presidency.

So, as much as I would like to spend a day at the beach with Ralph, I will probably be at work tomorrow morning.  Being the good employee and husband and father.  That's what I am.  Dependable.  Responsible.  Predictable.

Marty, the patron saint of dreamers.

Okay, it's the closest I could get to Finding Nemo