Ghost of Myself

VICTORIAN HOUSE GHOST, ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

2014

Following Halloween, I like to change the bow on my ghost
and leave her out for the remainder of the year.
Thanks to my friends Claude & Sue who wrote:
"Your lace Ghost of Christmas Past
is one of best yard decorations we've seen!"
And to dear Victoria Amador
who inquires every year if the ghost is up!

2018

The following two poems -- "i am running into a new year" by Lucille Clifton and "in celebration of surviving" by Chuck Miller -- have appeared recently on several different blogs and New Year posts and websites. Yet, I've never seen them posted together. As my contribution to the conversation, I will compare and contrast, in keeping with my goal to provide "a poem for every poem."

Here they are side by side: Clifton's almost middle - aged narrator, "running into a new year"; Miller's almost elderly narrator standing outside in January, coming "through on the stretch in a photo finish." The two narrators contemplate various ghosts of themselves as they resolve to take the New Year and run with it. Even so, they spare a moment to reckon with the ghosts of "Auld Lang Syne" [literally: "old long since"; idiomatically: "long long ago," "days gone by," "old times' sake]. I like to think of these poems as "Auld Lang Syne" reveries, midnight resolutions to cut loose the old trappings and embrace the new energy of the present. As Robert Burns reminds us when we put his poem to music every New Year's Eve, we drink the cup of kindness now.

Clifton begs the ghosts of her old broken promises and her younger selves to forgive her for choosing the present over the past. Miller stands, however briefly, in the "golden envelope" of the present -- not the past, not the future. What matters more is history as we are living it moment by moment; not history as we look back on it. The present is real; the past and the future are imaginary. Or is the opposite: there is no Now; there is only Before and After?

Remember what Thomas Jefferson said:
“I like the dreams of the future
better than the history of the past."

Contemplative essayist and novelist Scott Russell Sanders (American, b 1945) has the perfect phrase for what is happening in these poems. He begins the new year by sharing this thought from a friend: "Memory grips the past and hope grips the future." In both poems, you can feel the icy wind of winter, and the exhilarating wind of change:

i am running into a new year
i am running into a new year
and the old years blow back
like a wind
that i catch in my hair
like strong fingers like
all my old promises and
it will be hard to let go
of what i said to myself
about myself
when i was sixteen and
twenty-six and thirty-six
even thirty-six but
i am running into a new year
and i beg what i love and
i leave to forgive me

~ Lucille Clifton (American poet, 1936 - 2010)

******************************

in celebration of surviving
when senselessness has pounded you around on the ropes
and you're getting too old to hold out for the future
no work and running out of money,
and then you make a try after something that you know you
won't get
and this long shot comes through on the stretch
in a photo finish of your heart's trepidation
then for a while
even when the chill factor of these prairie winters puts it at
fifty below
you're warm and have that old feeling
of being a comer, though belated
in the crazy game of life

standing in the winter night
emptying the garbage and looking at the stars
you realize that although the odds are fantastically against you
when that single January shooting star
flung its wad in the maw of night
it was yours
and though the years are edged with crime and squalor
that second wind, or twenty-third
is coming strong
and for a time
perhaps a very short time
one lives as though in a golden envelope of light

~ Chuck Miller (American poet, b 1939)

Thanks to Katie Field for recommending Lucille Clifton;
and to Peter Bunder for recommending both Chuck Miller
and Scott Russell Sanders

More on this topic
and these poems next time . . .

******************************

January: Always a Time for
Gazing Forward & Hearkening Back

Christmas Forward Backward ~ January 15, 2016

Perfect Twins: Going Out, Coming In ~ January 14, 2016

Janus, Orpheus, Obsolescing ~ January 30, 2011

January: Forward Vision, Backward Glance ~ January 28, 2011

Janus ~ January 8, 2010

Fast Away the Old Year Passes ~ December 28, 2009

SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS ON MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Monday, January 28th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

January: Forward Vision, Backward Glance

ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUSOrpheus Leading Eurydice from the Underworld, 1861
by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796 - 1875)
French Landscape Painter

The Legendary Orpheus, greatest musician of Greek mythology, and his wife Eurydice, who died young but was granted leave by Hades, god of the Underworld, to return from the dead, upon the condition that Orpheus, who had descended to claim her, should walk in front of Eurydice without glancing behind until they were both safe in the Upper World.

Corot's 1860 Sketch
for Orphee Entrainant Eurydice

*********************************************
So the first month of 2011 is nearly gone! Not only is the old year past, but fast away the new year passes as well! However, we can't let January get away without paying our respects to Janus, the ancient Roman god of "gates, doors, doorways, beginnings, endings and time."

As I wrote last year around this time, it's good to remember that our opening month is named for this two - headed, two - faced deity who possessed knowledge of the future and wisdom of the past. Conveniently, Janus could see forward into the New Year and backward into the Old. It was customary to place his image, maybe a small statue or amulet, at the front entrance of every home where he could look outward at the passersby as well as inward toward the home dwellers.

Speaking of passing fast away, let me recommend a timely, stylish, and informative blog out of Philadelphia: Obsolescing: watching technologies as they wane. It is a nostalgic blog, but also forward thinking -- like Janus! Each post reads like an elegant reverse treasure hunt, presenting items such as typewriter erasers (not to mention typewriters!) and telephone books (not to mention telephones!) and tracing each technology back to its origin.

I like the way that my friend Ann de Forest and her co-blogger David Comberg describe what their blog is about: "We are not so much interested in wringing our hands over what we are losing as in considering the experience of loss that has always been a part of technological change." As they explain in their very first post (March 26, 2009): "Documenting objects and experiences that are rapidly disappearing from our daily lives, this blog elegizes the obsolescent and extinct, celebrates creative reinterpretations of technologies liberated from their original function, and analyzes the particular language used to talk about those technologies as they are vanishing."

No time for hand wringing! The technological landscape is changing much too quickly for such indulgence. Besides, if we take that approach, there are so many things to mourn, how could we ever find enough hours in the day? Better, surely, to spend that time looking forward. The backward glance must be swift, the forward vision steady, especially if we hope to master each miraculous new life - enhancing technology.

In several of her essays, Ann takes a closer look at these conflicting emotions:

1. "The Nature of Elegy" (July 7, 2009): "If change is loss, as pop psychologists love to say, then we all must be in a state of perpetual mourning. Depending on your age, you grieve for skate keys or glass milk bottles or the iceman’s cart; for 2-sided record albums, Checker cabs, solid black desk phones; Polaroid cameras, typewriters, cork in wine bottles, the Walkman – the list is endless. Even as we embrace convenient, new technologies, it seems to be human nature to lament whatever the next new thing replaces."

Further examples, such as Robert Louis Stevenson's insistence that electricity was inferior to the dear old gas lamp, illustrate the point that lamenting waning technology is hardly a new phenomenon. It was ever thus.

2. "An Emblem for Our Times" (July 7, 2009): "We all – no matter how old we are – can name a thousand things, the stuff of our childhoods, that now are virtually extinct. I’m sure I’m not alone in having felt an irrational pang for the passing of utilitarian objects that I never paid much attention to when they were commonplace" (e.g., the typewriter eraser mentioned above).

Yes, I have felt that pang! In fact, I feel it now, just reading these words. For things like the Joe Namath Popcorn Popper (try ebay). It's not the machine itself -- I mean, really, who wants to wash that thing? Anyone can see that microwave popcorn, in it's own sealed, disposable bag, is far superior -- cleaner, healthier, safer, easier -- you name it. But the memory isn't about any of those features; it's about Santa Claus bringing such a cool present for the whole family to play with, back in 1972!

On the coffee table:
Joe Namath Popcorn Popper & Princess Phone
As my sister Peg wrote, back when I
posted this same photograph a few months ago:
"Our pink princess phone! I loved that phone
and spent a lot of time talking on it late into the night.
Sometimes even when Mom & Dad didn't know I was on the phone!"
Because of another amazing feature -- an extra long cord! --
we could even pull the phone into the closet
(behind the door I'm leaning against) and shut the door.
How we loved that privacy, secrecy, and coziness!
But I digress! Back to Obsolescing . . .

3. One of my favorite recent posts is the autumnal "Ode for the Season" October 6, 2010 with it's allusion to the bereft Orpheus and Gerard Manley Hopkins' mournful little Margaret: "I think that the emotions that autumn elicits, the melancholy my own primitive soul starts feeling as the days shorten, are akin to the distress and sorrow we feel as the objects of our life, the utilitarian technologies that once surrounded and defined us, fade into memory. News of a past technology’s demise makes us suddenly, desperately long to hold, to touch, to smell, to hear the things of our past. Like Orpheus leading his beloved from the Underworld, we look back to reassure ourselves that the everyday things we have known and loved and remember still exist in their full corporeal presence (That’s why we revel in the sensory details — the typewriter’s clacking keys, the mimeograph ink’s distinctive scent.) Instead, we turn back to watch, in sadness and horror, as the objects of our lives, the tangible evidence of our own existence, slip from our outstretched arms" (~ Ann de Forest).

[detail from Corot's painting]
So as January comes to a close, should you crave a late night reminiscence of the old year or desire some early morning reading in contemplation of the new months ahead, turn on your astonishingly capable laptop computer and take a further look at Obsolescing: watching technologies as they wane. Enjoy the nostalgic, visionary musings of Ann de Forest and David Comberg.

Republican Janus Coin, c. 225 - 212 BCE
SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Monday, February 14, 2011

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com