Greener Grass Over There

~ ORCHARD HOUSE ~
WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

Photo by Stan Lichens
Family Home of Louisa May Alcott
Remember, in Little Women, this is the house of the "poor" family.
Yet by my standards -- when first reading the novel back in 1968 and,
even now, 50 years later -- Jo March lived in a dream house!
Just as the March girls were intrigued by the big house over there where Laurie lived, I imagined the enchanted life taking place right here in Orchard House where Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy embodied the creativity and romance that seemed hopelessly lacking from my painfully bland, uninspired split - foyer subdivision existence. It seems that there is always an over there, no matter where you are; and, in fact, it is always somewhere that you are not.

Double - Fronted Symmetry, Order, and Dignity
Everything I Longed For -- But Could Not Find

However problematic things may have been for the unprosperous March - Alcotts, their "humble" dwelling continues to represent beauty and perfection to countless readers and tourists who never cease in their admiration of the interior and exterior of this all - American New England home. The following selections capture the double bind of childhood nostalgia, ever convinced that the lawn next door had greener grass:

1.
Over There

Although we know they may
not be better necessarily,
over there we know at least
things are different, and we

sense we would be different
ourselves all these years
had we been born, brought
up, nurtured over there,

been given opportunities
to play the barefoot games,
had we had the friends
with the perfect trochee names

who lived on streets with
no sharp corners but with trees
that grew, merged over roads,
melded light like arches,

in houses shadowed with
pianos and portraits in oil,
who went to the alabaster
school on the low, smooth hill

with a library on whose
shelves are only first editions
bound in leather and halls
echoing a bronze tradition

like a language stranger
than ours, older and stronger,
the language of flawless children
into which ours fades forever.

by J. R. Solonche
in New Criterion (February 1993, Volume 11 Number 6, p 44)

2.
Yury Olesha (1899 - 1960)
from the novel Envy

"I would like to have been born in a small French town, to have grown up in daydreams, to have set myself some sort of high goal and one fine day to have walked out of that small town and come to the capital on foot, and there, working fanatically, to have reached my goal. But I wasn't born in the West. . . . I won't ever be either handsome or famous. I won't come walking from the small town into the capital." (17 - 19)

3.
Bruno Schulz (1892 - 1942)
from the novel The Street of Crocodiles

"Goodwill knows no obstacle; nothing can stand before deep desire. I have only to imagine a door, a door old and good, like in the kitchen of my childhood, with an iron latch and bolt. There is no room so walled up that it will not open with such a trusty door, if you have but the strength to insinuate it.” (19)

4.
from "Green, Green Grass of Home"
by American songwriter Claude "Curly" Putman, Jr. (1930 - 2016)
sung by Porter Wagoner (1927 - 2007)

The old home town looks the same as I step down from the train,
and there to meet me is my Mama and Papa.
Down the road I look and there runs Mary
hair of gold and lips like cherries.
It's good to touch the green, green grass of home.
Yes, they'll all come to meet me, arms reaching, smiling sweetly.
It's good to touch the green, green, grass of home.
The old house is still standing, tho' the paint is cracked and dry,
and there's that old oak tree that I used to play on. . . .

5.
George Orwell (1903 - 1950)
from the novel Coming Up For Air

"But I’d wanted to come over Chamford Hill, the way we used to go when we biked home from fishing in the Thames, When you get just past the crown of the hill the trees open out and you can see Lower Binfield lying in the valley below you.

"It’s a queer experience to go over a bit of country you haven’t seen in twenty years. You remember it in great detail, and you remember it all wrong. All the distances are different, and the landmarks seem to have moved about. You keep feeling, surely this hill used to be a lot steeper — surely that turning was on the other side of the road? And on the other hand you’ll have memories which are perfectly accurate, but which only belong to one particular occasion. You’ll remember, for instance, a corner of a field, on a wet day in winter, with the grass so green that it’s almost blue, and a rotten gatepost covered with lichen and a cow standing in the grass and looking at you. And you’ll go back after twenty years and be surprised because the cow isn’t standing in the same place and looking at you with the same expression.

"As I drove up Chamford Hill I realized that the picture I’d had of it in my mind was almost entirely imaginary." (Part Four, Chapter One, 175)

Binfield Heath

In every case, the tenuous belief in childhood innocence and unconditional acceptance is challenged by the reality of residual damage inflicted by careless adults and overbearing parents. Compounding the unreliable nostalgia of "the old home place" are the problematic parental units -- what a struggle it is to ever imagine them young, how difficult to know which memories are real, which perceptions accurate.

6.
Yury Olesha (1899 - 1960)
from the novel Envy

"I saw myself in the mirror and suddenly I sort of caught a similarity in me to my father. In reality there is no such similarity. I remembered: my parents' bedroom and I, a small boy, am watching my father changing his shirt. I was sorry for him. It's already too late for him to be handsome, famous; he's already done, finished and nothing more than what he is can he be. That's what I thought, feeling sorry for him and taking pride in my superiority. But now I recognized my father in me." (19)

7.
Julian Barnes (b 1946)
from the novel The Sense of an Ending

"In those days we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when the moment came, our lives -- and time itself -- would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first undiscernible.

"[Our teachers] and parents used to remind us irritatingly that they too had once been young, and so could speak with authority. It's just a phase, they would insist. You'll grow out of it; life will teach you reality and realism. But back then we declined to acknowledge that they had ever been anything like us, and we knew that we grasped life - and truth, and morality, and art - far more clearly than our compromised elders. . . .

"This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature. Look at our parents -- were they the stuff of literature? At best, they might aspire to the condition of onlookers and bystanders, part of a social backdrop against which real, true, important things could happen." (10, 12, 16)

***********************
I have yet to visit Orchard House. It's on my Bucket List; and, when I finally get there, I expect to find some greener grass and a finer house than the one I lived in as a girl. I hope to encounter the co-existence of Life and Literature, the embodiment and security of Home, where a talented young writer felt equally the pull to stay and the push to go, the longing to depart and the desire to remain forever.

More posts, poems, songs, and stories
about the houses we used to live in:
Derek Walcott & Kenneth Koch

the streets we used to live on:
Frank Sinatra & Art Garfunkel

the places we've left behind
Joyce Barlow, William Meissner,
Robert Wallace & Howard Nemerov

the rooms we can't forget
Sam McCartney & Clement Long

the places we dream about:
Frederick Buechner, Salman Rushdie & John Denver

comparing imaginary Holt, Colorado,
to the village of Lower Binfield, England
Kent Haruf & George Orwell
SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS ON MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Friday, September 14th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT ~ Jo March & Orchard House
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

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

Advancing & Receding

VIBRANT HORIZON, ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

Red Sky ~ or ~ Red Sea?
Advancing ~ or ~ Receding?
Painting by Leonard Orr

An literary exploration of the intriguing concept
of a perpetual redistribution of human emotion:

"We seem to have learned of the horizon
the art of perpetual retreating and reference."
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson ~
from "Experience" ~ 1844

"It was the tragic part of happiness;
one's right was always made of
the wrong of some one else."
~ Henry James ~
Portrait of a Lady (Chapter 35, 357) ~ 1888


"The tears of the world are a constant quantity.
For each one who begins to weep
somewhere else another stops.
The same is true of the laugh."
~ Samuel Beckett ~
from Waiting for Godot ~ 1953
See also:
Seen Through Tears & To Cry Or Not To Cry

"Every moment of one's existence
one is growing into more or retreating into less.
One is always living a little more or dying a little bit."
~ Norman Mailer ~
from Advertisements for Myself ~ 1959

"As in the fusion with Mercer, everyone ascended together or, when the cycle had come to an end, fell together into the trough of the tomb world. Oddly, it resembled a sort of biological insurance, but double-edged. As long as some creature experienced joy, then the condition for all other creatures included a fragment of joy. However, if any living being suffered, then for all the rest the shadow could not be entirely cast off. A herd animal such as man would acquire a higher survival factor through this..."

~ Philip K. Dick ~
from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? ~ 1968

"So how do we seize the past? As it recedes, does it come into focus? Some think so. We know more, we discover extra documents, we use infra - red light to pierce erasures in the correspondence, and we are free of contemporary prejudice; so we understand better. Is that it? I wonder. . . .

“The past is a distant, receding coastline, and we are all in the same boat. Along the stern rail there is a line of telescopes; each brings the shore into focus at a given distance. If the boat is becalmed, one of the telescopes will be in continual use; it will seem to tell the whole, the unchanging truth. But this is an illusion; and as the boat sets off again, we return to our normal activity: scurrying from one telescope to another, seeing the sharpness fade in one, waiting for the blur to clear in another. And when the blur does clear, we imagine that we have made it do so all by ourselves.

"Does the world progress? Or does it merely shuttle back and forth like a ferry?" (100, 101, 105)

~ Julian Barnes ~
Flaubert's Parrot ~ 1984


"Their happiness is not her unhappiness. Unless it is.
What if there is only an equal ratio of happiness to
unhappiness in the world at any given time?"
~ Gabrielle Zevin ~
The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry ~ 2014


"But life is not a zero - sum game.
There isn't a limited quantity of success or happiness,
meaning that if one person achieves something,
the rest of us take an automatic step backward."
~ Natalie Hanes ~ "Introduction" ~ 2015
to Extracts from The Second Sex
by Simone de Beauvoir ~ 1949

“It is because the human spirit knows, deep down, that all lives intersect. That death doesn't just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed.

"You say you should have died instead of me. But during my time on earth, people died instead of me, too. It happens every day. When lightning strikes a minute after you are gone, or an airplane crashes that you might have been on. When your colleague falls ill and you do not. We think such things are random. But there is a balance to it all. One withers, another grows. Birth and death are part of a whole.” (48 - 49)

~ Mitch Albom ~
from The Five People You Meet in Heaven ~ 2003


"It's the universe showing us that we're all connected
and feel the love, happiness, and pain oif one another
-- we just have to be ready to listen."
~ Peggy Carriker Rosenbluth ~ 2014


"One fire burns out another's burning.
One pain is lessened by another's anguish.
Tut man, one fire burns out another’s burning.
One pain is lessened by another’s anguish.
Turn giddy, and be helped by backward turning.
One desperate grief cures with another’s languish.
Take thou some new infection to thy eye,
And the rank poison of the old will die."
~ Shakespeare ~
Romeo & Juliet ~ 1597
Quoted by Peter Abernathy in Westworld ~ 2016

Green Bird ~ and / or ~ Green Fish?
Sky ~ and / or ~ Sea?
Painting by Leonard Orr

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

Thanks Len for multiple appearances on my blogs!
Previously Posted Paintings & Poetry:

Fortnightly
Capturing the Ginkgo Light
Like An Ant
I Will Show You Modernism In A Handful of Dust
The Ides of Whatever
Advancing & Receding
2020 ~ The Essential Sincerity of Falsehood

Quotidian
End of Summer Sounds
Golden Paintings by Leonard Orr
Excellent Images
Happy Birthday Dylan Thomas
The same war continues . . .
The Magpie Waiting for his Beautiful Partner
An Ant and a Grain of Sand
Bursting Into Light
Sun ~ Flower ~ Moon
Days of Optimism
Life Without Poetry
What To Do
Star - Spanlged But Unsingable
That Lost Time & Place

Book List
Lovely As A Tree
Evening ~ Timing ~ Floating: Poetry by Leonard Orr

Poems: "Past Tense, Future Tense" ~ "Yiddish for Travellers"
"The Loop" ~ "Desperate Times" ~ "Optimist" ~
"Sun and Wheatfields" & "Russian Olives" ~ "Monet's The Magpie"
SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS ON MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Tuesday, August 14th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT ~ Pie Safe
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

Trees, Trains, and Idiots

BONES, TREES, HOUSES ~ ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

"Bones...trees.....houses"
Cartoon by Michael Lipsey

Prequel: A few weeks ago, when writing about the Guayacan Tree (and shortly thereafter on the Vernal Equinox) there was one quotation that kept eluding me, something I read somewhere about trees and houses made of bones. After an hour of fruitless searching for the lost thought, I gave up locating the passage and posted the essay without it, even though it would have made such a perfect connection. I lamented the failed memory recall, filing away the almost but not quite remembered line under "maybe one day I'll relocate it."

Yesterday was the day!
Early in the morning I came across this comment:

" . . . [at] no time in American history have so many idiots
been exposed to other idiots Thanks Facebook . . ."
reminding me of the old / new, negative / positive [take your pick] adage that "the internet has given everyone a megaphone."

Only the day before, I had encountered these wise words from George Washington, describing the 18th Century version of "megaphone syndrome." I.e, you're going to have to listen to a lot of idiots:

"In a free and republican government,
you cannot restrain the voice of the multitude.
Every man will speak as he thinks, or, more properly,
without thinking, and consequently will judge at effects
without attending to their causes."
Stepping back in time, American historian Sarah Vowell explains: "Washington was reminding Lafayette that even though the establishment of a free and republican government comes with half - baked tomfoolery and half - cocked bile, every now and then someone who has something to say gets to say it" (203, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States). I.e, you're going to have to listen to a lot of idiots, but eventually you might hear something worthwhile.

But, getting back to yesterday, later in the afternoon, while re-reading high - lighted passages from my new favorite novel, I came across these lines:

"Gustave [Flaubert, 1821 – 1880] belonged to the first railway generation in France; and he hated the invention. . . . he hated the way it flattered people with the illusion of progress. What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together" (108, emphasis added).

Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes
Wow! Flaubert's 19th Century concern matches right up with the 21st Century image of the megaphone and the internet: "so many idiots . . . exposed to other idiots." Synchronicity! Except for one slight problem: where did I read that about the idiots? Somewhere on facebook. Only a few hours ago. Was it on my nephew's page? He had recently been expressing annoyance with facebook users who refuse to accept accountability for their own participation in the great communicative enterprise. I skimmed his page and reread his important, imperative advice: "STOP blaming people and be accountable for your own self"! But I didn't see anything specifically about "idiots."

On to my next lead, the page of facebook friend, artist and writer Michael Lipsey, who had also expressed misgivings about various issues of privacy and profit. I clicked on his page just in case but saw nothing about "idiots." However, you may have already guessed what was there, patiently awaiting my rediscovery: one of Lispsey's classic cartoons: "Bones...trees.....houses" -- as seen above! After congratulating myself on this fortuitous, serendipitous (No, I'm not going to choose! Yes, I'm going to use both words!) rediscovery, I was also able to retrace my steps to the subject of my original search -- the observation about exposure to idiots -- in a conversation between my brother and one of his facebook friends.

Just as a bonus, facebook decided to show me another glimpse of brilliance from Michael Lipsey before I turned off my laptop for the evening. Thanks Michael for your initial share (one of the good things about facebook!) and for allowing me to reshare here on my blog! Thanks Flaubert for predicting the 21st Century internet in your description of the 19th Century trains. And thanks facebook for the synchronicity!

Further thanks to Jean - Paul Sartre for referring to Flaubert himself as The Family Idiot (reviewed by Frederick Jameson; and to Hazel Barnes for her study of Sartre and Flaubert (reviewed by Julian Barnes).

As the song says, is it coincidence or connection? Or both.

SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS ON MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Saturday, April 28th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT ~ Coffee With Flaubert ~ Imposter Syndrome
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

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