When I was but a child, a butterfly landed on my hand. I wanted to capture it. But I knew, if I closed my hand fast enough to snatch it out of the air as it tried to escape, I would utterly smash it. The important thing, the most important thing still until this very day, is that I let it fly away. I did not crush the butterfly.
(Not exactly a poem, but not prose either…)
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Griselda by Maxfield Parrish
One of the most beautiful things I have ever seen in the art world are the paintings of Maxfield Parrish. That’s why this post needs to be about his work instead of mine. He made his mark painting ads for tire companies and on the ends of orange crates. The secret to his melancholy beauty is the cobalt blue underpainting he always did. Of course, the dominant color over all is a ghostly, iridescent blue. It fills his paintings with quiet grace and powerful emotions. I love that laughing blue quality more than any other thing I’ve ever seen in the realm of art.
I love to use the term “laughing blue”. It’s an oxymoron that sums up me better than any other descriptive phrase. It is the laughter that goes on so long and so hard that it causes tears, and at the same time it is the sobbing that eventually becomes uncontrollable laughter. Sweet-sad feelings of love and longing, piles of smiles that stretch for miles. Nothing is better or wiser or more filled with life.
There was the time when the church youth group put on the Halloween Carnival. I had won a blue, helium-filled balloon at the ball toss when beautiful Alicia was watching. She smiled at me. It was such a perfect moment that I had to savor it the best I could. I gave my friend six tickets to put me in jail. It was two tickets to get in. Someone had to pay four tickets to get you out. Tickets were a nickel each. I figured my friend would leave me in there for a while so I could just sit and contemplate that balloon. I was right. Mark spent the four tickets at the cake walk. He won a cake.
In the jail was a little boy, the son of the local barber, who had a bright red balloon. His mother had put him in the jail as a joke. He was four years old, I believe, about the same as my little brother David. His name was Tommy. Some laughing-jackal teenage boys came past the jail. One of the doody-heads had a safety pin. Bang! The red balloon was no more. The high school doody-heads took off cackling with glee. Tommy burst out in tears for his lost balloon. His mother, outside the chicken-wire cage, was beside herself, pleading for the gatekeeper to open up and let her boy out. Several church ladies zoomed in to see what they could do. My mother was one of them. Before they could get into the cage, however, I solved the problem by giving him my blue balloon. His mother never saw, never realized he had been upset by the loss of his balloon. She didn’t notice that the balloon he was holding when he left the cage was different than the one he took in. It didn’t matter. No one needed to know the sacrifice I made that night.
Later, at home, I cried. Yes, I know I was twelve years old and too big to cry about a lost balloon. But it wasn’t really that anyway. It was that feeling that filled me up. It was gladness that I had seized the moment to be unselfish and kind though somehow no one else knew it. It was sorrow over the loss of my connection to that moment when she smiled at me. It was beauty caused by ugliness. It was Laughing Blue.
,
The innocent sylph bends down to wake her sister, the sleeping nymph. The morning has broken on a new day. The painting has existed since the 1920’s, probably his most famous work of all. He worked from a photograph to paint it. Several photographs, in fact. Wouldn’t the authorities be upset now, this man painting a naked girl? Artist or no, it could look like pornography to many in this day and age. Ironically, though, the nude person in the photo he used as a model was himself. It was only a matter of the play of light over the bare form. It was a matter of innocent yet sensual beauty. It was a matter of Maxfield Parrish Blue. The painting itself is far more subtly blue than it appears here. It is laughing blue. It is a mix of youth and grief, the birth of the new dawn and the ancient jagged hills behind. It is flowers and parched rock, waking and dreaming. The art of it is in the opposition of things, what Confucius meant when he taught of the Yin and the Yang, what Lao Tzu spoke of in the Book of the Tao. Yes, it was Laughing Blue.
I wish I had the talent to paint like Maxfield Parrish. I loved his magazine illustrations and his faery-tale characters. I loved everything of his I have ever seen, and I have dug up a lot. He was a prolific artist. Almost everything he painted is from before I was born. He died not long after I came into this world. I am sad that he can paint no more for me, yet I can’t imagine anything he could do that is better than what I’ve already seen.
In the book The Little Prince the fox says, “It is only by the heart that we can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.” How true that is! We cannot describe in words the beauty we see in these works of art. We cannot explain why it is there. But we know it when we see it. It is Laughing Blue.
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This postable Paffooney is really not so wonderfully postable. It got a little bit moisture damaged in the garage where I found it improperly stored. It is an oil painting from before I had a family of my own back in the 1980’s. It is called Madonna of the Golden Door. The girl is my sister, the younger of my two sisters. The boy is one of my favorite students from the 1980’s, one I fed and helped raise in addition to being his teacher for two years.
This painting inspired the following silly free verse poem;
Open the Golden Door
Can a man…
Love a boy?
Not a son,
Not a nephew,
Not an in-law…
Just a boy?
Not for lust,
Not for profit,
Not for gain,
But for the gift…
Of being able…
To teach,
To learn,
To coach,
To cheer,
To mentor,
To shadow,
To see,
To feel,
To reach,
To hug?
Simply to love?
I would say yes…
But what do I know?
I am only a…
Teacher,
Author,
Poet,
Painter,
Wizard,
Instructor,
Confidante,
Mentor,
And Friend.
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I was always the one on the outside looking in. The sad fact is, all of us who are too creative and sensitive for our own good feel that way. We wish we had what see in there, but miss the beauty inherent in being on the outside. Stalker… peeping faun… magical wishes… and dreams in the dark blue of the night.
In this week’s Paffooney remix, I have pictured the little boy crooner Francois Martin on the main street of Norwall. Why have I done such a foolish thing? Why have I drawn a boy singing silently a song that only I can hear in my silly old head? In fact, why do I label them Cantos instead of Chapters? Of course, the answer to these rhetorical questions is metaphorical. I look at my writing as being poetry, or, more accurately, as music rather than mere prose. It is a metaphor central to my being, writing is putting the inner music of my mind down on paper.
Here is a secret to powerful writing. Connect ideas with metaphors. A metaphor is a direct comparison of two unlike things to create an analogy, an echo of an idea that gives resonance to a notion. Sorry, I’m an English teacher. It’s in my genes. But metaphors can serve as the essential connections, as glue to put paragraphs and scenes together.
Let me show you a metaphor. Here is a short poem, the natural environment where many metaphors live;
The Cookie
Once I had a cookie… But every time I took a bite, It became smaller and smaller…
With each bite I had less and less cookie left.
But when it was gone, the sweet taste of it…
Lingered on… as memory.
The central metaphor of this poem is comparing the cookie to my life. I am getting older. I have six incurable diseases, some of them life threatening. I have been thinking about mortality a lot lately. So what is the point of the poem? That even when the last bite is taken, and there is no more cookie… when I am dead, there is the memory of me. Not my memory. The memory of me in the minds of my family, my children, my students, and other people who have come to know me. That memory makes whatever goodness that is in me worth living for.
Okay, a metaphor explained is kinda like a bug that’s been dissected for a science fair. Its innards are revealed and labeled. The beauty is gone. It’s kinda icky.
What works better, is a metaphor that the readers can readily grasp on their own. The beauty has to be discovered, not dissected and explained. Let me try again;
The Boy and the Boat
The boy looked to the horizon where wild and wooly white-caps roiled upon the sea.
“Lord help me,” he said, “the sea is so large, and my boat is so small…”
I can hear what you are thinking. “That’s too simple and ordinary. If it’s a metaphor, then it’s a really stupid one.” Well, I heard someone thinking that, even if it was not you.
Let me add a bit of information to help you connect things as I do. When I was ten years old, a fifteen-year-old neighbor boy sexually assaulted me. I told no one. I was so devasted by the event that I repressed the memory until I reached the age of twenty two. In high school, my suicidal thoughts and darkest depressions were caused by this event even though I couldn’t even recall. To this day I have not explained to mother and father what happened. I can only bring myself to tell you now because my abuser died of heart failure last summer. It was a life event of overwhelming darkness, pain, and soul scorching. Now look at “The Boy and the Boat” again. Has the meaning changed for you the way it does for me?
Now, I know that the last paragraph was a totally unfair use of harsh reality to make a point about metaphor and meaning. So let me give you one last poem… a sillier one. You can make of it whatever you will;
The Grin
The wrinkly, bewhiskered old man
Had a smile like a plate of moldy spaghetti
In the afternoon sun.
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The Thumb-Sucker
Darkness surrounds us
As the nighttime moves in
And we feel overwhelmed
And burdened by sin
But comfort can come
From a place we’ve all been
Just open your mouth
And shove your thumb in
Our childhoods were happy
And made us all grin
And simple we were
With our little thumbs in
So as we’re all worried
And all feeling dumb
We can make it all better
By sucking our thumb
(Silly poems and blue cartoons are a specialty of mine. I’m no Ogden Nash, but I make it all rhyme.)
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I wrote the other day about the fact that my writing is music in my head. Now, I realize there are probably a number of things wrong with my head, and Lord knows, it may truly need a good cleaning… er, well, not a brainwashing if that’s what you had in mind. No, what I need is to clarify the meaning of what I said, to restate in a less metaphorical and obscure way.
I have this insane notion that I am a good writer. Believe me, I am aware of the fact that every Indie author with a self-published novel has the same crazy fantasy right now. I imagine that my humor is like Mark Twain’s, my characterizations like Charles Dickens (Boz), my themes and insights like William Shakespeare (the Bard), and my creativity akin to that of Walt Disney (Diz).
I plan to write about it in a novel that used to be called The Little Boy Crooner, and now labors on under the title Sing Sad Songs… with Clowns. Don’t be fooled by the fact that I call this idea-thing a novel. It is not complete. There is no flesh on the bare bones. If it were one of the walking dead, it would not even qualify as a zombie. It is an animated skeleton. It is a notion about how words and ideas become and are transmitted by musical means.
The main character is a young boy named Francois Martin, the singing clown-boy in the Paffooney above. He is orphaned by a terrible car wreck in France, then sent to the only living relatives he has, who happen to live in Norwall, Iowa. Yes, that same goofy little farm town where I grew up and far too many of my novels are set. The Norwall Martins own the town tavern, where the bachelor head of the family, Victor (also known as the Vicar), is trying to make a go of it by putting in his bar a new-fangled bar-thing called karaoke.
As you’ve probably guessed, Francois, though he is awkward and unable to communicate in English, is a natural at singing karaoke. He puts on the clown paint and sings for his supper, and brings people into the bar from all across the State, and eventually the whole Midwest.
The clown images come through his connections to the Dreamlands… the same fantasy world of dreams alluded to in the novels of H.P. Lovecraft. Three clowns, Mr. Disney (Diz), Mr. Dickens (Boz), and Mr. Shakespeare (the Bard) help the boy and his American cousin Billy travel back and forth to the Dreamlands and learn to understand each other in ways that family members should. I should warn you, the new title reveals the fact that all dreams are not happy dreams and all endings are not happy endings. But we shall try… Diz, Boz, the Bard, and I.
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Hear the Music (a love poem)
The singer sings his song,
And wants the world to sing along,
Though the world has gone all wrong,
And the darkness stays too long.
The singer warms and croons,
Under bright romantic moons,
And carries hopeful tunes,
To the listening dolts and loons.
Can a song bring truth to light?
Can it help us win the fight?
Does it ease the world’s plight?
And set the wrongs aright?
Yes a song can save the world,
Though the truth must be unfurled,
And the listeners’ ears are twirled.
So the hurts will all be pearled.
Okay, okay… goofy poetry, I know. That’s the way I am. I have a goopy-sappy-goofy faith in the power of words. I call the chapters of my fiction Cantos because I believe them to be musical compositions and pieces of poetry. Ooh, what a goof that I am! But I really do believe that the words of a song, the stories in a book, or the beat of a poem can save lives, change worlds, and make all things better. Why would I believe that? Because words and ideas have power. And as I feel my mortality creeping nearer and nearer, I am feeling more and more power in my words. I almost have to burst into song like some sappy musical… like Camelot, like My Fair Lady, like Man of LaMancha. Like the stupid boy in the Paffooney, I have to sing. I have my impossible dreams.
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Catch a Falling Star 