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Communitas

In Arts & Letters, Creative Writing, Short Story, Writing on November 29, 2012 at 8:45 am

The following short story first appeared here in Full of Crow.

The man awoke to the chirping of a bird.  He lay listening in his bed for some time before rising, stretching, and gaining the window.  He looked outside.  The sun had risen; off-white clouds unrolled like scrolls across the horizon; wet grass and tall pines punctuated the land below.  Sometimes the man looked out and read the words of the world; sometimes he looked out and read nothing because the world seemed unwritten.  “Not for nothing,” he said to himself.  “Not for nothing.”

Sometimes he would see her standing in the yard, working in the garden, pretty as a sunflower.  Sometimes he forgot her.  She was never there in any case.

The woman was, in her youth, symmetric and vaguely beautiful, like a poem: full of marks and scribbles working in concert, taking on meaning.  In recent years she had become, despite herself, an aging monument to womanhood whose rough topography of face showed traces, however faint, of vigor.  She had been gone five years, but he thought about her, and about her cool, liquid eyes, on many mornings, especially on the cool mornings when the steady, westward breezes tussled his hair and smelled, to him, like memory; the pain of her leaving was stronger in the mornings than in the afternoons or nights.  The earth, the soil, the animals: all were alive, shamelessly, recklessly, gloriously alive then.  The stirring of birds and squirrels and the retreat of nighttime critters—raccoons, owls, opossums—inscribed the world with syllables and notes, sang the world to the world, perhaps even to the universe.  Something happened in the mornings, something tremendous: the soul, his soul, like leaking ink, bled into the world, stained the world, and he, the man, became an artist, and joined the growing chorus of life.

But the man was not happy.  He no longer understood happiness because he could not read it.

This morning was different.  He wondered whether it was the music, the tune, the tone.   Standing before the window, he closed his eyes and listened to the world and turned his head toward the source of the sounds and then opened his eyes.

There it was.

A redbird.

He stared at the redbird, a stranger to him.  He knew the daily visitors to his feeders and birdbaths, knew them as one knows the contours of his hand: mostly bluebirds and robins, but occasionally finches and sparrows.  The redbird, though, was new; its music moved him, drew him out of himself.

The redbird perched on a limb on the old maple tree and turned its beak to the sky, its crimson crest and round black mask both brilliant and threatening.  Its little button-eyes were barely visible beneath the mask, but the man thought he saw the redbird looking back at him.  He smiled and waved.  The redbird bobbed in acknowledgment and then flew off.

The man grew sad.

He gazed as far as he could into the distance: at the brooks and streams meandering down the mountain and terminating into the various fishponds that dimpled the Okmulgee valley.  He could just make out the images of trees covering the foothills; yet when he had stood here as a boy, he could see everything, even the neighboring village, south of the mountain.  How strange, he thought, that the body grows old.

The man placed his hand before his face and wiggled his wrinkled fingers.  He smiled knowing that he controlled these appendages even if they weren’t strong or nimble, even if they wouldn’t touch the woman again.  Then he frowned because the fingers, crusty and bent, seemed separate from him—as if they belonged to a force even greater: God maybe.

It was Monday.  The boy would come today.

He was kind, this boy: a hard worker.  He showed up on time every Monday and Wednesday to till the land, chop the wood, feed the cows, water the plants.  He had been at this routine for two years.

When the boy came, the man was happy. Read the rest of this entry »

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Of Bees and Boys

In Arts & Letters, Creative Writing, Essays, Writing on November 14, 2012 at 8:45 am

Allen Mendenhall

The following essay appeared here in Front Porch Republic.

My brother Brett and I were polite but rambunctious children who made a game of killing bees and dumping their carcasses into buckets of rainwater.  Having heard that bees, like bulls, stirred at the sight of red, we brandished red plastic shovels, sported red t-shirts, and scribbled our faces in red marker.  They were small, these shovels, not longer than arm’s length.  And light, too.  So light, in fact, that we wielded them with ease: as John Henry wielded a hammer or Paul Bunyan an axe.

The bees had a nest somewhere within the rotting wood of our swing set.  Monkey bars made of metal triangles, much like hand percussion instruments, dangled from the wooden frame above; when struck or rattled with a stick, these replied in sharp, loud tones, infuriating the bees, a feisty frontline of which launched from unseen dugouts.

These deployments, though annoying, were easily outmaneuvered: Brett and I swatted them to the ground with our shovelheads.  Mortally wounded, they twitched and convulsed, moving frantically but going nowhere; all except one bee, valiant as he was pathetic, wriggling toward his nearest companion, his maimed posterior dragging in the dirt.  Not much for voyeurism, I relieved him of his misery.  Then Brett and I whacked the littered lot into tiny bee pancakes.

Meanwhile, the defeated community, convening somewhere in the wood, commissioned its combat medics: fat, steady-flying drones that hovered airborne over the dead and then descended, slow and sinking, like flying saucers.  The medics would, when we let them, carry off their dead to an undisclosed location.  I couldn’t watch this disturbingly human ritual, so instead I annihilated the medics, too.  They were easy targets, defenseless.  And they kept coming in battalions of ten or eleven.  As soon as I’d destroy one battalion, another materialized to attend to the new dead.  Unlike the frontliners, the medics didn’t try to sting.  They just came to collect.  But I wouldn’t let them.  Neither would Brett.  Eventually, they quit coming.  That, or we killed them all.

†

Bees are funny creatures.  Unlike birds, they have two sets of wings.  Most female bees, unlike most female humans Iknow, grow their leg hairs long and their bellies plump—this in order to carry nectar or pollen.  Bee pollination accounts for one-third of the human food supply.  Without bees, then, we might not have our Big Macs or Whoppers—nor, for that matter, honey or flowers.

When I lived in Japan, I had a friend who fancied himself an entomologist.  When he and I tired of talking politics, books, or women, we spoke of insects: I told him weird insect stories, and he explained away the weirdness.  He informed me, for instance, that the bees living in my swing set were probably solitary bees: a gregarious species that stung only in self-defense.  This, you might imagine, was sobering news for an insect murderer.

I asked about the medics that carried away the dead.  Honey bees, he said, discarded their dead for hygienic reasons—to prevent the spread of infection—and they coated their dead in antibacterial waxes.  As for the behavior of my bees, however, he wasn’t sure: maybe they, like honey bees, discarded remains where germs wouldn’t spread.  Or maybe—and he said this facetiously—they conducted funerals.

†

It wasn’t long before Jared, the boy next door, got in on our bee brutality.  Pregnant with mischief—more so than me or Brett—he decided one day to show us something; shepherding us through the woods, lifting a disarming smile as if to say, “Trust me,” he paused at last, indicated a hole in the ground, and declared, “Thisis it!”

A steady stream of yellow jackets purred in and out of the hole.  He waved his hand to signify the totality of our surroundings and said, “Ours.  All ours.  None for the bees.”

Or something to that effect.

Brett and I nodded in agreement, awaiting instruction.  If we were confused by Jared’s deranged sense of prerogative, we didn’t show it.  Brett found a heavy rock, which I helped him to carry.  We dropped it at Jared’s feet.

Jared summoned forth a mouthful of mucus and hacked it into the hole.  Unfazed, the yellow jackets buzzed in acknowledgment but otherwise ignored the assault.  “These guys are in for hell,” Jared said of the bees, offended at the ineffectuality of his first strike.  He anchored his feet and bent over the rock, which he heaved to his chest and, leaning backwards, rested on his belly; then he staggered a few steps, stopped, and—his face registering another thought—dropped the rock to the ground.

“Spit on it!” he ordered.

Brett and I, obedient friends that we were, doctored the rock in spit.

Then Jared undertook to finish the job he’d begun:  he bent down, lifted the rock, waddled to the hole, straddled the hole, and dropped the rock.  The ground thumped.  A small swirl of dust spiraled into miniature tornadoes that eventually outgrew themselves and became one with the general order of things.

“That’ll do it,” Jared said, clapping his hands together to dry the spit.  The colony, its passage blocked, was trapped both inside and out.  Those un-entombed bees, rather than attack, simply disappeared.

We rejoiced in our victory.  Jared pantomimed conquest, pretending to hold an immense, invisible world Atlas-like over his shoulders.  Brett danced.  I was so busy watching Jared and Brett that I can’t remember what I did.

We didn’t know that yellow jackets engineered nests, tunneled hidden passages and backup exits; nor did we appreciate what the tiny zealots were capable of.

It started with trifling harassment: a slight, circling buzz—reconnaissance probably.  Then I felt the first sting; looking down, I saw a yellow jacket, curled like a question-mark, bearing into my leg.  I spanked it dead.  It looked angry—something in the way it moved.

I heard Brett scream.  Then Jared.  Then saw the ubiquitous cloud of yellow jackets rising in the air, moving as one unit, enveloping us with fatalistic purpose.  My ears filled with the steady drone of thrumming wings.

Then, as happens in moments like this, moments of panic, moments when one feels he’s lost control, feels some other faculty taking over, I submitted to a greater power, which stiffened the muscles of my neck and arms, sent contractions through my calves and thighs, like spasms moving me forward, making me to run, the house, my house, once far away, a small square, growing larger and larger until at last it became a complete, reachable form, the door, my safety, announcing its presence, telling me to hurry, hurry.  Ahead was a fence.  I’d have to jump it.  I measured my strides for the leap, which, miraculously, I achieved with the slight assistance of my palms upon the fence-top.  I found the doorknob, dove into the kitchen, flung off my clothes.  The drone wouldn’t go away.

But where was Brett?  Not here.  Where was he?  Just then came a voice—“Allen!  What in God’s name?!”—and then mom was beside me, horrified, her eyes growing three-times their normal size; and then she was gone again; somehow I was back at the door, looking outside, at the yard, at mom battling the fleet of yellow jackets, at Brett stuck on the fence top, screaming, his face flushed red—red!—his arms leaking blood.  Was that blood?  Or a sore?  I couldn’t tell.

Mom deposited Brett in the kitchen, stripped him naked, called the doctor.  Tweezers.  I remember tweezers.  Yellow jackets were in his ears and mouth.  They were everywhere.  Outside, they continued ramming their bodies into the window.  I looked out.  One hovered there.  It looked at me.  I looked at it.  Insect and Man.  Sizing each other up.

†

In light of these memories, I can’t help but sense that, no, on account of their characteristics and functions, bees are not the affirmative, happy creatures of some Wordsworthian lyric; that they are too much like us for armistice or reconciliation; that, in fact, we will never see the last of them, as they will never see the last of us.  They will live on, as will we.

Let the boys at them, and they at the boys.  That’s how it ought to be.  So alike are the two that it’s hard to tell who has the advantage of intelligence.  I learned, those many years ago, before the profundity of it all struck me,that wounds can teach the tragic lessons of ignored similarities.  There’s something to be said for that.

If nothing else, I have come to admire bees for their tenacity and courage in the face of insurmountable power.  Theirs is a world of flux,disorder, and death.  Their body is a weapon, one that, once used, terminates everything.

Boys war with bees.  Bees war with boys.  Just another kind of outdoor game, one on a side, except no one can say “Elves.”  Not in this game.

In this game, there is only one ending.  Even in victory, the bees lose.  It takes a man to understand; it might just take bees, or something like them, to make a man.

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Selected Bibliography for Scholarship on Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

In America, American History, Arts & Letters, Historicism, History, Humanities, Jurisprudence, Law, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Pragmatism on November 8, 2012 at 8:20 am

Allen Mendenhall

The following bibliography is far from exhaustive; it consists of the works that I’ve found most helpful in my own research.  This list was created in November 0f 2012.

Books:

Aichele, Gary J.  Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.: Soldier, Scholar, Judge (Boston: Twayne, 1989).

Alschuler, Albert W. Law Without Values: The Life, Work, and Legacy of Justice Holmes (Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

Baker, Liva.  The Justice from Beacon Hill: The Life and Times of Oliver Wendell Holmes (New York: HarperCollins, 1991).

Bent, Silas.  Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (New York: Vanguard Press, 1932).

Biddle, Francis.  Mr. Justice Holmes (New York: Scribner, 1942).

Bowen, Catherine Drinker.  Yankee from Olympus: Justice Holmes and His Family (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1944).

Burton, David H.  Taft, Holmes, and the 1920s Court: An Appraisal (Madison, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998).

______________.  Political Ideas of Justice Holmes.  Madison, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992). 

______________.  Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980).

Cohen, Jeremy.  Congress Shall Make No Law: Oliver Wendell Holmes, the First Amendment, and Judicial Decision Making (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1989).

Collins, Ronald K. L. and David M. Skover.  On Dissent: Its Meaning in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2013).

Gibian, Peter.  Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Culture of Conversation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).  [This book focuses on Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. but reveals much about the environment in which Holmes Jr. grew up.  It also uses Harold Bloom to make sense of Emersonian communication and rhetoric.]

Hoffheimer, Michael H.  Justice Holmes and the Natural Law (New York: Taylor & Francis, 1992).

Howe, Mark DeWolfe.  Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Vol. One: The Shaping Years, 1841-1870 (Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1957).

______________.  Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Vol. Two: The Proving Years, 1870-1882 (Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1963). 

Kellogg, Frederic R. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.: Legal Theory and Judicial Restraint (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Menand, Louis.  The Metaphysical Club (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001).  [This book situates Holmes alongside other classical pragmatists such as C.S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey.]

Novick, Sheldon M.  Honorable Justice: The Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 1989).

Pohlman, H. L.  Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and Utilitarian Jurisprudence (Harvard University Press, 1984).

______________.  Free Speech and the Living Constitution (New York: New York University Press, 1991).

Rosenberg, David.  The Hidden Holmes: His Theory of Torts in History (Harvard University Press, 1995).

White, G. Edward.  Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: Law & the Inner Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

Editions of Holmes’s Writings and Letters:

Burton, David H., Editor.  Progressive Masks: Letters of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Franklin Ford (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1982).

______________.  Holmes-Sheehan Correspondence (New York: Fordham University Press, 1993).

Gordon, Robert W., Editor.  The Legacy of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (Stanford University Press, 1992).

Howe, Mark Dewolfe, Editor.  Holmes-Pollock Letters: The Correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Sir Frederick Pollock, 1874-1932, Vol. 1 and 2 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1941).

______________.  Holmes-Laski Letters: The Correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Harold J. Laski, 1916-1935 (Harvard University Press, 1953).

Lerner, Max, Editor.  The Mind and Faith of Justice Holmes: His Speeches, Essays, Letters & Judicial Opinions (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1943).

Mennel, Robert M. and Christine L. Compston, Editors.  Holmes & Frankfurter: Their Correspondence, 1912-1934 (Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1996).

Peabody, James Bishop, Editor.  The Holmes-Einstein Letters: Correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Lewis Einstein, 1903-1935 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964).

Posner, Richard.  The Essential Holmes: Selections from the Letters, Speeches, Judicial Opinions, and Other Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

Articles:

Alschuler, Albert W.  “The Descending Trail: Holmes’ Path of the Law One Hundred Years Later.”  Florida Law Review, Vol. 49 (1997).

Bernstein, Irving.  “The Conservative Mr. Justice Holmes.”  New England Quarterly, Vol. 23 (1950).

Blasi, Vincent.  “Reading Holmes Through the Lens of Schauer: The Abrams Dissent.”  Notre Dame Law Review, Vol. 72 (1997).

Bogen, David S.  “The Free Speech Metamorphosis of Mr. Justice Holmes.”  Hofstra Law Review, Vol. 11 (1982).

Caplan, Gerald.  “Searching for Holmes Among the Biographers.”  George Washington Law Review.  Vol. 70 (2002).

Cate, Irene M. Ten.  “Speech, Truth, and Freedom: An Examination of John Stuart Mill’s and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s Free Speech Defenses.”  Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, Vol. 22 (2010).

Feldman, Stephen M.  “Free Speech, World War I, and Republican Democracy: The Internal and External Holmes.”  First Amendment Law Review, Vol. 6 (2008).

Ferguson, Robert A.  “Holmes and the Judicial Figure.”  Chicago Law Review, Vol. 55 (1988).

Frankfurter, Felix.  “The Constitutional Opinions of Justice Holmes.”  Harvard Law Review.  Vol. 29 (1916).

Grey, Thomas C.  “Plotting the Path of the Law.”  Brooklyn Law Review, Vol. 63 (1997).

Haack, Susan.  “On Legal Pragmatism: Where Does ‘The Path of the Law’ Lead Us?”  American Journal Jurisprudence, Vol. 50 (2005).

Leonard, Gerald.  “Holmes on the Lochner Court.”  Boston University Law Review, Vol. 85 (2001).

Luban, David.  “Justice Holmes and the Metaphysics of Judicial Restraint.”  Duke Law Journal, Vol. 44 (1994).

Mendenhall, Allen.  “Holmes and Dissent.”  The Journal Jurisprudence, Vol.12 (2011).

______________.  “Dissent as a Site of Aesthetic Adaptation in the Work of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.”  British Journal of American Legal Studies, Vol. 1 (2012).

Ragan, Fred D.  “Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Zechariah Chafee, Jr., and The Clear and Present Danger Test for Free Speech: The First Year, 1919.”  Journal of American History, Vol. 58 (1971).

Rosenblatt, Rand.  “Holmes, Peirce, and Legal Pragmatism.”  Yale Law Journal, Vol. 84 (1975).

Shea, Thomas F.  “Great Dissenters: Parallel Currents In Holmes and Scalia.”  Mississippi Law Journal, Vol. 67 (1997).

Snyder, Brad.  “The House that Built Holmes.”  Law & History Review.  Vol. 30, No. 3 (2012).

Wells, Catherine Peirce.  “Old-Fashioned Postmodernism and the Legal Theories of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.”  Brooklyn Law Review, Vol. 63 (1997).

______________ [published under the name Catherine Wells Hantzis].  “Legal Innovation Within the Wider Intellectual Tradition: The Pragmatism of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.” Northwestern University Law Review, Vol. 82 (1988).