See Disclaimer Below.

Archive for the ‘Creative Writing’ Category

, , , , , , , , ,

“Constructing a Canon of Law-Related Poetry,” by Alexandra J. Roberts

In Arts & Letters, Creative Writing, Humanities, Law, Law-and-Literature, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Poetry, Writing on November 15, 2013 at 8:45 am

Alexandra J. Roberts has published “Constructing a Canon of Law-Related Poetry” in the Texas Law Review (Vol. 90).  Her abstract reads as follows:

Law and poetry make a potent, if surprising, pair.  Poetry thrives on simultaneity and open-endedness, while legal writing aspires to resolve issues decisively, whether it advocates or adjudges.  The law and literature movement has traditionally focused either on law as literature, applying literary theory and techniques to legal texts such as judicial opinions and legislation, or law in literature, i.e., law as portrayed in literary and artistic works.  Poetry and poetics have garnered relatively little attention under either approach.  While some scholars blame that omission on a supposed dearth of law-related poetry, the poems collected in Kader and Stanford’s Poetry of the Law: From Chaucer to the Present belie that claim.  This essay considers the place of poetry in legal studies and advocates incorporating it into both the dialogue and the curriculum of the law and literature movement.  It identifies themes that emerge from the juxtaposition of the poems in the anthology, examines the relationship of fixed-verse forms to law in the poems, and draws attention to those voices that are underrepresented in the collection and the movement.  It relies primarily on the process of close reading several of the hundred poems included in Poetry of the Law and, in so doing, it practices law in literature while it models precisely the type of critical approach that would serve those participating in the study of law as literature.  It prescribes a canon of law-related poetry and illustrates how the inclusion of poems and techniques of poetic interpretation stand to benefit students, lawyers, and theorists alike.

The paper may be downloaded here at the Texas Law Review website or here at SSRN.

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

James Elkins and the Lawyer Poets

In Arts & Letters, Creative Writing, Creativity, Humanities, Law, Legal Education & Pedagogy, Literary Theory & Criticism, News Release, Poetry, Writing on November 14, 2013 at 8:45 am

Lawyer Poets and That World We Call Law

James Elkins of West Virginia University College of Law has edited Lawyer Poets and That World We Call Law (Pleasure Boat Studio, 2013), an anthology of poems about the practice of law.  Professor Elkins has been the longtime editor of Legal Studies Forum.  Contributors to the anthology include Lee Wm. Atkinson, Richard Bank, Michael Blumenthal, Ace Boggess, David Bristol, Lee Warner Brooks, MC Bruce, Laura Chalar, James Clarke, Martin Espada, Rachel Contreni Flynn, Katya Giritsky, Howard Gofreed, Nancy A. Henry, Susan Holahan, Paul Homer, Lawrence Joseph, Kenneth King, John Charles Kleefeld, Richard Krech, Bruce Laxalt, David  Leightty, John Levy, Greg McBride, James McKenna, Betsy McKenzie, Joyce Meyers, Jesse Mountjoy, Tim Nolan, Simon Perchik, Carl Reisman, Charles Reynard,  Steven M. Richman, Lee Robinson, Kristen Roedell, Barbara B. Rollins, Lawrence Russ, Michael Sowder, Ann Tweedy, Charles Williams, Kathleen Winter, and Warren Wolfson.

James Elkins

James Elkins
Professor of Law and Benedum Distinguished Scholar, West Virginia University College of Law

, , , , , , , ,

Service in St. Paul’s

In Arts & Letters, Creative Writing, Creativity, Humanities, Literature, Poetry, Writing on November 6, 2013 at 8:45 am

Allen 2

 

This poem originally appeared in The Echo.

Service in St. Paul’s

 

            —London, 2003

 

Acrophobia turned

upside down:

fear floating away,

gravity deciding

to suddenly

give up.

 

There’s a dome

overhead, a glowing

Jesus over the altar,

and too much space

to pray

comfortably.

 

Imagination

among the scaffolding,

eye to eye with Joseph,

now falling facing up:

heaven does

not seem so high.

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

John William Corrington, A Literary Conservative

In American History, Arts & Letters, Conservatism, Creative Writing, Essays, Fiction, History, Humanities, John William Corrington, Joyce Corrington, Law, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Modernism, Southern History, Southern Literature, Television, Television Writing, The Novel, The South, Western Philosophy, Writing on October 23, 2013 at 8:45 am

 

Allen 2

 

An earlier version of this essay appeared here at Fronch Porch Republic.

Remember the printed prose is always

half a lie: that fleas plagued patriots,

that greatness is an afterthought

affixed by gracious victors to their kin.

 

—John William Corrington

 

It was the spring of 2009.  I was in a class called Lawyers & Literature.  My professor, Jim Elkins, a short-thin man with long-white hair, gained the podium.  Wearing what might be called a suit—with Elkins one never could tell—he recited lines from a novella, Decoration Day.  I had heard of the author, John William Corrington, but only in passing.

“Paneled walnut and thick carpets,” Elkins beamed, gesturing toward the blank-white wall behind him, “row after row of uniform tan volumes containing between their buckram covers a serial dumb show of human folly and greed and cruelty.”  The students, uncomfortable, began to look at each other, registering doubt.  In law school, professors didn’t wax poetic.  But this Elkins—he was different.  With swelling confidence, he pressed on: “The Federal Reporter, Federal Supplement, Supreme Court Reports.  Two hundred years of our collective disagreements and wranglings from Jay and Marshall through Taney and Holmes and Black and Frankfurter—the pathetic often ill-conceived attempts to resolve what we have done to one another.”

Elkins paused.  The room went still.  Awkwardly profound, or else profoundly awkward, the silence was like an uninvited guest at a dinner party—intrusive, unexpected, and there, all too there.  No one knew how to respond.  Law students, most of them, can rattle off fact-patterns or black-letter-law whenever they’re called on.  But this?  What were we to do with this?

What I did was find out more about John Willliam Corrington.  Having studied literature for two years in graduate school, I was surprised to hear this name—Corrington—in law school.  I booted up my laptop, right where I was sitting, and, thanks to Google, found a few biographical sketches of this man, who, it turned out, was perplexing, riddled with contradictions: a Southerner from the North, a philosopher in cowboy boots, a conservative literature professor, a lawyer poet.  This introduction to Corrington led to more books, more articles, more research.  Before long, I’d spent over $300 on Amazon.com.  And I’m not done yet.

***

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, on October 28, 1932, Corrington—or Bill, as his friends and family called him—passed as a born-and-bred Southerner all of his life.  As well he might, for he lived most of his life below the Mason-Dixon line, and his parents were from Memphis and had moved north for work during the Depression.  He moved to the South (to Shreveport, Louisiana) at the age of 10, although his academic CV put out that he was, like his parents, born in Memphis, Tennessee.  Raised Catholic, he attended a Jesuit high school in Louisiana but was expelled for “having the wrong attitude.”  The Jesuit influence, however, would remain with him always.  At the beginning of his books, he wrote, “AMDG,” which stands for Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam—“for the greater glory of God.”  “It’s just something that I was taught when I was just learning to write,” he explained in an interview in 1985, “taught by the Jesuits to put at the head of all my papers.”

Bill was, like the late Mark Royden Winchell, a Copperhead at heart, and during his career he authored or edited, or in some cases co-edited, twenty books of varying genres.  He earned a B.A. from Centenary College and M.A. in Renaissance literature from Rice University, where he met his wife, Joyce, whom he married on February 6, 1960.  In September of that year, he and Joyce moved to Baton Rouge, where Bill became an instructor in the Department of English at Louisiana State University (LSU).  At that time, LSU’s English department was known above all for The Southern Review (TSR), the brainchild of Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, but also for such literary luminaries as Robert Heilman, who would become Bill’s friend.

In the early 1960s, Bill pushed for TSR to feature fiction and poetry and not just literary criticism.  He butted heads with then-editors Donald E. Stanford and Lewis P. Simpson, who thought of the journal as scholarly, not creative, as if journals couldn’t be both scholarly and creative.  A year after joining the LSU faculty, Bill published his first book of poetry, Where We Are.  With only 18 poems and 225 first edition printings, the book hardly established Bill’s reputation as Southern man of letters.  But it invested his name with recognition and gave him confidence to complete his first novel, And Wait for the Night (1964).

Bill and Joyce spent the 1963-64 academic year in Sussex, England, where Bill took the D.Phil. from the University of Sussex in 1965.  In the summer of 1966, at a conference at Northwestern State College, Mel Bradford, that Dean of Southern Letters, pulled Bill aside and told him, enthusiastically, that And Wait for the Night (1964) shared some of the themes and approaches of William Faulkner’s The Unvanquished.  Bill agreed.  And happily.

***

Of Bill and Miller Williams, Bill’s colleague at LSU, Jo LeCoeur, poet and literature professor, once submitted, “Both men had run into a Northern bias against what was perceived as the culturally backward South.  While at LSU they fought back against this snub, editing two anthologies of Southern writing and lecturing on ‘The Dominance of Southern Writers.’  Controversial as a refutation of the anti-intellectual Southern stereotype, their joint lecture was so popular [that] the two took it on the road to area colleges.”

In this respect, Bill was something of a latter-day Southern Fugitive—a thinker in the tradition of Donald Davidson, Allan Tate, Andrew Nelson Lytle, and John Crowe Ransom.  Bill, too, took his stand.  And his feelings about the South were strong and passionate, as evidenced by his essay in The Southern Partisan, “Are Southerners Different?” (1984).  Bill’s feelings about the South, however, often seemed mixed.  “[T]he South was an enigma,” Bill wrote to poet Charles Bukowski, “a race of giants, individualists, deists, brainy and gutsy:  Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Jackson (Andy), Davis, Calhoun, Lee, and on and on.  And yet the stain of human slavery on them.”  As the epigraph (above) suggests, Bill was not interested in hagiographic renderings of Southern figures.  He was interested in the complexities of Southern people and experience.  In the end, though, there was no doubt where his allegiances lay.  “You strike me as the most unreconstructed of all the Southern novelists I know anything about,” said one interviewer to Bill.  “I consider that just about the greatest compliment anyone could give,” Bill responded.

While on tour with Williams, Bill declared, “We are told that the Southerner lives in the past.  He does not.  The past lives in him, and there is a difference.”  The Southerner, for Bill, “knows where he came from, and who his fathers were.”  The Southerner “knows still that he came from the soil, and that the soil and its people once had a name.”  The Southerner “knows that is true, and he knows it is a myth.”  And the Southerner “knows the soil belonged to the black hands that turned it as well as it ever could belong to any hand.”  In short, the Southerner knows that his history is tainted but that it retains virtues worth sustaining—that a fraught past is not reducible to sound bites or political abstractions but is vast and contains multitudes.

***

In 1966, Bill and Joyce moved to New Orleans, where the English Department at Loyola University, housed in a grand Victorian mansion on St. Charles Avenue, offered him a chairmanship.  Joyce earned the M.S. in chemistry from LSU that same year.  By this time, Bill had written four additional books of poetry, the last of which, Lines to the South and Other Poems (1965), benefited from Bukowski’s influence.  Bill’s poetry earned a few favorable reviews but not as much attention as his novels—And Wait for the Night (1964), The Upper Hand (1967), and The Bombardier (1970).  Writing in The Massachusetts Review, Beat poet and critic Josephine Miles approvingly noted two of Bill’s poems from Lines, “Lucifer Means Light” and “Algerien Reveur,” alongside poetry by James Dickey, but her comments were more in passing than in depth.  Dickey himself, it should be noted, admired Bill’s writing, saying, “A more forthright, bold, adventurous writer than John William Corrington would be very hard to find.”

Joyce earned her PhD in chemistry from Tulane in 1968.  Her thesis, which she wrote under the direction of L. C. Cusachs, was titled, “Effects of Neighboring Atoms in Molecular Orbital Theory.”  She began teaching chemistry at Xavier University, and her knowledge of the hard sciences brought about engaging conservations, between her and Bill, about the New Physics.  “Even though Bill only passed high school algebra,” Joyce would later say, “his grounding in Platonic idealism made him more capable of understanding the implications of quantum theory than many with more adequate educations.”

By the mid-70s, Bill had become fascinated by Eric Voeglin.  A German historian, philosopher, and émigré who had fled the Third Reich, Voegelin taught in LSU’s history department and lectured for the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he was a Salvatori Fellow.  Voeglin’s philosophy, which drew from Friedrich von Hayek and other conservative thinkers, inspired Bill.  In fact, Voegelin made such a lasting impression that, at the time of Bill’s death, Bill was working on an edition of Voegelin’s The Nature of the Law and Related Legal Writings.  (After Bill’s death, two men—Robert Anthony Pascal and James Lee Babin—finished what Bill had begun.  The completed edition appeared in 1991.)

By 1975, the year he earned his law degree from Tulane, Bill had penned three novels, a short story collection, two editions (anthologies), and four books of poetry.  But his writings earned little money.  He also had become increasingly disenchanted with the political correctness on campus:

By 1972, though I’d become chair of an English department and offered a full professorship, I’d had enough of academia. You may remember that in the late sixties and early seventies, the academic world was hysterically attempting to respond to student thugs who, in their wisdom, claimed that serious subjects seriously taught were “irrelevant.” The Ivy League gutted its curriculum, deans and faculty engaged in “teach-ins,” spouting Marxist-Leninist slogans, and sat quietly watching while half-witted draft-dodgers and degenerates of various sorts held them captive in their offices. Oddly enough, even as this was going on, there was a concerted effort to crush the academic freedom of almost anyone whose opinions differed from that of the mob or their college-administrator accessories. It seemed a good time to get out and leave the classroom to idiots who couldn’t learn and didn’t know better, and imbeciles who couldn’t teach and should have known better.

Bill joined the law firm of Plotkin & Bradley, a small personal injury practice in New Orleans, and continued to publish in such journals as The Sewanee Review and The Southern Review, and in such conservative periodicals as The Intercollegiate Review and Modern Age.  His stories took on a legal bent, peopled as they were with judges and attorneys.  But neither law nor legal fiction brought him fame or fortune.

So he turned to screenplays—and, at last, earned the profits he desired.  Viewers of the recent film I am Legend (2007), starring Will Smith, might be surprised to learn that Bill and Joyce wrote the screenplay for the earlier version, Omega Man (1971), starring Charlton Heston.  And viewers of Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973) might be surprised to learn that Bill wrote the film’s screenplay while still a law student.  All told, Bill and Joyce wrote five screenplays and one television movie.  Free from the constraints of university bureaucracy, Bill collaborated with Joyce on various television daytime dramas, including Search for Tomorrow, Another World, Texas, Capitol, One Life to Live, Superior Court, and, most notably, General Hospital.  These ventures gained the favor of Hollywood stars, and Bill and Joyce eventually moved to Malibu.

Bill constantly molded and remolded his image, embracing Southern signifiers while altering their various expressions.  His early photos suggest a pensive, put-together gentleman wearing ties and sport coats and smoking pipes.  Later photos depict a rugged man clad in western wear.  Still later photos conjure up the likes of Roy Orbison, what with Bill’s greased hair, cigarettes, and dark sunglasses.

Whatever his looks, Bill was a stark, provocative, and profoundly sensitive writer.  His impressive oeuvre has yet to receive the critical attention it deserves.  That scholars of conservatism, to say nothing of scholars of Southern literature, have ignored this man is almost inconceivable.  There are no doubt many aspects of Bill’s life and literature left to be discovered.  As Bill’s friend William Mills put it, “I believe there is a critique of modernity throughout [Bill’s] writing that will continue to deserve serious attentiveness and response.”

On Thanksgiving Day, November 24, 1988, Bill suffered a heart attack and died.  He was 56.  His last words, echoing Stonewall Jackson, were, “it’s all right.”

 

, , , , , ,

Unmasking

In Arts & Letters, Creative Writing, Essays, Humanities, The South, Writing on August 14, 2013 at 8:45 am

This essay first appeared here in Kestrel: A Journal of Literature and Art.

Allen Mendenhall

There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.

                                                                                           —Qoheleth 1 : 11

Southerners are particular about the way they preserve their loved ones; they encourage embalming, for instance, although at one time they shunned it as unconsented-to tampering with the body.  Eventually someone decided, rather wisely, that the deceased, had they a choice, would like a genteel display of their “shell.”  This meant more than sanitization: it meant dressing the dead like ladies or gentlemen on their way to church.  Which is precisely where they were going—just before they were buried in the ground.  For the most part, Southerners don’t cremate.  (A preacher once told me that the Bible discourages cremation.)

In the South—more than in other regions—funerals are hierarchical affairs: one’s nearness to the deceased signifies one’s importance to the family.  This holds for the church and burial service and is especially true if the departed was popular in life.  Being closest to the deceased, pallbearers shoulder the weightiest burden.

Nowhere is decorum more important than at a funeral procession.  It’s unseemly for one who’s not party to the procession to fail to bow his head and arrange a grave face as the procession passes.  If you’re in a vehicle, you pull over to the curb and, so long as it isn’t dangerous to do so, take up the sidewalk as if on foot.  Quitting the vehicle is, in general, inadvisable if by the time you encounter the procession the hearse is no longer in sight.  Or if, alternatively, the weather doesn’t permit.  If you’re in line, the modus operandi is ecclesiastic—ordered from clergy, to immediate kin, to next-of-kin, to distant family, to friends, to the rest.  Losing your place in line is, accordingly, like losing your intimacy with the family, for whom these rituals are carried out.

†

I was eight when Great-Granddaddy died.  Mom piloted me before his open-casket and whispered, “That’s not Great-Granddaddy.  That’s just a shell.  Great-Granddaddy’s gone to heaven.”

I looked down at the thing, the shell, the facsimile that seemed uncannily human, and said to myself—perhaps out loud—“That’s not Great-Granddaddy.  That’s something else.”  But the thing appeared real, strange, so nearly alive that it repulsed me.  Its eyes, thank God, were closed, but its mannequin face, vacant and plastic, nauseated me.

Mom prodded me away, hollering at my cousin to take me outside.  My first brush with death, while necessary, had not imparted a healthy understanding of mortality.

†

My grandmother, Nina, tried to familiarize me with the inescapable while I was still a boy.  Instead of taking me to playgrounds, she took me to cemeteries for what she called “Southern preparations.”  These outings usually occurred on warm spring afternoons, when azaleas bloomed bright white and pink, when yellow Jessamine vines crawled up walls and fences, when dogwoods yawned inflorescent, and when tulips, still un-beheaded, stretched with impeccable posture.  When, in short, nature was doing anything but dying.

Nina shared facts about various grave plots, giving the lowdown on so-and-so’s passing—“he died in Korea,” “he of aids,” “she during pregnancy,” and so forth.  When she finished, we fed the swans.

Which attacked me once.  I was standing on the riverbank, feeding the once-ugly ducklings by hand just as Nina had taught me, when, like Leda, I was enveloped by a feathered glory of beating white wings.  Traumatized, I no longer stood on shore but sat on the roof of the car.  To make me feel less sissy, Nina sat on the hood and pretended that she, too, was afraid.  It wasn’t their size exactly.  Nor the way they tussled with graceful wrath.  Maybe it was the mask about their swan eyes.  I’m sure it was that: the concealment, secret identity, veiled feelings.

Just before I got married, my fiancée, Giuliana, flew in from São Paulo to meet my family.  After supper, Nina insisted that I drive her through the cemetery.  I hadn’t been in years but instantly recognized the rod-iron gates that once seemed so colossal.  There was the river.  The ducks.  The swans.  In the distance, a family, their heads bowed, stood under a high green tent.

Giuliana was not disturbed by this detour.  Quite the contrary:  she felt in some way moved.  It was as if Nina had invited her into a private, intimate space: one that contradicted this modern world of medical science in which everyone tries to postpone or avert death.  In a cemetery one couldn’t help but think of decomposition, permanence, the soul.  One couldn’t help but track the beat of one’s heart, measure the inhales and exhales of one’s breathing.  One couldn’t help, that is, but cherish the fact that one’s alive.

†

My cell phone buzzed.  An unknown number flashed across the screen.  I answered, “Hello?”

“Mr. Mendenhall?”

“Yes.”

“Are you in the car?”

“No.”

“This is the cancer center at St. Joseph’s Hospital.  We need you to come in.”

I was twenty-four, and about to hear, “You have cancer.”

Nothing—not even a Southern upbringing—can prepare you for those three words.

†

The odd thing about preachers is that, depending on time and place, their company is either most welcome or most unwelcome.  When I got the call, the cancer call, my uncle, a preacher, was beside me, and I was, to that end, glad.  He made me feel the power of presence, to say nothing of companionship:  I was not alone.

My uncle—Uncle Steve—preaches in the only Southern Baptist church in Chicago.  Unlike most Southern Baptist preachers down South, he eschews the noisy and spectacular, preferring, instead, politesse and restraint.  Bookish and professorial, his voice nasal, his nose suitably sloped to hold up his saucer-sized spectacles, he loves theology and will tell you as much at the drop of a hat.  What with his general softness, he might, with a bit more age, have been mistaken for Truman Capote, with whom, incidentally, his father—my grandfather—had grown up in Monroeville, Alabama.

A man of custom, a student of Latin and Greek, fluent in Russian and French, a former lawyer and journalist, Uncle Steve is uncommonly qualified to carry on the sanctifying traditions of Western Civilization.  He is, in short, a gentleman and a scholar.  And he was in Atlanta that day, standing in the Varsity parking lot, his belly stuffed full of chili dogs, his ketchup-smudged face like an advertisement for this, the world’s largest drive-in restaurant.

I could feel his gaze moving over me and spared him the discomfort of asking what was the matter.

“I have cancer,” I said.

As the words issued from my mouth, my chest felt as though someone were driving a stake into it.  Cancer.  That thing other people got.  Old people.  Not young and healthy people.  Not me.

I tried to act normal, but in doing so betrayed what I really felt—terror.

Uncle Steve put his arm around me.  “Come on.  Let’s get to the hospital.”

†

Every hour on the hour, the employees of St. Joseph’s Hospital pray together.  These moments, though heavily orchestrated, bring peace to the ill and dying, the sick and suffering.  The nurses and doctors who wander the hallways pause while a disembodied, female voice recites the Lord’s Prayer, first in English, then in Spanish.  “Our Father, who art in heaven…”—the words echo off the cold, linoleum tiles—“hallowed be thy name.”

This was happening when I walked into the waiting room.  A nurse, a heavyset black woman with the softest eyes I’d ever seen, was behind the counter, her necklace, weighed down by a tiny crucified Jesus, dangling at her pillow-like breasts.  She whispered, again and again, amen, amen, and then, looking up, took me in with those deep knowing eyes, spoke without speaking.  Sunlight streamed through the cool, trapezoid panes of glass in the ceiling, falling across her face and hair at a low angle.

At last the prayer ended.  She unfolded her hands and smiled formally.  “Good afternoon, how may I help you?”

Responding with “I have cancer” didn’t feel right, so I said, “I’m here to see Dr. Danaker.”

That was all she needed to know.

“Bless your heart, child,” she said.  And, for the first time, I got emotional.  She hugged me, calling me child again; then, right then, I wanted to be a child, wanted her to scoop me into her arms and cradle me, wanted her thick, strong body wrapped around me; but there, too, was Uncle Steve, dignified and collected.  I couldn’t break down in front of him.

The nurse ushered me into a white, windowless room with expansive tile walls and sat me on a tissue-papered chair, which swished and crackled whenever I readjusted my derrière.

There I was.  Conscious.  Being, yet trying to fathom not being.  I imagined myself in a coffin, like that horrid shell, Great-Granddaddy.  Which only made things worse, for I knew that, once in the coffin, I would have no notion of being there.  The problem was thinking itself.  I couldn’t imagine being dead because I couldn’t imagine not imagining.

†

On Sunday mornings, before church, dad had always made my siblings and me read from the obituaries.  This, he said, would acquaint us with the fragility of life.  He also thought the best way to learn was from experience.  But he’d known only one person who’d experienced death and, almost impossibly, lived to tell about it—Martin, a friend of the family, who’d apparently died three times and, on the operating table, been revived.  Martin loved cigarettes, which he called the backbone of Southern economy and which, he readily admitted, had brought about his three near-fatalities.

Except Martin didn’t put it in those terms.  To him, cigarettes had allowed him to float outside his body for a while, to see what death was like.  For better or worse, Martin didn’t tease a tunnel of light, greet a golden angel, or feel a fluffy cloud:  he simply “left” himself and, in a state of utter weightlessness, peered down on his body as would an outside observer.  Maybe that’s why dad didn’t like us talking to Martin about death: Dad wanted us to hear about St. Peter and heaven and departed relatives.

The trouble with Martin was that one never knew when to believe him.  Heck, we barely knew who he was.  Ephemerally at least, he’d been my aunt’s boyfriend; then, when she dumped him, he’d never gone away: he moved in with my other aunt, a single mother, and helped care for my young cousin.  Martin was present every Thanksgiving and Christmas, but neither got nor gave gifts.  A transplant from North Carolina, he had daughters somewhere—either the Carolinas or Virginia—and had graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an achievement he was quite proud of.  He didn’t work.  Didn’t own a car.  And didn’t seem to have money.  His singular ability to access death could’ve been, for all we knew, lifted from a sci-fi novel.  Nevertheless, I believed him.

†

Ten.  That’s how old I was when I saw a dead body I wasn’t supposed to see.  A right turn on I-85, heading north, highway stretching to where sky and land sandwiched together.  I was in my school outfit, backpack in my lap.  Mom was in her tennis getup, checking the rearview mirror.  Traffic was slowing and stopping.  To my left was a vast gray sheet held up by blank-faced men.  Behind it, a woman.  Or what was left of a woman.  Arms and legs bent at impossible angles; head sagging, possibly unattached; a bloodied skirt lifted by the breeze.  Someone’s mom.  Or sister.  Or wife.  Or girlfriend.  Or daughter.  Here one minute, gone the next.  This wasn’t dignity.  This was mean and messy.

†

Death, they say, is not only universal but also the great leveler: it befalls kings and paupers, rich and poor, wise and foolish.  Solomon, Caesar, Constantine, Charlemagne, Napoleon: all died despite their glory in life.  What I never understood, and, frankly, still don’t, is why folks pretend death doesn’t happen.  The person who ignores death is delusional at best, narcissistic at worst.  Death is our sole commonality, the thing in this world we all await, about which we may commiserate.  It’s what makes us human.  I daresay one can’t fully love a person without knowing that person is temporary.

Francis Bacon once declared, “The contemplation of death, as the wages of sin, and passage to another world, is holy and religious; but the fear of it, as a tribute due unto nature, is weak.”  Weak it may be to the healthy and fit, but to the ill and ailing it seems only natural.  The person who claims he doesn’t fear death is either a liar or an incorrigible maniac—or else a coward, too faint-of-heart to face the facts.  Bacon himself had the good fortune of dying in two to three days, having contracted pneumonia while conducting an experiment in the snow.  Willfully blind to his fate, lying on his deathbed, he penned a letter to his friend, Thomas Howard, expressing relief that he hadn’t suffered the fortune of Caius Plinius, “who lost his life by trying an experiment about the burning of Mount Vesuvius.”

After surgery, I, like Bacon, was bedridden.  Soon a phone call would tell me one of two things: that I was okay, my cancer hadn’t metastasized, or else I wasn’t okay, I needed chemotherapy and my chances of living another two years were below fifteen percent.  A glued-together wound, resembling fat, blue, puckered-up lips, took up the length of my chest.  Visitors asked to see it and then regretted their request when I rolled up my shirt, revealing a moon-shaped, smurfy smile.  When the visitors left, and I was alone again, alone and quiet, I imagined what the malignancy would look like as it spread through my body, which I conceived of as a mini mine field: tunneled with small explosive cancer clusters about to be detonated.  How could this shell—which once ran a mile in under four-and-a-half minutes—expire?

†

I’m not in my brain but somewhere lower: near the chest, maybe, or the gut.  I couldn’t, for instance, stop a dream even if I wanted to.  Which is odd, because it’s my brain that’s dreaming—not someone else’s.  The brain works independently of me, or, to be precise, of what I perceive to be me: it’s like an unmanned motor boat zipping on the water.  Occasionally one of my siblings, or an old friend, will recall some long-ago event, which I’d otherwise forgotten, and then, suddenly, I’ll remember.  The brain has stored this memory somewhere—somewhere not readily accessible—but I, wherever I am in this shell, never felt compelled to find it.  The thought just exists up there, waiting.

It’s the soul, I suppose, that’s me.  When I lie awake at night and contemplate this interim body, which I inhabit the way a renter inhabits an apartment, I locate my self—that subjective knowing ego—whole and center, as though the brain, convenient as it is, has a mind of its own.  To be sure, I can borrow this organ when I study or otherwise require deep reflection; but when I tire of thinking, when I want a break, when I lean back from my desk, I’m very aware that I, my self, am moving from the head to just above the torso, where I belong.  And when I experience joy, compassion, anguish, despair—when, that is, I feel—it’s never with my head but with something deep within my bosom.  How does one explain this?  Perhaps we’re all antecedent to the body: little floating things confined to this definite, corporate form we didn’t choose, waiting, like thoughts, to be accessed—or released.    

†

Opossums, more commonly known, in the South, as “possums,” are, I’m told, a delicacy.  Nina’s got a cookbook that says so, though she claims she’s never cooked or eaten one.  I have my doubts, since my dad grew up eating squirrel, which, I think, is more revolting because squirrels are cute and handsome, whereas possums have that eerie look I associate with demons and devils—and masks.

At seven, I persuaded my brother to take a life.  A possum’s life.  It was a horrible affair, really.  One that, even today, is difficult to own up to.  Brett, being the gullible little brother he was—I convinced him once that the shadow-puppet giant who lived on the ceiling would kill him in his sleep—stomped on a squeaking pile of pine-straw while I looked on, presumably to punish him if he disobeyed.  Of course, the squeaking didn’t belong to the pine-straw, but to a tiny nest of baby possums underneath.

For some reason, I was initially proud of what I’d done, and, hours later, said as much to my mom.  Horrified, she made me show her the nest, since I’d “cried-wolf” before.  Sure enough, there, in the pine-straw, lay a bloody baby possum, whimpering, dying.

My first defense was I hadn’t done anything.  Brett had.  I’d simply stood by and watched.  Mom was smarter than that.  I don’t remember what she said—only that, once she said it, I began to cry.  And couldn’t stop.

It was this event, this murder of an innocent, that brought about my general appreciation for original sin, or least for the idea of innate human depravity.  Humans, you might say, are born rotten—so much so that most of us, in our youth, could stomp infant possums to death without understanding the wrongness of our action.  No doubt I regretted this behavior—this actus rea—but not because I felt guilty: it was, in effect, because I feared punishment—some combination of mom’s wrath and her spank-happiness.  A parent’s role is, among other things, to tame a child’s destructive impulses.  That’s what mom did—without succumbing to her own elemental aggressions.

She called the Chattahoochee Nature Center, a local environmental organization, and a worker there explained how to save the baby possum.  This, then, became my task, my agonizing punishment: to keep the possum alive.  Being intimate with death is one thing; being intimate with suffering quite another.  When I scooped the trembling creature up to my palm, it emitted a sad, pitiable squeak.  “Everything’s okay,” I whispered, “I’m not here to hurt you”—a funny assurance coming from the kid who’d just ordered its murder.

If truth be told, I wished I’d just destroyed the thing.  Better dead than in this wretched condition.  Still, the way it looked at me—its beady, searching eyes perusing my face—reminded me of how Ansley, my little sister, then only a year old, looked up at mom when she wanted to be fed.

I placed the creature in a shoe box, which I tucked beneath a shelf in my parents’ closet, the darkest place in the house.  More than anything, the possum needed darkness and silence.  I dug a hole in the backyard, tied two twigs together in the shape of a cross, and arranged a constellation of stones around what would’ve been a grave.  But the thing didn’t die.  It healed so well that, the next morning, it was squirming and scurrying and dad needed a net to contain it.  Even after the possum was free in the backyard, I left the grave untouched, a reminder that all things, even possums, eventually come to an end.

†

My Southern upbringing was all about learning how to die.  Like the Greek Stoics, Southerners believe in cultivating virtue, improving life, and, above all, accepting mortality.  Liberated from urban distractions, tied to land and home, they regard humans as custodians of the past; they keep gardens, preserve antiques, record lineage, mark battlefields, and salvage the efforts of planters, carpenters, raconteurs, and architects; they ensure, in short, the availability of history.  This can lead to nostalgia for times they never knew, bad times, ugly times, which is to say that this can cause Southerners to overlook—or, worse yet, revise—the inconveniences of history: slavery, for instance, or civil rights.  All the same, the Southern tradition, burdened as it is by various conflicts, retains virtues worth sustaining: community, family, religion, husbandry, stewardship.  These customs, however vulnerable, hardly need guardians.  They will, I suspect, persist, in some form or another, as long as humanity itself; for they are practical, permanent ideals—tested by generations—which people fall back on during disorienting times.  In a region haunted by racial brutality, these principles are, and have been, a unifying reference point, a contact zone where cultures—black, white, and Hispanic—share something spiritual despite their differences.

Living history, not just studying it, but consciously living it, is neither wicked nor wrong; the chronic, urgent awareness that everything you know and love will come undone, is not, I think, misguided, but utterly essential.  There’s something beautiful about facing the insurmountable.  When the world’s fleeting, death becomes a liberating, albeit terrifying, reality.  It throbs and pulsates and beats beneath the skin, inside of which we’re all raw skeleton.

For all this, however, I wasn’t ready.  Didn’t want to die.  Couldn’t even conceive of it.  The twenty-something years my family had been teaching me about death amounted to, not nothing, but not much, either.  Death, I suppose, is a hard thing to accept, and an even harder thing to fight, since fighting seems so pointless: deep down, you know you can’t win.  You might prevail once.  Maybe even twice.  But ultimately it’ll beat you.  It almost did me.

†

Friends ask how it feels to “beat” cancer.  I never can answer—not satisfactorily—for the experience is more like submission than competition: it’s a manifold process of coming to terms with the body, a thing doomed to decay.  When the doctor—Dr. Danaker—called to say the lymph nodes were benign, that the cancer hadn’t spread, I shocked him with a tired reply:  “Oh, good.”

“This is great news,” he assured me, as if I needed reminding, as if I hadn’t appreciated—indeed, hadn’t understood—how lucky I was.

“I know,” I said.

At this, the good doctor seemed annoyed.  “Ungrateful kid,” his tone implied.  But I wasn’t ungrateful.  Nor ecstatic.  I was, simply put, unbound—by life, by people, by things.  His take was that I had another chance, a fresh start, that I could put this nonsense behind me and move on.  My take was that, having embraced impermanence, I was done protecting myself from suffering, done seeking security through delusion, done dislocating from fate, destiny, providence, what have you.

Done: this, it is true, is weary resignation.  Yet it’s more than that: it’s a sweet but unhappy release, a deliverance, an unmasking.  Almost paradoxically, it’s freedom within—and despite—limitation.

What’s more exhilarating than that one should die?  What’s more mysterious, more horribly electrifying?  As one writer, Paul Theroux, has put it, “Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art.”  That is how you cope with this chilling, daunting, stupefying phenomenon: you do it every day until it’s serviceable and aesthetic, until at last you won’t know, can’t know, when it happens, until it’s pleasurable, a masterpiece, sublime in its regularity.  You keep it close, so close it becomes part of you, so close it’s at your disposal, so close that without it, you’re nothing, nothing if not boringly, thoughtlessly, mechanically alive, which is just another way of being dead.  You train and train and then it comes.

, ,

Pantry, 1982

In Arts & Letters, Creative Writing, Humanities, Poetry, Writing on July 24, 2013 at 8:45 am

Allen Mendenhall

 

A box of cereal, stale, ants running

Up the side, two brown bananas that

 

He says cleanse the pores

(If rubbed thoroughly),

 

An unwrapped chocolate bar

And a plethora of cans, unopened:

 

In a locked pantry, Little Maddy sits

Plucking the stems

 

Off Granny-Smiths.  Just ten more

Minutes.  Maddy, weary, wondering

 

Just when daddy would come home.

Time: the pantry is unlocked

 

And out comes light

And apples and, lastly, Maddy.

 

Daddy reaches

For the two rotting bananas,

 

Notes can upon unopened can,

Unwraps the chocolate bar,

 

Smears chocolate on his fingers,

Stops, thinks how unlikely it is

 

For apples to lose their stems.

, ,

Allen Mendenhall Interviews Julia Nunnally Duncan

In Arts & Letters, Creative Writing, Humanities, Literature, Poetry on April 3, 2013 at 8:45 am

Julia Nunnally Duncan

This interview originally appeared here at Southern Literary Review.

AM: Thank you for taking the time to do this interview, and congratulations on your forthcoming book, Barefoot in the Snow. This is, I believe, your third collection of poetry. How does this one differ from your earlier books of poetry?

JND: Barefoot in the Snow reflects a more mature vision and perspective of events and people because these poems were mostly written in the past two or three years. Some poems in this collection, such as “His Hands” and “My Uncle’s Grave,” took a longer time to germinate and more courage to share. I can’t imagine having tackled these poems earlier in my life.

AM: T.S. Eliot once said that genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood. Do you try to communicate with readers, or do you write for yourself? The answer to that is probably both, so let me rephrase the question this way: do you have a particular audience in mind as you write poetry, or are you more consumed with the craft, with “getting it right,” so to speak?

JND: Unless I am writing for a specific magazine theme or contest, such as the poem “My Mother’s Elm” that I wrote to submit to the Joyce Kilmer Poetry Contest (and for which I was thankfully named a winner), I write only with the intention of composing the most honest and polished piece I can. But even with “My Mother’s Elm,” the poem took over once I started it, and I forgot the contest until I finished it. My goal was, most importantly, to capture a particular tree’s place in my childhood and to select my most poignant associations with the tree.

AM: Why do you write poetry?

JND: To capture memories, to record reflections, and to work out intellectual and psychological puzzles and give them tangible form that others might recognize and be moved by.

AM: You have written in a variety of genres. Which comes easiest for you?

JND: A poem is easiest because, in general, it takes shape and is completed more quickly than a short story, an essay, or a novel. I have also discovered that my poems tend to find a readership more quickly too. My novels might have garnered me wider recognition and usually more regional response, but poems have allowed me more comfortable expression of what’s in my heart.

AM: Do you find that poetry demands a certain economy of language that sets it apart from other forms of writing?

JND: By the nature of the poetic form—the condensation of language and attention to rhythm and line structure—I would say yes. However, my poems are narrative, often telling stories, so they’re somewhat similar to my prose. I think my prose is lyrical, too.

AM: Who are the writers that have influenced you, and to which writer would you say you owe the greatest debt?

JND: My first response to this question is always D.H. Lawrence, mostly because of his novel Sons and Lovers, which was the first work of his that I read as a young teenager. At that time, I was moved by the romance, especially between Paul and Miriam, but now when I read it as an adult, it’s obvious that the relationship between the son and his parents and the dynamics between Paul’s parents are most compelling and what have affected me.

The English midlands setting of Lawrence’s work, especially as described in Sons and Lovers, has always reminded me of my Western North Carolina landscape, particularly as it was in my childhood. Lawrence’s boyhood coal mining village of Eastwood is reminiscent of the Clinchfield Cotton Mill village where my mother grew up.

As far as poetry goes, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “Alas, So Long!” is a favorite, and Poe’s “Annabel Lee,” with its internal rhyme and alliteration—devices I use in my poems—has no doubt influenced me.

AM: Tell our readers where they can buy your latest book.

JND: Readers can order Barefoot in the Snow from the publisher World Audience Publishers at www.worldaudience.org. Online distributors such as amazon.com will also offer my book. If readers are interested in getting a signed copy, they can check my web page at www.thereadonwnc.ning.com/profile/JuliaNunnallyDuncan for an ongoing schedule of my appearances in WNC.

AM: Thank you, Julia, for taking the time to do this interview, and best of luck with everything.

JND: Thank you, Allen, for allowing me to share this information about Barefoot in the Snow and for giving me the opportunity to reflect upon my life as a poet.

, , , ,

The 1965 Eagles

In Arts & Letters, Creative Writing, Essays, Humanities on January 2, 2013 at 8:45 am

Mel Mendenhall was born and raised in Columbus, Georgia.  He lives in Atlanta and is the CEO CLVL Solutions, LLC. 

Mel Mendenhall

The following essay was composed in 2011, when Gary Levi announced that he had an inoperable brain tumor.  Gary Levi passed away in November 2012.

All of us have known someone who was a particularly good storyteller.  For me, that person was my Dad.  I guess growing up, as my dad did, in the country during the 1920s and early 1930s lent itself to that sort of entertainment: there was no TV, or even radio, back then.  It seemed all of his siblings inherited the storytelling trait, and as children my brothers, sisters, and I enjoyed listening to dad’s siblings’ stories about life on the farm, life in the military (eight brothers and one brother-in-law served in WWII), and life in general.

My Dad coached my first baseball team, the Eagles.  The Eagles I can easily recall are Sim Thomas, Rob Varner, Mac Turner, Johnny Jackson, Gary Levi, Jimmy Monfort, and Johnny Cooper.  In the history of eight-year-old baseball teams, our team, I’m certain, was the cream of the crop – the eight-year-old equivalent to the 1927 Yankees.  What follows is a quick biography of the players at age eight:

Sim Thomas – The star of the team; he did it all.  A true five star player: runs, throws, fields, hits, and hits for power.  He also was our most dominating pitcher, but susceptible to getting frustrated when the umpire’s vision was impaired and strikes were called balls, or so it seemed.  Pitched and played 1st base.

Rob Varner – a solid all around ball player who was reliable in all facets of eight-year-old baseball.  Rob and Sim were both upper classman, 3rd graders, whereas the rest of us were in the second grade.  Rob played third base and catcher.

Mac Turner – A solid second baseman and, like me, a coach’s son.  Mac was from a prominent family that, though wealthy, was very down-to-earth and inclusive.  Mac was always smiling and having a good time on the field and in the dugout.

Johnny Jackson – a really good athlete, muscular fireplug.  He could do it all.  He started out the season as a catcher, but moved to 3rd base after his mom felt – we all felt — that Johnny’s privates were getting a little too beat-up over the course of the season (Casey Stengel didn’t have these parental issues at the MLB level).

Gary Levi – Played left field and was easily our most outwardly enthusiastic player.  Gary woke up fired up and stoked those fires all day long until game time. He had a distinctive way of wearing his hat sideways on his head, with the bill facing left or right, but never straight.  He continuously pounded his glove with his fist while standing in his usual left field spot and giving himself a vehement pep-talk, or, depending on your perspective, “talking to.”

Jimmy Monfort – a very smooth shortstop for an eight-year-old.  He threw right-handed, but batted left-handed, a fact that I thought would look pretty cool on the back of a baseball card.  Jimmy was a sweet swinger who hadn’t yet mastered actual contact, but who looked very good swinging the bat.  There was no question but that he was a ballplayer in the making.

Johnny Cooper – “Cooper” is what we called him.  Did you ever know a kid who always smiled?  It didn’t matter what the circumstance, Cooper was smiling.  Unfortunately, Cooper’s five-year-old athleticism was captured inside an eight-year-old body that quite frankly had not caught up with his fellow 1927 Yankee eight-year-old teammates.  He stood in right field (one couldn’t claim he actually played right field).

The season began, and from the start it was apparent that the Eagles were a team of destiny.  Reporters from all around Columbus, and eventually the entire New York media, or so it seemed to us, followed the team as it plundered through the league beating the Foxes, the Bears, the Cubs, the Lions, and other collective critters.  Simply put, our pitching was dominant and our hitting and fielding were equally good.  Some among us, me included, had to learn to deal with periodic failures where insult was the occasional strike out, which was followed by immediate temper tantrums and tears.  One waiting to bat, or one sitting in the “open air” dugout, needed to stay alert because all of us, without fail, were prone to hurling our bat backwards, towards the dugout, whenever the ump ended our “at bat” with a strike three call.  All of us, of course, except “Cooper,” who always struck out with a smile on his face, and believe me, Cooper always struck out, were given to emotional instability when we ran out of strikes.

As the season went along, we continued to get better and better, and the kids playing on the other teams did as well.  Each team seemed to have a star player or two.  I recall being fascinated with each team’s colors: the Foxes wore red jerseys, the Bears green, the Cubs blue, the Lions a lighter shade of blue.  All teams’ jerseys and caps matched red for red, green for green, blue for blue – you get the picture.  The Eagles, on the other hand, wore the colors of a winner: navy blue with orange letters (like my beloved Auburn).  Would you believe me if I told you I can still smell in my mind’s nose what those jerseys smelled like—I can!—just as I can still smell the freshly mowed grass, or in the outfield, the stubble of weeds. Read the rest of this entry »

, ,

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 »

, , ,

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.