Unfinished Business

From whiskey river:

A Way to Look at Things

We have not yet made shoes that fit like sand
Nor clothes that fit like water
Nor thoughts that fit like air.
There is much to be done –
Works of nature are abstract.
They do not lean on other things for meanings.
The sea-gull is not like the sea
Nor the sun like the moon.
The sun draws water from the sea.
The clouds are not like either one –
They do not keep one form forever.
That the mountainside looks like a face is accidental.

(Arthur Dove [source])

Not from whiskey river:

“We’re going through!” The Commander’s voice was like thin ice breaking. He wore his full-dress uniform, with the heavily braided white cap pulled down rakishly over one cold gray eye. “We can’t make it, sir. It’s spoiling for a hurricane, if you ask me.” “I’m not asking you, Lieutenant Berg,” said the Commander. “Throw on the power lights! Rev her up to 8,500! We’re going through!” The pounding of the cylinders increased: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa. The Commander stared at the ice forming on the pilot window. He walked over and twisted a row of complicated dials. “Switch on No. 8 auxiliary!” he shouted. “Switch on No. 8 auxiliary!” repeated Lieutenant Berg. “Full strength in No. 3 turret!” shouted the Commander. “Full strength in No. 3 turret!” The crew, bending to their various tasks in the huge, hurtling eight-engined Navy hydroplane, looked at each other and grinned. “The old man will get us through” they said to one another. “The Old Man ain’t afraid of Hell!” . . .

“Not so fast! You’re driving too fast!” said Mrs. Mitty. “What are you driving so fast for?”

“Hmm?” said Walter Mitty. He looked at his wife, in the seat beside him, with shocked astonishment. She seemed grossly unfamiliar, like a strange woman who had yelled at him in a crowd. “You were up to fifty-five,” she said. “You know I don’t like to go more than forty. You were up to fifty-five.” Walter Mitty drove on toward Waterbury in silence, the roaring of the SN202 through the worst storm in twenty years of Navy flying fading in the remote, intimate airways of his mind.

“You’re tensed up again,” said Mrs. Mitty. “It’s one of your days. I wish you’d let Dr. Renshaw look you over.”

(James Thurber, from “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” [source])

…and:

The Dead

Their reward is
they become innocent again,

and when they reappear in memory
death has completely erased
the blurs, given them boundaries. They rise

and move through their new world with clean,
clear edges. My grandmother, in particular
has become buoyant, unattached finally

from her histories, from the trappings
of family. By no means was she

a good woman. But the dead don’t care anymore for that.
Weightless, they no longer assume
responsibility, they no longer

have bodies. Once,

at the end of August, after swimming
in the muddy pond

I’d gone into the living room, cool
as vodka, where my grandmother
sat. Greed thins a woman,

I remember her rings, bigger
than her fingers.
Water ran down my legs

onto the floor becoming slippery
and my grandmother, her breath
scratchy from cigarettes and blended whiskey,

leaned into my ear and whispered
you’re an ugly girl. Do I have

to forgive her? My mother tells me

no one ever loved her,
so when I see her, I see her again in the park
in her pink tailored suit, suede pumps,

I see her moving among the strange
gentlemen that have gathered, the dark
powerful men. She is still young, blonde

and most of all, she is beyond reach, beautiful.

(Kate Northrop, from Back Through Interruption [source])

Finally, no video or music clip this week. It just seemed right to use this bit, from Douglas Adams’s unfinished novel The Salmon of Doubt. Adams would have been 58 years old today yesterday, but died — the very model of a writer with sadly unfinished business — in 2001. Which I guess makes this excerpt trebly appropriate: content, source, creator.

One particularly niggling piece of Unfinished Business, it occurred to me the other day in the middle of a singing session with my five-year-old daughter, is the lyrics to “Do-Re-Mi,” from The Sound of Music.  It doesn’t exactly rank as a global crisis, but nevertheless it brings me up short anytime I hear it, and it shouldn’t be that difficult to sort it out.

But it is.

Consider.

Each line of the lyric takes the names of a note from the solfa scale, and gives it meaning: “Do (doe), a deer, a female deer; Re (ray), a drop of golden sun,” etc.  All well and good so far.  “Mi (me), a name I call myself; Fa (far), a long, long way to run.”  Fine.  I’m not saying this is Keats, exactly, but it’s a perfectly good conceit and it’s working consistently.  And here we go into the home stretch.  “So (sew), a needle pulling thread.”  Yes, good.  “La, a note to follow so…”  What?  Excuse me? “La, a note to follow so…”  What kind of lame excuse for a line is that?

Well, it’s obvious what kind of line it is.  It’s a placeholder.  A placeholder is what a writer puts in when he can’t think of the right line or idea just at the moment, but he’d better put in something and come back and fix it later.  So, I imagine that Oscar Hammerstein just bunged in a “a note to follow so” and thought he’d have another look at it in the morning.

Only when he came to have another look at it in the morning, he couldn’t come up with anything better.  Or the next morning.  Come on, he must have thought, this is simple.  Isn’t it?  “La… a something, something… what?”

One can imagine rehearsals looming.  Recording dates.  Maybe he’d be able to fix it on the day.  Maybe one of the cast would come up with the answer.  But no.  No one manages to fix it.  And gradually a lame placeholder of a line became locked in place and is now formally part of the song, part of the movie, and so on.

How difficult can it be?  How about this for a suggestion?  “La, a…, a…” — well, I  can’t think of one at the moment, but I think that if the whole world pulls together on this, we can crack it.  And I think we shouldn’t let the century end with such a major popular song in such an embarrassing state of disarray.

Update: Oh, the heck with it. It’ll make this post awfully long, but here’s an excerpt — Episode 1 — from the original BBC radio production of Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

[Below, click Play button to begin. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left -- a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 28:36 long.]

You can learn more about the Hitchhiker’s radio program(me) at the BBC site.