Rexroth’s San Francisco
August-December 1960
The Tao of Fishing
Riding in the Mountains
Art of Grace and Modesty
Why I Like Opera
Why I Don’t Like Jazz Festivals
Aida and Ornette Coleman
Matters of Taste
The Greatest Fiction
Christmas
For the next couple of weeks we are going on a pack trip in the southern
Sierra. Nothing startling. We don’t intend to make fires by striking two
photographers together, sleep in trees, or dine on muddy dandelions. Just a
square type outing,
We will go to Mineral King, above Visalia on the edge of Sequoia National
Park, and ride over the hump and have the man leave us with a couple of donkeys.
From there on we’ll travel or “set” as we please. If we don’t want to pack up
the donkeys and travel, the children can ride them around the meadows. It’s the
finest part of the Sierra, the high plateau and peak country just west of Mt.
Whitney. If you get off the main trails, as you can with donkeys, it is still
pretty unspoiled.
I know plenty of places where there are beautiful lonely lakes, lots of fish,
good feed for the donkeys, and few or no people passing by all summer. There are
all kinds of peaks to climb if we want to climb them, some you can ride a horse
up, others amongst the trickiest in the country. [...]
For going on 30 years I have spent most of my summers this way. Last year we
were in Europe, the year before in the Gros Ventres Mountains in the Wyoming
Rockies. I’ll be glad to get back. I have always felt I was most myself in the
mountains. There I have done the bulk of what is called my creative work. At
least it is in the mountains that I write most of my poetry.
Life in the city in the winter seems too full of distractions and busy work.
Who said poetry was emotion recollected in tranquility? I don’t know about
others, but I find most tranquility camped by a mountain lake at timber line.
There whatever past emotion and experience I choose to recollect and write down,
take on most depth and meaning.
Dry fly fishing has the same effect on me. It seems to me
it is a kind of
higher mathematics, practically embodied, of the study of the free flow of
water. It combines all the virtues and none of the strains and responsibilities
of both art and mysticism. Besides, you catch fish. You don’t have to read books
on Zen and Taoism and do funny gymnastics with your breathing and put your legs
in painful contortions.
Fly fishing is Taoism in simple and fascinating action. If you let it, it
produces, and by much more natural methods, the same results, the crystal clear
calm of heart that so many people seek by so much more difficult ways. Maybe if
Lao Tse and Bodhidharma had just known about it, they would have been fishermen
and not mystics. Of course, you can’t use it, like Zen, to impress gullible
chicks in espresso bars. Or can you? I’ve never tried. Maybe I should.
Most men are like that fellow Hercules wrestled with, Antaeus. If they can
make contact with the earth every once in a while, they keep their strength. Of
course, a lot of people don’t know this, and so they wonder what’s wrong with
them [...].
[7 August 1960]
NOTE: This theme is
discussed more detail in two Classics Revisited essays, on the
Tao Te Ching and The
Compleat Angler.
Well, we all came back from our pack trip unscathed and fit as fiddles. We
decided to go deluxe and ride every day instead of being packed in and left with
a couple of donkeys. This, of course, delighted our little girls, and as for
father, there’s nothing like 20 or more miles a day on horseback over mountain
trails to jar off the grease. [...]
It’s a wonderful way to capture just a little of the feeling of the Old West.
In fact, I guess it’s the only way left. When I was a boy, bumming around the
West out of Chicago, I bought myself a little zebra dun up in the Horse Heaven
Country in central Washington. I rode him all over the intermountain country,
drifting from job to job — just like Hashknife Hartley, the Cowboy Detective, or
one of Ernest Haycock’s heroes. Each fall I’d board him out where I happened to
be, and next spring I’d come back and get him.
I, too, have ambled down off the rimrock to the green homestead in the box
canyon, building a wheatstraw “cigareet” with one hand while the sun set over
the distant mountains. To my children this will be as improbable as though I
claimed to have fought at Waterloo or Thermopylae.
How little time ago, and it’s all gone. Still, you can imagine it back,
riding down the switchbacks of Black Rock Pass, the Kaweahs rising in front of
you and a lightning storm battering the pinnacles. I can, anyway, and whatever
my daughters imagined, they so obviously just loved it.
Nights under the thick stars, dawn swims in the cool mirror of a lonely lake,
golden trout that quarrel to climb on your fly, vast stretches of park-like
forest where nobody ever comes, meadows like square mile bowling greens full of
elderly bucks with top heavy antlers — they are still there. Some day I’ll be
too old, but I will still have some wonderful memories to wander in.
[...]
[14 August 1960]
NOTE: See Rexroth’s
Autobiography for more on
his early trips out West.
[...] For the Pacific Festival the de Young Museum people have put together a
splendid Japanese show, gathered mostly from museums on the Pacific coast.
[...]
One of the loveliest paintings I know is here from Seattle, a gold and green
and blue Descent of Amida with Attendant Saints. It is a perfect
representative of modest religious painting. There is none of the breathtaking
impact of the famous Amida and two bodhisattvas rising like triple moons over
the mountains by Eshin Soozu Genshin which you can find in most books on
Japanese art. This is a quiet, gentle, lyrical painting, like, as they say, a
cool hand laid on the brow.
All the best pictures in the show are of that character. There is an
unpretentious ink blot landscape by a disciple of the great Sesshu. There is a
brisk brush drawing of the Chinese poet Tu Fu riding along on a mule, wrapped in
thought. Tu Fu is my favorite of all the poets in the world, and I have myself
over the years translated some 50 of his poems.
There are plenty of paintings, Japanese and Chinese, of the poets Li Tai Po
and Po Chu I — but Tu Fu is an uncommon subject, so first thing I did was stock
up on reproductions of this one at the desk. That, incidentally, is one of the
nice things about this show, there are a lot of reproductions available to
remember it by.
How calm and mature Far Eastern art seems in comparison with our own! I will
never forget once when I had only one day to spend gallery crawling in
Washington. I spent the morning looking at the great Far Eastern collections in
the Freer and ate lunch in a little French restaurant, strangely uncrowded for
Washington, and then went across the park, still rapt away in the bright
interior peace of the morning, and started through the National Gallery.
It was like switching from Gregorian chant, say the Office of Compline, heard
before going to bed at Solesmes Abbey itself, to John Philip Sousa parading down
Fifth Avenue on the Fourth of July. Even the Raphaels seemed to bellow at me
from the walls. I couldn’t take it, but ran away and went for a walk in the park
amongst the autumn leaves.
How seldom Western religious art seeks, let alone conveys, peace, grace and
illumination. What a lot of beheading and disemboweling and riot and melodrama!
When she was little, I used to show my daughter Mary the favorite picture books
of my own childhood, one of them Masterpieces from Doré. She always used
to say, when we came to the Paradise Lost pictures, “Here’s them angels,
fighting again!”
I have seen most of the great museums and private collections of the world,
and I can think of only a handful of paintings to compare with the best from the
Far East in this quality of grace and illumination — untroubled spiritual
magnanimity. They are all distinctly “minor” pictures. There is one major
exception, Velasquez’s Christ in the Home of Mary and Martha, where the
transfiguring presence of Christ is somehow caught up, as in a sacrament, in the
lustrous still life in the foreground, and maybe Piero della Francesca.
There is the portrait of Luca Pacioli, the monk and mathematician, in
Naples, demonstrating a theorem under a mysterious crystal — you can find it in
Burckhardt’s Renaissance and it is on the cover of Newman’s World of
Mathematics. There is the “Wilton Diptych” in London — the Blessed Virgin
descending from Heaven with a bevy of mild girlish angels rather like Kate
Greenaway’s maidens. There is Filippo Lippi’s Virgin Appearing to St. Bernard
in the Badía in Florence, which you can find in most books on Italian art.
It would pay a spectator of sensibility to look these up
in books of reproductions and then go and study this unspectacular but
thoroughly representative collection of Japanese art, and ponder on what they
have so easily, and what we have so seldom.
Of course, concentration on nuance, on refined sensibility and quietness has
its dangers, too. Our art, even at its greatest, may get lost in noise — think
of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. Japanese art, and especially Japanese
poetry, can dribble away in sentimentality and finicking.
I think this is why the currently popular American imitations of Japanese
haiku — the 17 syllable little poems that are epigrams of the sensibility —
almost always never come off. American poetic imitators of the Japanese miss the
deep foundations of the culture — all too seldom they do not come over at all
in translation — and seize on the superficial sentiment.
At its best, Japanese poetry makes a perfect introduction to the
understanding of Japanese painting. Since my one venture into verse translation
in this column provoked a rash of pleased fan letters, once again I’ll leave you
with some little poems to bear in mind when you look at the pictures. They are
all from the classic period of Japanese verse, in the “long” form — of only
31 syllables.
As I watch the moon
Shining on pain’s myriad paths,
I know I am not
Alone involved in Autumn.
—Oe No Chisato
I go out of the darkness
Onto a road of darkness
Lit only by the far off
Moon on the edge of the mountains.
—Lady Izumi Shikibu
As certain as color
Passes from the petal
Irrevocably as flesh,
The gazing eye goes through the world.
—Lady Ono No Komachi
As I approach
The mountain village
Through the Spring twilight
I hear the sunset bell
Ring through the drifting petals.
[18 September 1960]
NOTE: Some more of Rexroth’s Japanese
translations can be found here. Some
of his Tu Fu translations can be found
here.
As the opera season rolls along I will probably be writing about one or the
other of the shows each week. First off, I’d like to say something about opera
as such, or at least what it is for me.
I enjoy opera as mass entertainment, just like the circus or the funny
papers, but more expensive. For my taste it can stand just so much intellectual
content and then it becomes dull. I don’t even like “great music” in opera,
unless Verdi is great music. I consider Wagner the all time low of bad taste in
the history of art. The only Mozart operas I like are the funny ones.
Deep, pretentious operas with difficult and ambitious music like Wozzeck
give me the shudders. I go to opera for the same reason I listen to Frank
Sinatra. When Frank starts reciting The Wasteland to twelve tone jazz, I
won’t be there to listen.
Carmen has always struck me as being about as serious as opera can get
and survive as entertainment. Bizet’s music is clean, bright and efficient.
Prosper Merimée was not a first-rank writer of his time. Nowadays he would be a
successful, steady contributor to the better grade second-rate magazines.
In Carmen he created a tragedy whose characters hover on the narrow
line between the Great Archetypes of the major classics and the Great
Stereotypes of mass culture. The librettists sharpened the story into a compact
drama, and in obedience to French formula, added the balancing “good girl,”
Micaela. It is easy to object to formulas like this — but they are all right if
they work. Racine added just such a good girl to the dark and bloody tragedy of
Hippolytus and Phaedre. He certainly didn’t improve Euripides, but he certainly
made the story French.
Why has no one ever written a successful opera using Hamlet as a
libretto? Or Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, or Ford’s Broken Heart?
Both of them are even more “operatic” Elizabethan plays than Hamlet. The
reason, of course, is that they are too good, too deeply moving as drama. The
text would destroy the unity of reaction in the audience.
Someone will raise the objection, “But the Chinese and Japanese produce
opera which is Great Art, why can’t we?” That’s just it, the Chinese and Kabuki
plays are no great shakes as literature, and the music is by and large routine.
Every dramatic situation has a musical formula which varies little. They are
great popular art.
It is the modern western world which makes the distinction between Great and
Popular. Carmen has its own kind of greatness. One of the things that
makes it truly great is that it is a perfect blend of all the necessary
ingredients of popularity. [...]
[25 September 1960]
[...] I guess there are those who expect a big think piece from me about the Monterey Jazz
Festival. I didn’t go. I don’t like jazz festivals. I don’t even like
“concert jazz” of the sort made popular by Norman Granz.
For me jazz is intimate music. It depends on a close audience participation. One of its
points of origin was the New Orleans brothel, certainly an intimate enough atmosphere.
Another was the intense group “folkloristic” life of Congo Square. Another was
the small and even more intense group of the revivalist church. Even in the period of the
craze for big ballroom dancing, jazz was most successful in the smaller places. True, the
big bands of the swing period played for immense audiences, but in the years since, the
trend has been back to the small group in the small club and only a few big bands have
been able to keep going.
I think the audience relationship determines the music. I can’t bear the Dixieland
Revival. It’s music for drunken college boys who bang on the table, clap, and stand
up, blubber, “Shay fellows, lesh have good ole ‘Tiger Rag’,” and fall
down. Good time music if that’s your idea of a good time. If not, not.
The music of Ornette Coleman, the Modern Jazz Quartet, John Coltrane, is essentially
popular chamber music. It is a product of a special kind of night club. It is true that
the ordinary night club atmosphere destroys it. But that just goes to show.
Jazz belongs in dark and quiet dens full of natural shoulders and bouffant
hair-do’s. It needs the light tinkle of glasses and the brittle laughter of would-be
dangerous women. It is not football, polo, or sulky racing. The Modern Jazz Quartet
playing in the middle of a race track to 8000 people is just as ridiculous, no more, no
less, than the Budapest String Quartet would be under the same circumstances.
Furthermore, what is wrong with modern jazz is the exclusive domination of
“stars.” This has destroyed all but the most childish form — “You take
a chorus and I’ll take a chorus and he’ll take a chorus, and we’ll all go
out together.” In other words, everybody is a star, and each one, except sometimes
the poor drummer, has his chance to show off.
I am longing for the day when I can go into a club, sit through a set and not hear a
single instrument solo for more than four bars. I don’t care how good the musician is
— this is why most people “outgrow” jazz — the form is insufferable
after a few years. Think of the effectiveness, and the inexhaustibility of the solo
instruments in [Stravinsky’s] The Firebird or in Debussy’s Trio
Sonata. We never grow tired of them. Both pieces have had a powerful influence on
modern jazz. Think of how tedious they would be reduced to the form of theme and
variations and broken up into 32-bar solos with “rhythm section” accompaniment!
This is the real primitivism of modern jazz — not its imagined African background.
Amusingly, this is the principal formal difference between modern African
“jazz,” if you want to call it that, and our own. The popular African music is
incomparably more complex and contrapuntal.
Obviously, the jazz festival only reinforces this star system. A premium is placed on
Big Names, virtuosity, gimmicks and stunts. The circus atmosphere corrupts the natural
response of the jazz musician to the closely participating audience. Serious new musical
developments are appreciated for the wrong reasons, as though they were quadruple
somersaults and double barrel rolls in mid-air or home runs. Jazz is not a spectator
sport. It is an art which depends entirely on audience participation. [...]
Ornette Coleman is another dish of tea. He is one bright hope in jazz in this period of
worn out clichés. (Charles Mingus is another.) Next week I’ll write about him. Go
and hear him at the Jazz Workshop.
[2 October 1960]
NOTE: For more extensive
discussion, see Rexroth’s Some Notes on Jazz.
You couldn’t ask for a worse opera critic. Unless something is
very wrong, I just wallow in it.
So does my daughter Mary, who is just the mental age for which
most of the operas were written. (She is 10.)
I guess my favorite opera is Aida, operatically speaking,
that is — Boris [Mussorgsky’s Boris
Godunov] and the Mozart operas are music, and
transcend opera altogether. Aida has everything, and with a slight spurt of
imagination, you can even see the kitchen sink amongst Rhadames’s trophies. As
Verdi’s sumptuous music and noble sentimentality roll out over the auditorium, I
always settle back to enjoy the show of the year.
Mary has already learned the techniques of the compleat opera
goer. She studies the people in the opposite boxes, compares their gowns to
Renoir and Clouet, compares the performance to a previous one in Europe, and, I
suppose, frightens the neighbors. What is more essential to truly civilized
entertainment than the presence of beautiful women? What greater reward has
middle life to offer than the chance to take one’s daughters out to dinner and
the opera? Nothing. Nothing. [...]
After the show the daughter returned to her mother, who is fed
up with opera, and I went down to hear Ornette Coleman at the Jazz Workshop.
Although my head was full of Verdi at his best, I must say these four young men
stood up very well.
I don’t understand all the furor about this music. The public is one
thing, but aren’t the critics familiar with modern “classical” music? Why
does everyone find Coleman so difficult and strange?
An evening spent with a few easily available records by Webern, Boulez, the later
Stravinsky and Bartok, would acclimatize the ears to Ornette Coleman. These are the Old
Guard, the comparatively orthodox modern musicians. These is no need to adventure into the
truly modernistic contemporaries.
I don’t mean to imply that Ornette Coleman is importing devices from classical
music directly into jazz, in the fashion of Gunther Schuller or Fred Katz. He is not. Most
of his novel material comes from close musical study of the novelty passages of so-called
rhythm and blues orchestras, the popular bands of the Southwest style.
The rest of his innovations are only a natural development of the main stream of modern
jazz since the bop revolution. What is wrong with jazz is lack of scope. It doesn’t
say enough, in enough different ways.
Coleman has succeeded in giving it new scope. He says more, about more. He does this,
however, by purely musical means, and without ever going beyond the rather defined limits
of the jazz idiom. People say he doesn’t swing, but they say that about everybody new
and different. The group doesn’t just swing, you could roll and bump to it if you
wanted to. Underlying all the musical adventuring is a solid foundation of the music of
Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana country dance halls and cheap clubs.
Last week I spoke about how bored I was getting with the endless virtuoso solos of
modern jazz. Of course I am quite well aware that the Coleman group uses the same form.
But I think there is a difference. There is not just a close musical relationship between
the solos of each member of the group, there is a strong dramatic relationship, too, a
genuine passionate conversation. It’s like Aida.
Furthermore, although I find people who jabber about Bach and jazz in the same breath
absolutely insufferable, I am afraid I know of no better example of how Ornette Coleman
develops a musical statement than Bach’s famous Chaconne. By which I do not
mean that he is as great as Bach or even in the same category. It is just that each
restatement refers back to its predecessor and ahead to its successor in the same way. It
is a kind of one-line counterpoint. The solos of Lester Young, on the other hand, are a
continuously unfolding harmonic development.
I do think, however, that the group is at its most exciting in ensemble. It’s when
they all get going at once in all directions, with Cherry and Coleman crossing each other
in the most extraordinary dissonances that they are at their best. I do wish they’d
do a whole set like that sometime. It might be the Lexington and Concord of modern jazz.
[9 October 1960]
[...] One of the privileges of having good taste is the right to disagree with
other people who have it too. Only new arrivals in the arts consider themselves
duty bound to like everything everybody else does.
I, for one, have a profound distaste for everything connected with German
Romanticism and its grandchild Expressionism — except Paul Klee, if you have to
include him. I don’t like Mahler, or Bruckner, or Schoenberg, or Berg, or even
the later serialists. They give me the meemies. It isn’t the idiom. Now that
Stravinsky has come to use the same idiom as Schoenberg and his disciples, I
like it fine — when Stravinsky does it.
I don’t like Nolde. I don’t like Kokoschka. So there. I don’t think there is
anything wrong with people who do like them, it’s just that — a difference of
taste.
I seem to have touched a nerve in Wozzeck. People have written letters
the purport of which has been, “Uh-huh. We knew you’d sell out... You’ve been
sucked into the Establishment.”
Really. If anything is part of the Establishment right now, it is precisely
Wozzeck. It is windy rhetoric and twelve tone howling about monstrous
generalities that are diverting attention from the very ordinary, very specific
problems bedeviling humanity.
Man’s most serious problems are concrete, not abstract. What the Indian
peasant needs is not Communism or Free Enterprise, what he needs is a square
meal. France is headed into chaos, not because of Jean-Paul Sartre’s
demonstration that the soul of man has nowhere to lay its head, but because of
vested interests in fraud — in a simple and simply crooked misrepresentation of
simple social facts.
I am sorry, but I must be an incorrigible pagan or maybe a bit of a fellow
traveler of St. Thomas Aquinas. I do not respond to the “existentialist
dilemma” at all. Its inventor, Soren Kierkegaard, has always seemed to me a
sick man who treated his girlfriend wretchedly. A man “badly in need of help”
as the headshrinkers say.
I don’t think uncomprehending man confronts an ominous and indifferent world
without a single weapon. I believe he has reason, or will, or a coherent
religious belief to sustain him. I, for one, am pretty sure I have a reason,
reasonably sure I have a will, and I fancy that I have chosen to put together a
coherent system of belief — religious or not. I do not look on my Being every
hour as a dreadful meeting with reality. I like it.
I am sitting at the window in the midst of the woods, in northwest Marin
County, while the rain is coming down like a fire hose. I came over to brood and
work on a ballet scenario.
My own column is beginning to influence me. For reading matter I brought
along two Penguins, S.L. Grigoriev, The Diaghilieff Ballet—1909-1929 and
a new translation of the greatest of the Icelandic Sagas, Njal’s Saga —
known as Burnt Njal in the old Everyman’s Library edition.
The first is a joy to read even if it does make me feel old. “Time was when
the little toy dog was new...” What a terrific rumpus it all was! You discover
how realistic the comic novels of ballet by Brahms and Simon, Bullet in the
Ballet and Six Curtains for Stroganova, actually are. (All ballet
fans should read these books, too.) Raptures, follies, quarrels, all epic — but
so much creativity.
As the poet Richard Eberhart says, “It is not possible to live always at
the pitch that is near madness.” When they say to me, “Were the first thirty
years of the century really like that?” I am going to stop being modest or
afraid to sound middle aged. I am going to say “Yes. Don’t you think two world
wars, a world economic crisis, and the Russian Revolution have cost anything?”
Njal’s Saga is one of the five greatest works of prose fiction.
Sometime, in slack periods, I would like to devote a column to each of them. But
apropos of now, here is the story of man in a thoroughly hostile and indifferent
environment, but full of will and reason and faith, and a great deal of cunning
and common sense as well. It is a tragedy though, in which the weaknesses and
flaws in man’s relationships to man work out to a terrible dénouement. It is
believable, as the Romantic tragedy is not, because it is underlain with courage
and honor and loyalty. Without them it wouldn’t be a tragedy, but just another
foolish debacle.
[20 November 1960]
Still brooding in the woods. Days and days of
rain. Hardly a bee ventures out of the hive in the wall of the house during the
day. At night an owl comes and sits under the eaves and grumbles. Curtains of
rain obscure and reveal the low mountains. Tatters of cloud drift between the
Douglas firs and the redwoods. Out of my window in every direction there is a
Chinese ink-brush painting. [...]
I’ve been too busy lately with things of no
importance. It is good to sit and look out the window at the drifting mist, to
read, and write, and walk in the rainy forest.
It is good to read only books that have
nothing to do with the problems of the day that are bound to pass. All the books
on the shelf beyond my desk were written hundreds of years ago. I will reread
some of them with sherry and a cigar beside the fire in the evenings. The others
I can just look at. I know well what is in them.
People have written to ask what I meant by
the five greatest works of prose fiction. [...]
The great works of prose fiction are great,
not because they try to talk about deep things, as do so many novels of the
passing day, but because they are themselves profound.
Any fool can chatter about nobility and
magnanimity and courage. It is another thing to embody these virtues. The love
life of a Japanese prince, the conflicts in a Chinese harem, the adventures of a
crazy country gentleman in Renaissance Spain, the sad story of chivalry and
betrayal in a Britain that never existed, the capers of a pair of fantastic
giants, the domestic affairs of a handful of Icelandic farmers, a boy and a
young Negro drifting down the Mississippi, the guilty troubles of three neurotic
Russian brothers, a little English boy growing up, the disasters of a French
popinjay — out of these unimportant materials, as trivial in themselves as the
lines and circles of Euclid, the great prose dramas of mankind have been made.
These are the books which have, each in its
own distinctive guise, each so different from the others, the same nobility and
mystery that Archimedes surprised in the spiral and Apollonius in the parabola.
To them too, in the mathematician’s sense, can be applied that rare word of
final artistic approval — elegance.
The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki; The Dream of the
Red Chamber by a doubtful Chinese author; Cervantes’s Don
Quixote; Njal’s Saga; Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur; Dickens’s
David Copperfield; Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel; Dostoevsky’s
The Brothers Karamazov; Stendhal’s The Red and the Black; and
not least of all, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.
Not everybody has the equipment to follow the
speculations of the great philosophers, saints, scientists and mathematicians.
Everybody can read a good story, and in these stories, so widely different and
so absorbing, the human mind is again at its finest. Today they can all be found
in cheap paperback editions. One by one I hope, as the months go by, to write
about them.
[27 November 1960]
NOTE: Instead of in these
columns, he later discussed all of these works in Classics Revisited, except
that he substituted The Pickwick Papers for David Copperfield.
For a month my girls have been in a slowly mounting fever of excitement.
Cards have piled up on the mantel, presents have piled up under the tree. The
tree is 12 feet high — we live in a Victorian flat — under it is a Bavarian
crèche that’s been in the family for years. On another mantelpiece is a
Provençal crèche of santons, little figures of every human occupation and
condition, on their way to the manger.
We’ve had a party. We’ve been to see the Ballet do the Nutcracker and
Beauty and the Beast. We’ve seen all the store windows and all the Santa
Clauses. We’ve walked entranced through one of America’s most amazing sights —
Christmas at Podesta and Baldocchi’s. Finally, there was midnight Mass at the
Church of the Advent and then me in red coat and whiskers distributing the
presents.
We get all we can out of Christmas. Some of my intellectual friends think it
is too commercial. Some think it is hypocritical. Some think it is a relic of
Sun worship.
We don’t care. We like it. Even if for some people the motives are
one-upmanship and status, it’s good for them to even pretend to be generous at
least once a year. I don’t care if merchants make a lot of money selling toys
that disintegrate in an hour and negligees that come off red all over you. If
those were the worst evils of Free Enterprise we wouldn’t have much to worry
about.
As a matter of fact, our house is full of Christmas presents that date back
far through the years. In front of me as I write is my easel, given me by my
first wife, now long dead, over 25 years ago. I can still see it draped with
tinsel and hung with ornaments standing in the dark outside the door, a
surprise.
Maybe my girls are orderly and conservative, but they still have most of the
dolls and toys and all the books they were ever given. It is beginning to be a
problem housing them. All around me are presents Marthe has given me — and so
for her — the Skira histories of art, the cast of the Minoan Serpent Priestess
on her dresser — it all depends on what you do with your money and how really
much you want to please the other person. [...]
What difference does it make if it is all just a Sun Myth? I don’t believe
that, and that kind of criticism of the Bible has gone out of date in scholarly
circles. But suppose it is true? What we need, what our lives are so
impoverished of, are precisely great festivals to mark the turning of the year,
the sleep and awakening and fruitfulness of the earth. Those of us who still
belong to religions that mark the similar moments of our own lives, birth,
puberty, vocation, marriage, death, are lucky. I don’t care if it takes Daddy a
year to pay off the bills for the First Communion Party or the Bar Mitzvah or
the wedding. For a moment there has been at least a token acknowledgment that
even the poorest and most humdrum life is of transcendent importance, that no
individual human being is insignificant. [...]
[25 December 1960]
Rexroth’s
San Francisco (columns from the San Francisco Examiner and San Francisco
Magazine). Copyright 1960-1975
Kenneth Rexroth. Reproduced by permission of the Kenneth Rexroth Trust.
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