Clifford Browder's Blog, page 52

71. The Magnificence and Insolence of Trees

Twigs of the tree of heaven.
     There are wonders all around us, but we don't look.

     I have always loved trees.  It began in my childhood in Evanston, where the streets were lined with arched elms that provided welcome shade in the summer.  The most unathletic of boys, I still loved to climb in the willow trees on a nearby riverbank.  (I say "riverbank," but it wasn't really a river, just a sewage canal.  Unpoetic, but at least it didn't smell.)  Right on our street, and on many other streets, was the tree of heaven, or ailanthus, which gave off no heavenly scent but a stink.  And if you stripped a twig of its leaves, you had a pliant switch.  I know because an older friend of mine, having provided himself with just such a weapon, challenged me to a duel, and when I declined, lashed my bare legs with his switch, which sent me rushing home with tears of rage.








This is the stuff my brother loved to set on fire.
EnLorax         But the great tree of my childhood was a giant cottonwood that towered in a neighbor's yard just across an alley from our own back yard, a tree so huge that it robbed our neighbor of sunlight, but so costly to remove that he simply had a few branches severed and left the rest.  In June it gave its cottony seeds to the breeze, and everyone's lawn was whitened for many days, and I went about sneezing, since I was allergic to the stuff.  My older brother took delight in setting fire to those seeds, ostensibly to spare his kid brother some sneezes, but really just to create a little havoc.  Fortunately, he never set the neighborhood on fire.  In summer I would lie on a flat roof next to our sleeping porch, hoping for a tan while watching a breeze ripple through that vibrant mass of silver-flecked green: a pulsing continent of life.



Eucalyptus leaves and fruit.  I loved to crush the
leaves and breathe in the intoxicating scent.
Emöke Dénes     Yes, this blog is supposed to be about New York, and I'll get there soon enough, but allow me one more digression, a side trip to Southern California, where I went to college.  There, one Easter vacation when everyone else flocked to the beaches for sun by day and erotic and boozy revels by night, I myself, stuck carless in tranquil Claremont, trekked its tidy streets studying the trees of that strange clime, most of them imports from distant places.  There were palm trees both native and from the Canary Islands, acacias from Asia, eucalyptus from Australia, and the Mexican pepper tree.  One huge pepper tree loomed in an undeveloped lot that I often crossed on my way to classes, breathing in a subtle aroma of pepper.  But the most memorable fragrance came from the crushed leaves of the eucalyptus, the headiest, most intoxicating scent that I have ever experienced from a tree.  As for majesty and sublimity, I encountered them later when I went to Muir Woods, an old-growth redwood forest near San Francisco, and had my first glimpse of redwoods, some of them 1200 years old, towering giants that made us humans seem like puny little creatures indeed.


Redwoods in Muir Woods.
     So at last we come to New York.  Within two blocks of my apartment there are magnolias, cherry trees, gingkos, redbuds, and a mystery tree I was for years unable to identify.  The mystery tree is 30 to 60 feet high with white flowers of the rose family (5 petals and a cluster of protruding stamens); it's all over on the streets, blooming every April.  None of my friends could identify it, but my online query to the Parks Department finally received a response.  It is the callery pear, a name I had never heard of before, and the second most common tree on the city's streets.  (And the most common one?  They didn't tell me.  My candidates: gingko biloba, Norway maple, American basswood.)

My mystery tree in bloom.

The fan-shaped leaves of the gingko.     The gingko biloba is a strange thing with fan-shaped leaves often divided into two lobes.  A native of China, it has no close living relatives but resembles fossils from 270 million years ago.  A common cultivated tree here and elsewhere in North America, it was long thought to be extinct in the wild, but now may still grow in two small areas in eastern China.  A rarity, then, but here it is on West 11th Street, turning yellow every fall and bearing soft fruitlike yellow-brown seeds that smell like rancid butter or vomit, as I discovered one autumn when, an amateur forager (see post #23, September 2012), I investigated it.  Suburbanites complain of the smell and mess of the fallen fruit, which can render sidewalks slippery as well as stinky.  Yet at the North End of Central Park I have seen Chinese women busily gathering the fallen fruit, which is believed to have both culinary and medicinal values, and value also -- though I haven't checked it out -- as an aphrodisiac.  In any case, the smell put me off, so I gave up on foraging it.  Yes, I know it's prized by herbalists and used by Western medicine to enhance memory and treat dementia, and for other stuff as well, but my God, that smell of vomit!  But it's a tough baby, so tough that six gingko trees survived the atom bomb in Hiroshima charred but intact, and in time became healthy again.  One of the strangest trees I've ever known, growing almost on my doorstep.  It will probably survive us all.

The fruit of the gingko, beneficial but smelly.
W

A redbud in full glory.
Dcrjsr     Less mysterious and exotic is the redbud, a small tree of the pea family that bears pink flowers in the spring before the leaves appear.  My mother once came back from a spring visit to rural Brown County, Indiana, raving about the beauty of the flowering dogwoods and redbuds in the woods.  Dogwoods I have seen in every forest I have visited in the spring, but redbuds never.  So redbuds became an elusive but sought-after prey, once prompting a special expedition to Inwood Hill Park that proved fruitless.  Then, a year ago, I found one, labeled and blooming, in the little park just across the street, and this year I have seen them in that park and elsewhere in the neighborhood.  A lovely little tree bearing pea family flowers clustered on its branches, well worth my quest through the years.

     There is no way I can mention all the trees in city parks that I relate to, so I'll just mention a few.  In my post on foraging (#23 again) I told how I have harvested wild apples in Van Cortland and Pelham Bay Parks and the Staten Island Greenbelt.  If I finally gave that up it was because the yellow apples were small and afflicted with dark spots that had to be cut out, leaving not much apple, while at the same time the greenmarkets were full of large, ripe, often flawless apples with a superb taste that you get only from freshly picked apples for a month or two in the fall.

No, these aren't apples, but black walnuts still on the tree.
Sue Sweeney The dried nut.
Jamain     Another attempt at foraging likewise proved a fiasco.  Black walnuts grow wild in the city parks, and I had heard that they, like their cousin the English walnut, are edible, which sounded good to me.  The nut is contained within a green, fleshy husk, rather like a shrunken tennis ball, that falls to the ground in autumn, so you might think harvesting the nuts is easy.  Well it ain't.  First of all, the husk clings to the nut, so to remove it you're advised to stamp on the fruit with old shoes to get the husk off.  What you then have is a corrugated brown nut that stains your fingers if you touch it, so rubber gloves are advised.  (If you get the stain on your fingers, don't worry, it will come off -- in a few days.)  So now you have to let the nuts dry on newspapers for a week, so as to eliminate the stain.  Even then you don't have the edible kernel, which is locked inside the nut.  But you can get at the kernel; all you need is a heavy-duty nutcracker, a vise, a heavy hammer, or a large rock.  (At this point I'm tempted to say a boulder.)  So finally you crack the nut open and there, inside, is the long-sought meat, which you remove with a pick.  I'd been told that black walnut has a strong, rich, smoky flavor with a hint of wine, and that it can be used in any recipe that calls for nuts, but it must be used sparingly, or it will overpower the other ingredients.  After all this to-do -- the gathering, the stamping, the stain, and then the long week of drying, climaxed by the bashing and cracking -- I expected something wondrous, a taste that would vault me to pinnacles of bliss.  No go: the taste impressed me as unimpressive and certainly not worth all that effort.  Since then I've been quite content to consume the commercial English walnuts readily available in stores and requiring no such lengthy preparation.  But good luck, if you want to try.

     Most mature trees have dark, ridged bark that doesn't help laymen much in identifying the tree, but three exceptions come to mind: the mottled bark of the sycamore, the papery bark of the paper birch, and the smooth bark of the beech -- all three of them to be found in city parks.  My favorite sycamore is a huge tree in Van Cortlandt Park, its trunk some four or five feet in diameter, with the typical sycamore bark showing green, gray, brown, and white patches that resemble U.S. Army camouflage, the kind you see very unmilitary-looking young men wearing on city streets.  A giant of giants, yet few park visitors stop to admire it.  (Fewer still notice the stand of poison hemlock growing nearby -- the stuff that did Socrates in -- but that's another story.)  The bark of the paper birch peels off in horizontal stripes, leaving black marks on the trunk.  As its other name "canoe birch" implies, the Native Americans of the Northeast used it to make canoes.  And the smooth gray bark of the beech invites graffiti, often the initials of lovers cut into it -- avowals that may be embarrassing in a year or two, since fervor fades, whereas beech bark endures.

Sycamore bark.
Jim Thomas



Paper birch bark.
Sue Sweeney
   








Beech bark with graffiti.HorsePunchKid

     I won't go into the colors of foliage in autumn, since it's not the season.  Instead, I'll mention what about trees grabs me most in any season: their architecture.  Their roots plunge deep in the soil, their trunks rise nobly, and their twigs reach for the sky.  This is seen best in those that tower, when they stand singly and assume their full proportions: beech, cottonwood, sycamore, and above all oak.
David Lally
     Trees figure prominently in myth and legend, where the roots are identified with the underworld, the trunk with the middle world or earth, and the soaring branches with the upper world or heaven.  Connecting all aspects of creation, they become the World Tree or Cosmic Tree, whose fruit has healing powers or confers immortality.  In my post on gardens (#57, April 2013) I mentioned the Tree of Life in Eden and the tree bearing golden apples in the Garden of the Hesperides.  Both conferred immortality, both were forbidden to mortals; to prevent Adam and Eve from eating of the fruit and becoming immortal, Yahweh drove them from Eden and placed cherubim with a flaming sword to guard the Tree of Life.  So obviously, those trees have got a lot going for them.
     The Tree of Life appears in the myths and religions of ancient Persia and Egypt, Assyria, China, the Baha'i faith, the Kabbalah, Mesoamerica, and elsewhere, and has inspired many artists.  In Egypt it was sometimes portrayed as a nurturing mother, another manifestation of the Goddess (aka Big Mama) discussed in another post (#59, May 2013).  Christianity has identified it with the Cross; the tree of death of the Crucifixion becomes the tree of life of the Resurrection.  It also appears in a vision in the Book of Mormon, where a path leads to a tree symbolizing salvation.
The Tree of Life from the Book of Mormon. A modern Tree of Life in a Swedish church.
Hakan Svensson
From the tomb of Thutmose III (1500-1450 BCE).
The Pharaoh is fed from the holy tree.  
The Tree of Life: stained glass by Tiffany.
     In Norse mythology the world tree Yygdrasil is a holy tree where the gods assemble daily tohold court.  Various creatures reside in it, including an eagle, a squirrel, and four stags.  The three Norns, who rule the destiny of gods and men, bring water from a holy well and pour it over the tree, so its branches won't rot away or decay.

Yygdrasil and the creatures that inhabit it.
From a 17th-century Icelandic manuscript.

     By now, I hope that the magnificence of trees is apparent, and you can understand why, in passing a park, I always stop to admire the grand, leafy fullness of trees.  But why do I also mention their insolence?  Here we go into fantasy.  In a poem I have imagined a dialog between the trees and myself.  In it the trees put me down as a fruitless, rootless creature who dithers about, lacking their calm, earthed fixity.  When I protest that my daily motions and varied feelings are meaningful, they laugh contemptuously and dismiss every other claim of mine to a significant existence.  Finally, when I mention my vitamin-rich, fiber-crammed diet, pesticide-free and locally grown, they answer scornfully, "Runt, what do you eat?  We eat the sun!"  Finding no answer to this, I retreat to a more comforting communion with weedy fields and tufts of small grasses, which, despite my memories of towering sun-flecked continents of green, are reassuringly squat and sensible.  So trees in their magnificence can be seen as dwarfing us and reminding us of our puny dimensions, our insignificance.  Not a bad note to end on, but for a final touch I'll quote the ending of a poem by Joyce Kilmer (not my favorite poet, but relevant here):
          Poems are made by fools like me,          But only God can make a tree.
To which I'll simply add: Yes, but with the help of Big Mama, who sticks her nose (and other apparatus) in everywhere.  (Again, see post #59, May 2013: Earth Goddesses: Big Mama.)
     Note:  One year ago, on July 11, 2012, this blog began.  The first post: 16. My Love/Hate Affair with WBAI.  That affair continues to this day.  Prior to that I was sending e-mails to friends; those e-mails appear as 15 vignettes in this blog.
     Coming soon:  Next Sunday, Liars, Cheats, and Manipulators.  Also, fittingly, a note on two New York politicians disgraced and ousted from office by sex scandals but now rising like the phoenix from its ashes to run for office again: Eliot Spitzer and Anthony Weiner.  Their resurgence confirms yet again the name of this blog: No Place for Normal: New York.
(c)  2013  Clifford Browder

70. Me and the Seven Deadly Sins

      In Christian and especially Catholic tradition there are seven deadly sins, indulgence in which destroys the life of grace and charity and therefore creates the risk of eternal damnation.  These sins are the source and origin of all other sins.  The seven, in the order in which I shall treat them, are sloth, gluttony, envy, lust, greed, pride, and wrath.  In a rare moment of introspection I have decided to examine myself for signs of each of the seven, and at the same time to see which may characterize the city of New York and the nation.  A noble and weighty undertaking, not to mention a courageous one. So here goes.

Sloth

     Shrewdly, I begin with the sin that I honestly think myself least guilty of.  I feel the need to always keep myself busy and above all to occupy my mind.  Yes, I can take a break when necessary, but I always go back to whatever project I have in hand.  Since I'm a writer, this usually means a writing project, as for instance a post on sins for my blog.  Similarly, I think New Yorkers are immune to sloth. This city is, and always has been, a mecca for hustlers, a magnet for the eager and ambitious.  And the nation too is rarely subject to sloth; our capacity for action over the years has at times had unfortunate consequences for our neighbors.  We are doers, go-getters, achievers.  We have other sins but, I at first concluded, not the sin of sloth.

     In 1556-1558 the Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder did a series of seven engravings illustrating the Seven Deadlies that I find so engaging I shall offer them here.  They follow the same pattern: in the center foreground is a human, more often a woman than a man (feminists, take note!), who represents one of the sins, with an appropriate symbolic animal close by.  All around is a fantastical landscape reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch, with weird constructions and all manner of humans, including giants, and bestial-looking demons engaged in actions exemplifying the sin.  Shocking, puzzling, or amusing, the details are well worth examining, though I can't begin to explain them all.  Some express Flemish proverbs we are not familiar with.  These landscapes have been called surreal, but in fact they are quite logical and ordered, each detail illustrating the sin in question.  For traditional Christianity sin was a serious matter; it lowered us to the level of animals and was ugly to behold.

Sloth (Desidia), by Bruegel.  For him, sloth seems to be a kind 
of sleeping sickness.  The associated animal is a snail.     Did I say Americans aren't guilty of sloth?  Well,  I have changed my mind.  Yes, when I go out on errands I see runners whizzing by, and cyclists pumping furiously in the bike lanes (or conspicuously not in them), which suggests an energetic city and nation.  But why, then, this epidemic of obesity that we hear so much about?  Some Americans are certainly active and agile, but thanks to the automobile, television, and the Internet, many others are strangers to exertion; they would rather drive than cycle or walk, and prefer to sit passively in front of their TV sets or computer screens than to do even a gentle bit of yoga, much less anything so strenuous as tennis or swimming.  As for golf, most golfers now rent little put-puts to drive them about the links, and so avoid anything so challenging as walking.  Yes, many of us are sunken in sloth, a fact that my account of gluttony will extend even further.

Gluttony

     Another sin from which I seem to be exempt.  I eat my three squares a day, but between meals I'm not even tempted to snack.  I enjoy food, but it isn't the center of my life; there's so much else to do.

Bruegel on gluttony (Gula).  She is sitting on a pig and guzzling from a pitcher.  On the left, a 
man vomits into a river.  In the right background a man's head in the shape of a windmill
 is being force-fed.
     Thomas Aquinas took a broader view of gluttony, which for him included an obsessive anticipation of meals, and the constant eating of delicacies and excessively costly foods; it is sinful, he opined, to eat too soon, too expensively, too much, too eagerly, too daintily, or to eat wildly.  Of all these variations of the sin I'm still exempt.  Maybe my aversion dates from the day when, in the college dining hall, I happened to get a hot dog still encased in its wrapping, on which were printed all the ingredients, a hodgepodge of meat scraps that was both appalling and disgusting.  Ever since I've had an aversion to wienies.  Which is especially relevant now, in the wake of the annual Fourth of July hotdog-eating contest sponsored by Nathan's at Coney Island, which was won again this year -- for the seventh time --  by Joey "Jaws" Chestnut, who gorged his way into history by consuming 69 hotdogs and buns in 10 minutes.

Honestly, can you blame me?  But please, no jokes.
Finger-lickin' good.
Brent Moore

    New Yorkers are no more guilty of gluttony than the nation as a whole.  Ah, but that nation as a whole is constantly guzzling Cokes and Pepsis, gulping down pizzas and french fries and Tootsie Rolls, devouring Snickers and Fritos and potato chips, and the exquisite sugary concoctions -- admittedly delicious -- dispensed by the celebrated Magnolia Bakery on the ground floor of my building.  Of course we have an epidemic of obesity, hence an epidemic of diabetes.  Is there gluttony in America?  Are we eating too soon, too much, and too eagerly, and eating wildly?  Just have a look at the nearest fast-food restaurant.  Guilty, guilty, guilty as charged!



Envy


Envy, from an 1894 pulpit in Saint
Bartholomew's Church, Reichenthal,
Austria.
Hermetiker


     Envy involves coveting something that someone else possesses; in the words of Aquinas, it is "sorrow for another's good."  This too I seem to be free of, though I've often had the opportunity to resent someone else's success and wish it for myself.   But somehow I've never ventured down that sinister pathway.  Nor do I think New Yorkers, or Americans generally, particularly prone to envy.  We find our worst sins elsewhere.


Bruegel's envy (Invidia).  Near her is a turkey, a bird newly discovered in North America, and two dogs (or pigs?) fighting over a bone.  I find many of the details baffling, as for instance the shoes
in the left and right foreground.
Lechery

     I've always been at heart monogamous and not inclined to stray.  Bob and I have been in a stable relationship for forty-five years, which to some may sound dull, but for us has been reassuring and rewarding.  But for anyone to be monogamous in this permissive society is amazing, since we are assaulted daily by sexually explicit ads.  At the checkout counter of my supermarket recently I beheld, at eye level, a glossy women's magazine with the enticing suggestion, "Have a great butt."  Of course an illustration accompanied it, with the relevant anatomy conspicuously displayed.

Bruegel's lechery (Luxuria).  Fornication everywhere; even the dogs are at it.
     Balzac's novel La Cousine Bette gives a marvelous portrait of lechery in the person of Baron Hulot, whose passion for his neighbor's complaisant wife, Mme Marneffe, leads to the disintegration of his moral and physical being.  But one doesn't have to go to literature to encounter lechery; I have known two friends who were hopelessly enslaved by it.  One in a candid moment told me that he was addicted to sex, that every so often the feeling came over him that he would be totally unworthy as a person, unless he went out and had sex with a man every night that week.  I had never thought of sex as a possible addiction, but he convinced me.  Another friend whom I had known years before was constantly, as he phrased it, "tom-catting about," having casual sex with strangers on a regular basis.  He had married a Japanese woman because, as he explained to me, if a Japanese husband chooses to go out alone at night, giving no explanation, the Japanese wife acquiesces and asks no questions.  Of this he took full advantage.  He often regaled me with his adventures, sent me postcards from the Caribbean featuring clusters of phallic bananas, and offered tantalizing tidbits of information, as for instance the latest fashion in French male underwear, and how casual French lovers switched to the intimate tu in moments of passion, then reverted to the formal vous afterward.  The first friend is now in a stable longtime relationship and free of his addiction.  The other one I haven't seen in years; I wonder what has become of him.  Perhaps, as he got older, the tom-catting subsided, and the wife could claim him fully at last.  Perhaps.

Greed  

     So far, viewers will note that, by my own accounting, I've gotten off scot-free.  But now the plot thickens.  I confess to being, to some extent, guilty of greed, the desire to acquire or possess more material wealth than one needs; I am, in a small way, a greed creep.  But how could I or anyone not be, when we live in a capitalist society that sees everything in terms of money and encourages its acquisition by all means fair or foul?  Especially in this country, where wealth, not social rank or merit, brings respect and security, and there is no national health-care system to rely on as one gets older.   SAVE,  SAVE,  SAVE!  urge financial advisers, and how is one to do it without becoming just a bit greedy?

Bruegel's greed (Avaritia); near her, a toad.  The victims seem to be stripped to their underwear.  In the left background a mob is assaulting a fantastical structure that probably contains a treasure.  On the right, archers shoot at a bag containing coins that rain down on the ground.
     Christ drove the money changers out of the temple, an action that many artists have illustrated.  And the medieval Church looked askance at money and its accumulation, deeming the charging of interest for loans to be sinful.  Jews, not being Christian, could practice money lending, but in early Renaissance Italy banks developed to answer the needs of a mercantile society and even conduct business for the Church.  So if the Church, in spite of its misgivings, found banks and banking to be a necessity and had good uses for money, I guess my modest stabs at greed can be forgiven.

Christ Driving the Money Changers out of the Temple.
Valentin de Bourgogne, ca. 1610

      Ah, but how about Wall Street and corporations generally?  Think of the banks and cigarette companies, or Big Pharma, which is constantly being fined for misrepresenting its products and committing other peccadilloes?  Too often government lets corporations write its laws, or crafts laws with cunning loopholes to accommodate their interests.  I cite again my favorite Occupy Wall Street sign:  TODAY  ONLY:  BUY  ONE  SENATOR,  GET  ONE  FREE.  The Sunday Business Section of a recent Sunday's Times (June 30) listed the pay of 200 top U.S. executives.  The total compensation of Oracle's CEO was a whopping $96 million, that of CBS's CEO $60 million, and so on down the scale to a paltry $11 million for GM's top honcho.  In America the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.  Is greed inherent in capitalism?  Is there such a thing as compassionate or principled capitalism?  Well, one can always dream.

Pride

     In Christian tradition this is the worst of the seven, the one that got Satan thrown out of heaven and cast down into the sulfurous precincts of hell.  It is defined as the desire to be more important or attractive than others, and as excessive love of self.  Dante described it as "love of self perverted to hatred and contempt for one's neighbor."

Bruegel's pride (Superbia).  She eyes herself in a hand mirror, next to a peacock flaunting its tail.
     So am I guilty of pride?  We all have moments of high self-esteem and I am no exception, but this in itself hardly constitutes the sin of pride.  And like most people, my moments of high self-esteem alternate with moments of low self-esteem, which doesn't sound like Satan or any exemplar of pride.  Also, I have a mischievous sense of humor that prompts me daily, or hourly, to laugh at myself for a fool.  Pride, I think, is more likely to afflict the high and mighty than the low and trivial.  One endearing comment of Lincoln, when President, was that sometimes he thought all the world were fools, and he himself the biggest fool of all.  A useful bit of self-deflation, but not one that undermined his ability to govern.  The sin of pride leaves little room for humor, least of all at one's own expense.

     Bruegel shows pride at its worst; it is bestial, grotesque, degrading.  But the Satan of Milton's Paradise Lost has a certain grandeur, and this is conveyed in the illustrations of Gustave Doré.

Doré's Satan.  Defeated, but not grotesque or ugly.
     So is New York guilty of pride?  As the premier city of the Empire State, seat of the United Nations and a must for tourists, a center of fashion, publishing, and finance, and a preferred target of terrorists, how could it not be?  In fact, it wouldn't be New York if it wasn't.  Grudgingly, I allow it this sin of sins without too much condemnation.

     And is America guilty of the sin of pride?  You bet!  The doctrine of Manifest Destiny, enthusiastically embraced in the mid-nineteenth century, meant that God or Providence or the Powers That Be wanted us to expand across the continent, albeit at the expense of our neighbors.  In peace and war alike, God is always on our side.  We will bring peace to the frontier, civilization to the benighted Filipinos, freedom to those who want it (or don't want it), and democracy to the world.  We are a shining example of all things good, and can vastly improve the world, if the world will only heed us and follow.  Today, perhaps, chastened by a few futile foreign wars, we are a little less confident, a little less imperialistic, but deep down inside I suspect that we harbor remnants, huge remnants, of these grandiose assumptions.  Like all great powers, all empires, America reeks of the sin of pride.

The War to End Wars
Make the World Safe for Democracy
Manifest Destiny
Fifty-four Forty or Fight
In the Name of Jehovah and the Continental Congress
Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory of the Coming of the Lord
The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave
 God Shed His Grace on Thee
Operation Just Cause
The Patriot Act

Wrath

     I've saved the best till last, for of this sin I am admittedly, flagrantly, incorrigibly guilty.  Not at the expense of others, for I'm really very patient with people, wouldn't dream of flaring up at them or in their presence.  What provokes my anger is the universe, things, and myself.  Wrath has been described as inordinate and uncontrolled feelings of hatred and anger.  It is violent and self-destructive and can manifest itself as impatience, revenge, and vigilantism.  In my case, no vigilantism, little revenge, but a vast deal of impatience.

Bruegel's wrath (Ira).  This one time the figure is decidedly male: a sword- and whip-wielding soldier who with his followers massacres all before him.  The associated animal is a bear.  In the left
background another soldier has a victim on a spit and pours some liquid onto or into his belly 
or groin.  These scenes may have been less fantastic than real in the wars of Bruegel's time.
     So what provokes these rages of mine?  For one thing, the laws of the universe, and above all the law of gravity, which I would like to repeal.  I drop things, resent having to stoop and pick them up.  Sometimes I just kick them out of sight, but then I have to retrieve them later.  As for things, there seems to be no end.  For instance:
pens that won't writestubby pencilschild-proof bottles that I can't openjunk mailjunk phone callsmisfiled fileslittle rugs that kick up easilyeasy-to-open packages that aren'tumbrellas whose ribs become ungluedrotating fans that won't rotatebank statements that won't balanceair-conditioners that drip on mecrumbling plastertangled hangarscrooked lampshadesa perverse and perfidious computer  
     Worst of all is the computer, which harasses me daily.  If I'm trying to compose a text, the text jumps around on the screen; it simply won't sit still.  Or the print suddenly enlarges.  Or the computer informs me that I'm not connected to the Internet, when I really am.  Or its officious memory proposes websites which aren't at all what I had in mind.  Or suddenly a lot of gibberish appears on the screen, blotting out whatever I'm reading or working on.  And so on.  Whatever its limitations, my typewriter never harassed me in this way, never presumed to be smarter than me, never imposed on me things I didn't want.  My computer is presumptuous, arrogant, malicious.  I have never wholly trusted machines, and it knows this and wreaks vengeance.  We have truces when it behaves, but they never last.  It is war, war, war.

     Needless to say, I disclaim responsibility for any of these provocations, computer-inspired or otherwise.  I am a victim of things generally.  They conspire against me, trick me, frustrate me, baffle me, even though I have done them no injury, bear them no ill will whatsoever.  Although by nature inferior to humans, they don't know their place, they offend my sense of order, my tranquility.  And what do I do, when provoked?  Mostly I utter imprecations, blasphemies, uninspired profanities, shrieks of rage and vengeance.  These are meant for my ears alone, but anyone in close proximity can't help but hear and bear witness.  Not long ago I heard of a young man who, when his rented boat overturned on a lake in a park, uttered shrieks and blasphemies, scorching the ears of all around, including mothers with impressionable young children.  For this outburst he was hauled into court and made to pay a fine.  My heart goes out to him; there but for the grace of God (or someone) go I.
     In point of fact, I rarely rage in public and my rages, though sometimes violent, end quickly, often with a bit of laughter at my own folly.  But for the sake of public peace and gentility, lately I have embarked upon a campaign of gentility.  Before, I muttered or uttered
##***++##*!##?***!!!
Now, in the softest voice, I remonstrate 
Why, you recalcitrant little thing, you!
Or  
You mischievous little devil!
Or
How can you do this to me, you naughty inanimate blob of an object?


All of which, frankly, sounds wimpish.  Which raises an interesting question:  Is polite, civilized behavior inherently wimpish?  It may well be.  Whatever Satan was or is, he certainly isn't a wimp.
     Speaking of Satan, by comparison with his revolt against the Almighty, I have to confess that my rages are puny; nothing epic here, or grandiose.  So puny, so quickly terminated, I have to question whether they really qualify as one of the Seven Deadlies.  I hate to end on such a down note, when viewers probably hoped for shocking revelations, but can wrath over a stubby pencil or a malfunctioning umbrella or even a malicious computer merit such classification?  I seriously doubt it.  Bruegel wouldn't have deigned to include such trivia.

     Donation fatigue:  Or maybe I should say generosity fatigue, or heart failure.  WBAI failed to achieve the goal of its spring fund-raising drive, so now it continues, not full-time but at intervals, to beg for donations.  One fund-raiser asks for an "angel" to come forward and donate five or ten thousand dollars -- sums I have never heard mentioned before.  In this game I'm not even a cherub.  Having given three times already -- modestly, but still: three times -- I confess that my generosity is worn thin.  When these appeals begin, I flee to WNYC, which may be doing something relevant or something silly.  I know all the arguments for giving, but I can't help it; I can only take so much.  And if  I'm experiencing donation fatigue, so must many others.  There's something very wrong.  WBAI estimates that out of all its listeners only 10 percent donate.  Why?  I wish I knew the answer.  (For me and WBAI, see posts 16, 50, and 60.)


     Coming soon:  Next Wednesday, July 10, The Magnificence and Insolence of Trees.  Next Sunday, July 14 (Bastille Day!):  Liars, Cheats, and Manipulators.  And others in the offing.


(c)  2013  Clifford Browder

69. Jim Fisk, part 5: Such a Good Boy

            This post completes the Saga of Jim Fisk.  The earlier installments comprise posts 61, 63, 66, and 67.  Fisk appears earlier in posts 44, 45, and 46, dealing with the Great Erie War of 1868, when Fisk, Gould, and Daniel Drew fought Cornelius Vanderbilt for control of the Erie Railway, a struggle that combined drama with farce.

     *                    *                  *                 *                   *                   *                  *                  

            Editor Horace Greeley disliked Jay Gould, loathed Jim Fisk.  How could he not loathe the high-living fat man who was his opposite, Greeley being a perennial critic and crusader, an advocate of a milk and Graham cracker diet, shuffling in a country hat and floppy trousers, inveighing against drink, tobacco, dancing, and divorce?  The same fervor that kindled his rebukes of Erie management sparked his tirades against Fisk’s imports of light opera, which he saw as an extension of French theater, that shameless expounder of the fine art of adultery.  He was determined to make his Tribune the nemesis of Erie.
Editor Greeley in his office.          Fisk’s influence was pernicious and inescapable, he told the Tribunestaff.  If people were so misguided as to want to see the latest Offenbach opera, they had to go to Fisk's Opera House, and even if he wasn't in his box, all those frescoed nudes and chandeliers and thingamabobs proclaimed his grandiose offensive bad taste.  If you wanted to go to Boston via Fall River, or in season to Long Branch, you had to take one of his steamboats, with egregious plush furnishings and an outsized portrait of the rogue himself.  Strolling on the Fifth Avenue, you risked meeting him strutting in front of his band.  And if you took refuge in the Park, there he was chortling and hallooing in a fancy rig, running wild with loose women.  Half the town loved him and half hated him; the man didn’t care which, as long as he was the center of attention.  In all but name, he had made this city Fiskville.


            On November 25, 1871,  the long-heralded case of Mansfield vs. Fisk – the libel suit, not the action to snag fifty thousand dollars – came up before Judge Bixby at the Yorkville Police Court on East Fifty-seventh Street.  The packed audience had scratched and shoved to get in, one woman fainting and an elderly gentleman having his pince-nez shattered in the process; the police intervened to keep order.  Pencils poised, the press were out in force, the Herald chronicler eager to recount, now in Roman mode, the exploits of Caesar Fisk, Mark Anthony Stokes, and Cleopatra Mansfield, while the Tribune scribe prepared to pillory Antichrist.
            Necks craned as the principals assembled.  The Herald man was scribbling images already: Fisk’s stickpin “shone out of his fat chest like the danger light at Sandy Hook bar,” while Stokes’s diamond pinkie ring “glowed like a glowworm in a swamp.”  Prince Erie was wearing his admiral's uniform, but his face was grim, his mustache waxed to a point, while Stokes, attired in an Alexis coat of dull cream color (the latest latest style) and polished black boots, sat stiffly, swinging his cane nervously between his knees as he waited for the proceedings to begin.
            Watched by all, Miss Helen Josephine Mansfield took the stand in a black silk dress with flounces, veiled, her bosom snowy with lace, and wearing a jaunty Alpine hat with a feather.  Showing poise that almost masked the hurt in her voice, she testified how Mr. James Fisk, Jr., had libeled her and Mr. Edward S. Stokes by accusing them of trying to blackmail him by means of his letters; her good name had been sullied.  Then Fisk’s attorney, armed with information newly acquired by his client,  closed in.
            “Years ago in San Francisco, wasn’t a gentleman by the name of D.W. Perley found in your company clad only in a shirt, and allowed by your stepfather to leave only after signing a check for a substantial amount at pistol point?”
            Miss Mansfield winced, paled.  Her attorney protested vigorously: “The witness’s veracity is not to be confused with her chastity!”  Amid snickers from the audience, the judge allowed Fisk’s attorney to proceed.  He repeated the question.
            Miss Mansfield’s voice trembled.  “Yes, there was a circumstance of that kind happened, but he was fully clothed, and the check was in payment of a debt.  My virtue was not in question.”  (More snickers.)
            “When you were acquainted with Mr. Fisk, didn’t he supply you with a steady flow of funds?”
            “He was only a friend.  I am a lady of independent means.  My money comes from speculations in stocks.”
            “When the Erie Railway board of directors were in exile in Jersey City, were you there as well?”
            “As a friend.  I had a suite at Taylor’s Hotel.”
            “Did anybody occupy it with you?”
            “All the time, you mean?”
            “You know what I mean.”  (Snickers.)
            "Mr. Fisk did, sometimes."
            "Anybody else?"
            "During the day it was used as a sort of rendezvous by the officers."
            "During the night only by yourself and Colonel Fisk?"
            "Yes, that is all, I think."
            On the stand for three hours, she maintained her poise, but when she left the stand, it was clear to all that she and Stokes had indeed been conspiring against Fisk.  

            At Christmas Jim Fisk went to see his wife Lucy in Boston.  (Yes, he had a wife.  If followers of this blog have forgotten her, so at times did Fisk himself.)  Lucy was back from Europe now; had the scandal reached her ears?  Though he dreaded it, he had to confess.  He did, portraying Josie as a venal wanton, himself as a pliant fool.  His jenny wren was shocked.  How could her boy have done this?  Jim Fisk wallowed in contrition, declaring himself unworthy of her forgiveness.  Though a stranger to motherhood, Lucy Fisk brimmed with maternity.  Of course she forgave her little boy.  He'd done a bad thing, but he hadn't been happy, had he?  She soothed him, reassured him.  Jim Fisk left Boston forgiven, but troubled.  He had destroyed Lucy's calm of innocence with the hurt of knowledge.  Would she ever be the same?

            DOWN  WITH  THE  ERIE  ROBBERS!  screamed the Tribune, insisting that Fisk’s letters contained sufficient evidence to send all the Erie rogues to prison.  With shareholders up in arms, tracks broken, trains derailed, and his partner’s private life destined for further exposure in the courts, Jay Gould went to Fisk again, determined to set the Erie house in order: Fisk had to resign as vice president of the railroad.  Choking back tears, on the last day of the year he did so; Prince Erie no longer.  That same day an Erie engine jumped the track near Hackensack, crushing the fireman’s foot, and another gold speculator brought suit against Fisk and Gould for fifty thousand dollars.
            On January 6, 1872, the case of Mansfield vs. Fisk came up for its second hearing.  Fisk himself was not present, since his testimony was scheduled for a later session, but the plaintiff was very much there, in a velvet jacket over a dress of black silk.  Stokes was also on hand in an elegant coat, his boots polished, but looking worried, as Josie took the stand again and was subjected to ruthless questioning by Fisk's attorney.  As the examination continued, her poise crumbled, her voice faltered: she had no recollection of this, denied that, never tried to blackmail Mr. Fisk.  Her own testimony revealed her as a scheming doxy older, crasser, and greedier than Fisk had ever dreamed.  She left the stand in tears.
            Her cousin Marietta Williams took the stand briefly to defend the respectability of the Mansfield household, where she also resided, then was questioned by Fisk’s lawyer about Miss Mansfield’s character.
            “Her general habits – ” she began.
            “I don’t mean her general habits,” said the lawyer.  “That would involve an extensive range of inquiry.”
            The spectators roared, Stokes glared, and Josie buried her teary face in a handkerchief.
            When Stokes took the stand in turn, he insisted that his friendship with Miss Mansfield was platonic.  When he called on Miss Mansfield, her cousin always sat between them.
            “Did you stay at Miss Mansfield’s overnight?”
            “Only when the weather was stormy.”
            “It must have been an inclement year!”
            The spectators roared again.
            Further questioning completed the portrait of Stokes as little more than a fancy man sharing with Josie the bounty she had wheedled out of Fisk.  When the court adjourned for lunch, Stokes stepped down from the stand, nerves shaken, his delicate being spiked on barbs of scorn.  One of his lawyers pulled him aside and informed him that the case was hopeless and had to be dropped.  Fighting off the sting of despair, Stokes let his lawyers whisk him off to Delmonico’s for oysters and ale.  There they were greeted by Judge Barnard, who informed them that a grand jury had just indicted Stokes and Josie for attempting to blackmail Fisk.  The young man's rage seethed, his features tightened. 
            Getting word at his Opera House office of the morning's court proceedings, James Fisk, Jr., washed at his nymph-adorned marble-and-porcelain washstand, stopped at the Opera House bar for a lemonade, and went forth by carriage in a silk hat and scarlet-lined cloak, diamonds ablaze, savoring a taste of triumph.  Having decided to visit the widow of an old friend whose family he was helping financially, he shouted the address to his coachman in a voice that anyone in the vicinity could hear.  Stokes was in the vicinity.
            Alighting from his carriage at the Grand Central Hotel on Broadway, Fisk whistled, bounced up the stairs.  Stokes loomed at the top, revolver in hand: “I’ve got you now.”
The witness is a young hotel porter.  From 
Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper.
           Astonished, Fisk froze: a perfect target.  A bullet burned his arm, another ripped his stomach; he wailed, staggered, grasped the handrail, didn’t fall.  As Stokes fled into the hotel, people flocked to the downstairs entrance, helped the wounded man up the stairs through a lingering smell of gunpowder, and deposited him in an empty room with a bed; a doctor was summoned. 
            Outside, the news raced through the streets, rippled the length of horsecars, splashed into restaurants and shops.  Barbers paused, razors held in midair above their lathered customers; bellboys blurted it to managers; at the Opera House, clerks gasped, dancers wept.  While newspapers stopped their presses and began writing the biggest story in years (“He can’t even die quietly,” muttered Greeley), armies of lawyers wondered how this would affect the reams of red-taped documents wedged in cubbyholes in roll-top desks. 

           In room 213 of the Grand Central Hotel, while police and reporters flocked outside, the house physician dressed the arm wound, probed the stomach wound, couldn’t find the bullet, gave him a brandy and water.
            “Doctor,” said Fisk, his stomach aflame, “if I’m going to die, I want to know it beforehand.”
            “Colonel, you’re not going to die tonight, and not tomorrow either, I hope.”  His voice held scant assurance.
            More doctors came, gave him chloroform, probed deep for the bullet, couldn’t find it in the mass of his flesh.  “For God’s sake, send for Lucy,” he gasped; they did.  Arrested on the hotel premises by bystanders, Stokes was brought in, mute, rigid, glaring.  Fisk looked: “Yes, that’s the man who shot me.”  They took him away.
            Tweed came.  “Colonel, how do you feel?”
            “Like a little boy who’s run away from school and eaten green apples.  I’ve got a bellyache.”  They gave him morphine.
            Jay Gould, his features rarely warped by sentiment, arrived, looked at his only friend, sat tensely in an adjoining room with others, bowed his head, burst into sobs.
            Informed by a Herald reporter at home, Josie Mansfield paled.  “Stokes must have been insane!”  Then, collecting herself: “I am in no way connected.  I have my reputation to maintain.”
            Locked in a cell at the Tombs, Stokes lit a cigar, flung it away, lit another, flung it away, lit another.
            The press kept watch all night while he rallied, sank.  “I’m not afraid to die,” he whispered, as doctors, friends, brass bands, and champagne and pickled oysters at Delmonico’s fuzzed into a haze, and the haunting silence that he had always dreaded loomed.  A little boy groping through a cold mist, alone; terror, then a warming presence.


   
          Toward dawn Lucy Fisk had arrived from Boston, found him in a coma.  She sat with him for hours, soothed him, held his hand.  Gently, he died.  She kissed him, wept.

            “He was such a good boy.”
            Gotham and the nation were shocked: Colonel-Admiral James Fisk, Jr., impresario and Prince of Flash, had bounced into the void.




            “Whoremaster!  Profligate!  Antichrist!” thundered pulpits throughout the nation.  Intoned the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher in Brooklyn, “I say to every young man who has looked upon this glaring meteor, ‘Mark the end of this wicked man, and turn back again into the ways of integrity!’ ”  Noted Greeley’s Tribune, “Mr. Gould will be glad to be rid of this encumbrance and hide all Erie’s crimes in his grave.”  The Stock Exchange refused to fly its flag at half mast; Erie stock surged on the market.  But Erie clerks and workers, chorus girls, and bellboys mourned: “Damn it, he was fun!”
            At the Tombs Ned Stokes, in a velvet dressing jacket and silk socks, fought off bedbugs, dined on catered veal.  Lynch talk surfaced among Erie employees and the men of the Ninth Regiment; two hundred and fifty policemen guarded him, with a squad at Josie Mansfield’s.
            In the vast marble lobby of the Opera House the colonel, a pudgy veteran of  Wall Street and boudoir battlefields, lay in state in his blue uniform, gold-laced with red epaulets, his regimental sword at his side, as hundreds filed by to pay their respects.   
            “Once more, dear friend, for the last time,” said his barber, who, touching the waxed ends of the colonel’s mustache, gave them an expert twirl.  The rosewood coffin was closed.
            With muffled drums the teary-eyed Ninth Regiment – hoarding memories of beer-spouting Opera House parties with high-kicking dancers, hosted by the braidiest, craziest, rip-roarin’est colonel in the world – bore forth the coffin followed by a riderless horse, stirrups reversed, plus six colonels and a general in black-draped, solemn pomp.  It would have made him proud. 
            Multitudes watched, the crush so great that five ladies fainted.
            “A friend of the poor,” sobbed a waiter girl.
            “A bully boss,” said a tough.
            “Nothing like it,” a blueblood muttered, “since Lincoln died; obscene.”
            At the New Haven depot they saw him off on a Brattleboro train furled with smoke and crepe.  Was his funeral the last caper of a master of surfaces and fun?  Had he learned from his hurt?  Had he left on the witnessing world any more meaningful impression than the glint and flickerings of Flash?  The city didn’t know, but having lately called him rogue, lecher, thief, it missed his whistle and shine.


            A week after his death, Fisk's letters to Josie were finally published by the Herald; they revealed nothing about Erie corruption.  Bogus biographies of both Fisk and Josie also soon appeared.  Two hundred and fifty of Fisk's canaries were sold at auction.  His fortune turned out to total a mere million, much of it having been gobbled up by legal expenses.  In Brattleboro the citizens put up an impressive cemetery monument adorned with -- appropriately -- four scantly clad young women representing railroads, shipping, trade, and the stage.


            Edward S. Stokes was tried for murder, but claimed that he had shot Fisk in self-defense, since Fisk had whipped out a pistol and meant to shoot him; Josie Mansfield appeared for the defense.  Though witnesses for the prosecution testified that Fisk owned no guns at all, the jury could not agree.  At his second trial Stokes was convicted and sentenced to be hanged, but he won an appeal and was tried a third time, convicted of manslaughter, and sentenced to six years in prison.  He served four years at Sing Sing, where influence got him lenient treatment, before being released early for good behavior.  He was an outcast at first, but the proprietor of the Hoffman House, a loyal friend, gave him a room there and took him in as a partner.  He was often seen there at the bar, where a famous painting by the French artist Bouguereau, Satyr and Nymphs, was a must-see for visiting gentlemen.  He later quarreled with the proprietor, was involved over the years in various shady enterprises, and died in New York in 1901.  He evidently had a wife who divorced him.  At the time of his death he was living with another woman who claimed that they had been secretly married a year before.

           Vilified in New York, Josie Mansfield left the city and, like many an American exile, took up residence in Paris.  In 1891 she married an expatriate American lawyer in London, but later divorced him and returned to America.  In time she went back to Paris, where she died in 1931, having survived Fisk by almost sixty years, and was buried in Montparnasse Cemetery.  The funeral was attended by  two servant women and an unidentified third mourner.

            Returning to Boston, Lucy Fisk frittered away in bad investments and unwise loans what she had inherited from her husband, and lived from then on in modest circumstances.  She died in Boston in 1912 and is buried with her husband in Brattleboro.

            So all these people once closely associated with Colonel/Admiral Prince Erie Fisk ended their days shabbily and died obscurely.  None of them seems to have had the knack of living meaningfully and well.




            Jim Fisk's story cries out to be told -- and retold.  It's throughout the blogosphere, there have been biographies and a song, and even an unmemorable 1937 Hollywood movie, The Toast of New York, with Edward Arnold as Fisk, Frances Farmer as Josie, and Carey Grant as a character who, in an unlikely combination, seems to combine Stokes and Gould.  Playing fast and loose with historical fact, the film was a commercial flop and lost $530,000.  Daniel Meek played Dan Drew.


            Writers have conceived of Fisk's saga as a musical, though none has been produced to date.  I know, having once entertained  such a folly myself.  My only comment, in retrospect: Yuck!  (I have another idea for theater -- not a musical -- as well, but more about that another time ... or maybe never.)  With Fisk, one major problem is casting.  Lots of actors and actresses could do Josie, Stokes, and Gould, but who could do Fisk?  I remember Edward Arnold as a splendid character actor in films, but I can't imagine him -- or anyone -- as Fisk.  A pity.  Jubilee Jim would so relish the thought of getting still more attention!

            Source note:  For information on Jim Fisk I am especially indebted to W.A. Swanberg, Jim Fisk: The Career of an Improbable Rascal.  Anyone wanting to know more about Fisk should read this very readable biography.

            Note on the Gay Pride Parade:  Last Sunday, a warm, humid day with a threat of rain, was, of course, the annual day of craziness.  As usual, our friend John came to share some wine and cheese with Bob and me, after which John and I went out to lunch.  We went to our favorite Chinese restaurant, the Empire, on Seventh Avenue just below Greenwich Avenue, avoiding the nearer restaurants because they would probably be jammed.  The streets were crowded and the police were out in force directing traffic, but we got our usual ground-floor table by a big window that let us watch those going to and coming from the parade, a spectacle almost as colorful as the parade itself.  When we left the Empire it was jammed, with people waiting near the entrance for a table, and outside were two gay guys with outsized fuzzy-wuzzy hairdos, one bright yellow and one bright pink.  It was beginning to rain lightly, but we went down Seventh Avenue toward Christopher Street and the parade, whose floats we could seeing passing in the distance to clamorous acclaim, and whose sounds drummed in our ears.  On all sides, rainbow flags (small ones stuck in hairdos) and rainbow shirts and T-shirts, blatant colors, and memorable messages on T-shirts: two lesbians walking hand-in-hand with identical T-shirts:  I'M  HERS  and  I'M  HERS; a gay guy:  IT  GETS  BETTER  (the message of older gays to young ones still in school, where peer-group pressure weighs heavily and bullies harass them); and another lesbian: BAM/WOW.  As we got near Christopher Street the crowd on the sidewalk was jam-packed, so we decided we didn't need to see more, having watched the parade often in years past.  The mood generally was upbeat and celebratory, innocently wild, nothing nasty or confrontational.  Back in our apartment, Bob and I anticipated whoops and shrieks into the night, since celebrations don't die fast; it is, after all, only once a year.

New York?  No, Tel Aviv, June 2013.
U.S. Embassy, Tel Aviv


          Coming soon:  Next Sunday, Me and the Seven Deadly Sins, with a glance at this sinful city and the nation, too.  After that, Trees on the following Wednesday and something else on the following Sunday.  Meanwhile, Happy Fourth to all!


(c)  2013  Clifford Browder

68. Farewells

                                                         p.servus     This post is about farewells, both those implying mortality and those that don’t.  But let's face it: most farewells imply lasting loss and often death.  I’ll start close to home with a relatively conventional farewell.  My mother died quietly in her sleep at age 94 – the death that most of us would probably prefer.  I didn’t have a chance to say good-bye, but I had phoned her at intervals during the previous year, so I wasn’t haunted by the thought that I’d neglected her.  But saying farewell also involves burial and all that goes with it.  I flew back to Illinois and my older brother, who lived with her, met me at the airport.  “I already feel had by this character,” he said, referring to the funeral director, “so you can be the skinflint from New York.”  At the funeral home we were served coffee in the sumptuous parlor, where we were to wait until the director could see us.  But the an assistant appeared almost immediately and invited us into the director’s office.  “Better take that coffee with you,” said my brother loudly.  “It’s the only free thing you’ll ever get in this place!”  My brother was not known for subtlety.
     When the director showed us a bunch of pricey coffins, I assumed – uncomfortably – my role as the skinflint from New York.  “Have you any others?” I asked, meaning of course any cheaper ones, though the word “cheap” was not to be uttered.  There is in principle a wide range of possibilities, from the most ornate to – if you can find one – a simple pinewood coffin.

This ...?                                              G. Dall'Orto ... or this?                                  Nature's Casket     Footnote:  All right, I cheated just a little, since the ornate casket is a seventeenth-century German one exhibited at the Castello Sforza in Milan, and therefore not readily available.  But it shows how fancy a casket can be.  As for the simple pinewood coffin, it's the bargain item available from Nature's Casket in Longmont, Colorado.  You assemble it yourself.  What an adventure -- assembling your own coffin!  But it wouldn't cost much, and it's eco-friendly, made with nontoxic materials that are 100% biodegradable.  Nature's Casket is part of a growing green burial movement that I have just learned about and heartily approve of.

     Now to get back to our story: the director went to another room and came back wheeling a somewhat simpler coffin, but a far cry from basic pinewood.  We took it.
     The funeral itself was simple enough, attended by just my brother and me, and a cousin and his wife who drove up from Indianapolis.  Having on occasion seen funeral processions pass by in the street, I now found myself in my brother’s car at the head of one, right behind the hearse.  Yes, I felt strangely conspicuous, but the drive was short.  At the cemetery we had planned no final rites, but I suggested that we all scatter on the grave some flowers sent by an old friend in Indiana.  Then my cousin gave a brief impromptu speech, thanking my mother for being such a good friend to her younger sister, his mother, long deceased.  It was true: the two sisters had been close all their lives, with never a moment of friction that any of us knew of.  And so, with the least fuss possible, we said farewell to my mother.


     Now for a different kind of farewell.  When I was studying in France long ago I got to know a precocious young lycée student named Claude, with whom I shared a passion for literature and learning and a keen sense of humor.  (No, it wasn't one of those friendships; we were just buddies.)  He had already written a novel, long sections of which he showed me; from them I learned the word pourriture (rot), since that was what his young protagonist (obviously autobiographical) was rebelling against.  That summer I visited him in Vichy where, like a good Frenchman, he was taking the waters, and a year later I introduced him to the wonders of hitchhiking in England, where we visited castles and country houses and churches, endured the intermittent rain, and stayed in youth hostels.  After I returned to America we kept up our correspondence, and when I retuned to France ten years later there he was, visibly older and now a journalist, ready to travel with me again; on a weekend when he was free, we went to Rouen and visited its churches, then visited various sites of interest in the surrounding area, ending with a sip of cider (not wine, this being Normandy and apple country) in the countryside.  After I returned again to the States we sustained our friendship with letters, but gradually, over time, we began to drift apart.  Years later, when my partner Bob went to Paris, I asked him to check the Paris annuaire and see if he could find Claude's phone number.  He did, and also found his address in the rue des Bernardins, where he had lived for years.  But now, when I wrote him to renew the friendship, I got no answer.  I sensed frustrations on his part -- he had hoped to be a writer, not a journalist, and had family hangups as well --  and he apparently had little desire to revive our friendship.  I felt no such disinclination but had to accept his decision.  So at last I sent him a final note:  "Je regrette ton silence.  Adieu, camarade.  Pour ce qui reste, bon courage!"  (I regret your silence.  Farewell, old friend.  As for what remains, have courage!)  I expected no answer and got none.  With Claude I had shared things I couldn't share with anyone else.  So a big chunk of my youth, and of my connection to France, was gone forever.  A sad farewell.


     When my friend Ed got cancer of the esophagus -- a very aggressive cancer -- I asked him for a half hour of his time so I could present an alternative perspective on healing, and assured him that, if it didn't interest him, I would never mention it again.  I'm not one to proselytize, but knowing how quickly fatal his cancer could be, I decided -- just this once -- to give it a try.  Ed listened patiently as I put the case for an alternative treatment, and after a half hour I left, so he could think it over.  He never brought it up  again, so neither did I.  A month later he asked me to escort him on foot to his bank, and a month after that he had me fetch a taxi so he could go to Saint Vincent's (it still existed) for radiation.  When I wheeled him into the waiting room and saw all the other patients waiting for treatment, my heart sank, for I knew radiation had many nasty side effects and offered no definitive cure.  Several months after that I saw him again into Saint Vincent's, where he told one of his doctors that just taking one short step drained him of energy.  "They don't understand," he kept saying, but then, once, to me: "Maybe you understand."  "I think I do," I replied, aware that Ed was too tired to want to go on living.  A doctors' conference resulted, and they promised Ed that, by rehydrating him overnight, they could replenish his energy.  So Ed agreed to stay over.  When I and other friends went to see him two days later, one of his doctors told us that a biopsy had found the cancer all through his body; he had only a short while to live.  But Ed had indeed recovered his energy and was focused on the practical, giving each of us an assignment; mine was to go to his apartment, get some envelopes and stationery, and put stamps saying LOVE on the envelopes, placing them -- he stressed the importance of this -- upside down.  When I delivered the envelopes as requested, it was the last time I saw him.  Other friends saw him into a hospice, where he died within a week.  So my getting him the envelopes with LOVE stamps placed
upside down -- typical of his sense of humor -- was my farewell.  A small gesture, but somehow fitting.


әʌoႨ
   
     Part of a Manhattan farewell is the cleaning out of an apartment.  Ed had left his records to my friend John, and his books to another friend of his, and named the two as his executors.  To dispose of the records and books they each contacted a dealer who was willing to come and appraise the spoils; as a result, the books brought a thousand dollars, and the records three hundred.  That left the furniture and various odds and ends, and to dispose of these they called in what is known as a liquidator to offer a lump sum and take the lot.   I had never heard of liquidators until John told me about the transaction; back then one found them in the yellow pages, whereas now one googles them and finds numerous listings, usually promising prospective buyers bargain prices for all kinds of wares.  Some obviously prefer to buy up the estates of the affluent, but others deign to take the possessions of those more modestly circumstanced, since these too will find their market.


     Lucky are those who die peacefully in the presence of those they loved the most:  Sarah Bernhardt in the presence of her son, André Gide with the young man -- by then grown, married, and a father -- who as a boy had become his lover.  But not all farewells are peaceful, nor need they come with death.  On the radio recently I heard a man tell how, as a freshman in college, he told his family he was gay, and what resulted.  They seemed to take it in stride; he went back to college happy.  But later he would learn from his sister what had then happened.  His mother, the reigning matriarch of the clan, had the family bring together in the back yard all the son's possessions: letters, clothes, photographs, old report cards, everything in his desk, the desk itself and all the other furniture in his room -- in other words, everything relating to the son.  This done, she set fire to the pile and watched the blaze that followed, until every last vestige of her son was destroyed.  From then on, none of the son's letters was answered, and he slowly came to realize that, because of the mother's action, his bond with his family was severed forever.  He tried to see the mother at work, but when she came down the hall and saw him there, she turned on her heel and avoided him.  After that a package was delivered to him: a funeral wreath mourning the loss of her son.  He never saw her again and years later heard she had died.  Perhaps the saddest farewell I have ever heard of.




     Our friend Hugh, the cunning waif of vignette #16 (6/17/12), was a gentle soul and a mostly recovered alcoholic, but he still had his quirks and obsessions.  Afraid of people yet relating to them well on the phone, for years he had worked as a telephone receptionist, his last job being with a prominent Manhattan law firm that sent him home by limousine to his apartment in the distant nether reaches of Brooklyn.  Certainly he was paranoid, so fearful of identity theft that he didn't throw out any correspondence with his name on it, keeping it in his increasingly cluttered apartment for what ultimate disposal I can't imagine.  And when a close friend died suddenly, he suspected foul play, though there was absolutely no evidence of it.  Furthermore, a hearty meal was an experience almost unknown to him; once retired, he preferred to snack all day on junk food while watching television.  Yet for all these eccentricities, he was kind, gentle, sensitive, considerate, never failing to send an amusing birthday card or heartfelt holiday greeting.  One of Bob's best and oldest friends, and a good friend to me as well.

Euphoria, maybe.  But this stuff can do you in.
     Alas, time caught up with Hugh.  A longtime alcoholic, junk food addict, and user of amyl nitrite and numerous other pills, he had not been kind to his body.  His health problems multiplied, yet he had no doctor to oversee his condition and offer treatment.  Bob kept me informed, as Hugh deteriorated steadily.  Finally one day he phoned us and in Bob's absence I talked to him.  "Hugh," I told him, "for God's sake get to a hospital.  If you have to, go to an emergency room!  Don't wait.  Go!"  He took the advice and ended up in a hospital in Manhattan, where Bob visited him three times, noting further deterioration at each visit.  Hugh's problem was now pneumonia and some other complication, Bob never quite grasped what.  The first time he saw him, he had some device inserted into his mouth that prevented him from talking.  But he obviously wasn't happy being there, wanted to go home; when he was served a tray of food, with a quick gesture he swept it to the floor.  On Bob's third visit he found Hugh heavily sedated and completely out of it.  A nurse told him that they had given him two powerful antibiotics, but to no avail; since he had lived on junk food for years, he had no immune system and therefore no defense against opportunistic infections.  Soon after that we learned from a visiting cousin that Hugh had died.  No funeral; he had arranged to have his remains cremated by the Neptune Society of Medford, New York, the warm ashes to be deposited in the cold Atlantic -- so fitting a conclusion, in Bob's opinion and mine, that we decided to arrange the same with the Society for ourselves.

     But that was not the end of Hugh; his cluttered apartment had to be emptied, and this task fell to Bob and me.  It wasn't just the usual accumulation of a clutterbug, but huge plastic bags crammed full of correspondence never discarded lest his precious identity be stolen, and further piles of mail that had to be gone through, in case they included items of importance.  It took days.  Among the litter were the sketches and eye-catching doodles of a potential artist who had never gone to art school -- so appealing that Bob and I both took some in remembrance of him.  Hugh's cousin and his wife returned from Virginia to collect some items that neither Bob nor I wanted or had room for, and the rest we left for a liquidator.  After closing the apartment door for the last time the four of us went to a nearby restaurant where, by way of a final farewell, we lifted a glass to Hugh's memory, hoping that, wherever he was, he was happy and fulfilled, no longer obsessed with identity theft and the other woes of life on this earth.  A gentle guy, an unfulfilled life, a sad yet hopeful farewell.


     Here is another kind of farewell, or maybe the absence of one.  I had been long out of touch with an old friend, a veteran New Yorker, who was so negative and depressed when I last visited him that I couldn't bring myself to get in touch again.  Years passed; I often thought of him.  Recently I summoned up the courage to phone him; a stranger answered.  If his phone number no longer worked, it could only mean one thing: he was no longer at that address, his residence for years.  And since he had nowhere else to go to, I have to conclude that he has died.  There is no mutual friend to confirm this, but my conjecture is almost certainly correct.  I know he had no will, didn't care what happened to  his things when he died.  Will I ever know for sure what has happened to him?  Maybe not.  So it is in the big city; people can disappear without a trace.  All I can do now is remember the good times he and I shared long ago.


     And now for one more farewell, the last I shall relate.  When my novel The Pleasuring of Men was published, it by chance coincided with the publication of a new list of the survivors of my high school class, with their updated addresses.  So I sent a notice of publication to several old friends whom I hadn't been in touch with for decades, with a personal note addressed to each.  Only one replied: Jean (a fictional name), whom I had dated in junior high school and the first two years of high school, and who surprised me by saying that she had read the novel and called it a tour de force, with scenes that leap off the page without being wordy.  I thought the subject matter might put her off, but she said that this was not the case, explaining that her now deceased husband had done interior design for hospitals and residential customers, had known many gay men in his work, and had been horrified when the AIDS epidemic eliminated many of them.  Other letters followed with news of her family, hometown reminiscences, and even a detailed questionnaire about my vegan diet, which greatly interested her.  The only hint of a problem was her mention of Christian TV, membership in a non-mainstream Bible-based Presbyterian church, and reference to a Damascus Road experience that had changed her life.  Urged by me to explain that experience, she told how a desperate prayer to God had rescued her from chronic depression accompanied by persistent chest pain, and how she felt a wave of power come down from on high to change her utterly and make her a completely new person.  This story fascinated me; I had never experienced such a thing, but greatly respected it as probably the most meaningful event of her life.

     Then, without warning, came the twist: her next letter urged me, since I wasn't born that way, to give up being gay (no hint of such advice prior to this), and ended with the announcement that this was her last letter, she had no more to say, please do not reply.  So complete and abrupt a change of tone astonished me.  I answered briefly, insisting that she tell me why she wanted to kill our friendship.  A month and a half later came her reply: we live in different worlds; in all matters regarding politics, economics, and religion we are at opposite poles, she being Christian and conservative, while I am secular and leftist.  I have dismissed or deflected every opportunity to glimpse into her world, she said -- a statement that amazed me, since I had listened with the greatest interest, even fascination, to her account of her Damascus Road conversion.  The New York Times (which I had never mentioned) is my Bible, she announced, even though it slants and censors the news, and Social Security is a Ponzi scheme.  I believe that, because I am a good person, I will end up in heaven, even though I don't accept Jesus (an opinion I don't recall ever having expressed).  Then, to round things out, she told an anecdote that occurred during the Monica Lewinski affair and that, she assured me, would make my hair stand on end.  (She seemed to know a lot about my hair.)  During a lunch with some women from her church, the subject of the Lewinski affair came up, and the good Christian ladies concluded that our eminent president was WHITE TRASH.  This being the world she lived in, why would I want to have anything to do with it?  Her last words: "I hope all is well with you."

     It was months before I could reply, or even wanted to.  Finally I did, saying that her well-meant advice to give up being gay was based on a false assumption: we don't choose our sexuality, it is imposed on us.  Yes, I admitted, we live in different worlds, but we can still communicate; it might even be interesting.  In the last election, I didn't vote for Obama or even vote Democratic.  (I didn't say who I voted for, hoping to puzzle her at least a little.)  Of course the Times has biases; all papers do.  Clinton is white trash?  I wouldn't have put it that way, but his involvement with Monica was stupid and invited such comments.  Above all, I said, I endorse the words posted on the wall of my health foods store:

 TRUTH  IS  ONE
    PATHS  ARE  MANY  
As for heaven, it might be a bore: all those goody-goodies!  My closing:  "Answer if you want to (I hope you will), but don't, if it would be painful.  Either way, I wish you the very best.  Happy New Year!"

      That was months ago; she hasn't answered.  I regret this and will always miss the gracious correspondent of the earlier letters, who metamorphosed so suddenly into the opinionated correspondent, carping and contentious, of the last letter.  We are indeed in different worlds.  The children of darkness and the children of light can have little commerce, the preachers used to say, though which is which isn't always clear.  In some ways, the saddest of all my farewells because of the opportunities missed.




                Farewell    Adios    

                               Adieu     

                  Leben  Sie  wohl        Addio       Sayonara

     Village celebration:  The decision last Wednesday by the Supremes voiding the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), coming as a surprise to many, was celebrated wildly in the West Village, especially at the Stonewall Inn (see post #38, A Walk Through Greenwich Village, 12/16/12) and the gay center on West 13th Street.  Many of you probably saw it all on TV, which I did not, having no TV.  Today is the day of the annual Gay Pride Parade here in New York, always a slightly crazy day, and the Supremes' decision is sure to fever the fervor.  (See vignette #9, Me and the Gay Pride Parade, 5/27/12.)  My friend John and I will have to navigate carefully to get to a restaurant for lunch and then go our usual separate ways; coming down Christopher Street, the parade may interfere, in which case we might do as John did a year ago and join it for the last few blocks, smiling and waving to the spectators, before it disbands at the river.

     Coming soon:  The last of Jim Fisk next Wednesday, July 3; he goes out with a bang.  Me and the Seven Deadly Sins next Sunday, July 7: my confession: sloth no, wrath yes, and a tiny bit of greed; illustrations by Bruegel.  Beyond that, topics to be announced.  Meanwhile, Happy Gay Pride Day to all!


(c)  2013  Clifford Browder
 

67. Jim Fisk, part 4: Foremost in the Fray

            This post continues the Saga of Jim Fisk, the nineteenth century's most colorful robber baron, following up posts #61 and #63.


Our hero, more at home in civilian garb.                                             Summoned to an emergency meeting in the middle of the night by the superintendent of police, Colonel James Fisk, Jr., learned that his beloved Ninth and four other regiments had been ordered to protect the city’s tiny community of Orangemen when they marched on the morrow, July 12, Orange Day, in celebration of the 1690 victory of Protestants over Catholics in Ireland.  Colonel Fisk knew little and cared less about the history of Orange Day, but was well aware that the city’s Irish Catholics had threatened mayhem in reprisal, and that the Orangemen’s march a year before had provoked a pitched battle leaving five dead and many injured.  Since neither the colonel nor his men had until now anticipated any action other than Opera House galas and parades, this news inspired in them a nest of anxieties.
            July 12 dawned hot and sticky.  The regiment assembled that morning at its armory, well aware that Irish quarry workers and stevedores were already quitting work to mass in protest, tanking up in grog shops en route.  Early that afternoon when, few in numbers, the Orangemen marched down Eighth Avenue, they were entirely screened by police and the military, with Fisk’s Ninth guarding the rear.  Catcalls and jeers greeted the marchers, then tomatoes, eggs, cobblestones, and finally bricks hurled from rooftops that hit the pavement with a hard, crisp smack.  Fisk and his men marched grimly on, sweat streaming, staring straight ahead, through smack after smack all around them.   
            At Twenty-third Street a bullet suddenly zinged, then more.  Furious, several of the marchers, including some of Fisk’s men, broke ranks and opened fire.  Near him a private toppled, his skull shot away, spattering those beside him with brain.  A second man crumpled, then a third.  Fleeing the mayhem, a crowd of onlookers surged across the avenue, engulfing Fisk, who toppled into a swirl of blurred bodies, screams, trampling feet.  When the fugitives were gone, the men of the Ninth saw their colonel sprawled on the pavement, bruised, his sword shattered, groaning in pain. 
            “My ankle!” he yelled.  “It’s broken!”
            All around him soldiers and civilians lay in pools of blood, some moaning, some mute. 


The marchers fire into the mob.  From Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper.
            At Lieutenant Colonel Braine’s command, a squad of soldiers hoisted their colonel’s hefty frame and hustled him over to the curb.  Seeing a doctor’s shingle posted by a doorway, they carried    him up the stairs, deposited him in the office of the startled doctor, wished the groaning colonel good luck, and rushed off to rejoin the parade, which was continuing in spite of the bloodshed.  Examining his patient’s ankle, the doctor found it was dislocated, not broken; he reset it and loaned Fisk a cane.  An hour later the colonel, his ankle reset and bound, left by a back stairway so as to avoid the hostile crowd in the street.  Hobbling down an alley, with great effort he mounted a barrel and scaled a fence, then retreated through back yards past clotheslines and privies.  Donning an old coat and hat given him by a sympathetic householder, he ventured out again on the street and flagged down a cab on Ninth Avenue.  In it, by a quirk of chance, was his pal Jay Gould, who after one glimpse of this sinister intruder, yelled to the cabman, “Drive on!”
            “Wait, Jay!  It’s me!”
            Astonished, Gould let him into the cab.  Traversing streets jammed with hostile Hibernians, the wounded colonel conceived a great yearning for Long Branch, that festive, peaceful haven, and instructed the driver to deposit him on the North River docks.  Catching the next boat to the Jersey resort, he found refuge at last in the Continental Hotel, where he was perennially persona most grata.  Soon he was reclining on a veranda, nursing his swollen ankle while sipping a lemonade.
            Back in the city the parade ended with over forty dead; no Orangeman had been hurt.  The Ninth Regiment, with three dead and four wounded, had been in the thick of it, but where, the press asked, was its colonel?  Stories were circulating about his “wounded (?) ankle,” his back-yard flight past ash cans and privies, his alleged fainting from terror, or fleeing the state in an old lady’s bonnet and dress.  All the dailies sneered. 
            From Long Branch the recuperating colonel issued a communiqué stating that his ankle  constituted a dangerous wound attended by several physicians; he keenly regretted not being able to attend the funeral of the Ninth’s slain heroes.  Lieutenant Colonel Braine hastened to his side and defense, though somewhat at a loss to explain why his superior’s strategic withdrawal had taken him all the way to New Jersey: “Colonel Fisk did his duty to preserve the public peace. He was foremost in the fray.”
            Recovering his health and dignity at Long Branch, where the press fantasized him as attended by a troop of winsome females, the colonel was in no hurry to return to New York.  When he did, more battles awaited him: a suit by his former lady friend Josie for fifty thousand dollars (the alleged debt having marvelously doubled), and one by his rival Stokes for quadruple that -- more tangles in a legal imbroglio that included two suits by irate English stockholders, seventeen Black Friday lawsuits, claims of damages from Erie accidents, actions against Drew and Vanderbilt, and even Fisk himself didn’t know what else.   “Lawyers lap up money,” he remarked, “like kittens lap up milk.”
            Josie had mentioned having Fisk's letters, and the press seized on them greedily.  The Herald proclaimed them “a pillar of fire by night and a column of smoke by day to the redoubtable Fisk,” thus whetting the public’s suspicion that these complaints of a lovesick swain contained lurid secrets of Erie.    Since nothing in his letters to Josie mentioned Erie, Jay Gould urged him to publish them himself and stop Stokes and Josie's attempted blackmail once and for all.  Fisk’s eyes welled with tears:  “I can’t, Jay.  That’s my heart!”
            Gould was amazed at the tears, the hurt.  His comrade in arms, who had challenged Vanderbilt, whipped Drew, thumped up gold in the Gold Room, flummoxed a Congressional committee, and reportedly thumbed his nose at the President, couldn’t bring himself to share with the world his whines and pleas to a doxy.  A nasty mess, and where might it lead?  
            Still smarting from his loss as an investor in the Erie Railway, editor Horace Greeley now viewed Fisk as Antichrist.  Joining in the Herald's campaign, his Tribune published a letter to Fisk from Josie supplied by “an unknown source” that could only have been the lady herself.  She denied trying to extort money from him, but mentioned having a whole trunk full of his "interesting" letters, some of which she blushed to have received.  She claimed to know too well the crimes he had perpetrated, but would leave all matters in dispute to their respective counsel.
            Here again Prince Erie saw shameless venality and cunning, with a literary assist from her fancy man.  But the public was now convinced that these innocuous billets-doux reeked with the corruptions of Erie. 
            Though winning on several fronts, Ned Stokes was still desperately short of funds.  His legal fees were soaring, and his social standing was fraying at the edges, with even the Tribune calling him “Fisk’s too successful rival.”  So he sued Fisk for libel and pressured Josie to do the same – two more suits for Prince Erie.
            At this point it occurred to Jim Fisk -- perhaps at Jay Gould's suggestion -- that he knew precious little about Josie Mansfield's past.   Into this tantalizing void he now unleashed his legal beagles, to sniff out what they could.  In time, piquant details began to emerge; he was shocked, amused, enraged.  If she wanted a fight, she would get it.  He brought formal charges against her and Stokes for attempted blackmail.  With all these suits in the offing, the public anticipated a feast, an orgy of scandal.
            Jim Fisk was alone.  Viewed with smirks by many, pursued daily by reporters greedy for another scrap of gossip, another glimpse of his lovelorn heart, he kept more and more to himself.  Holed up in his brownstone with his valet, he dreaded breakfasting alone.  His whole life had been movement, noise, and glitter; stillness terrified him.  So he invited the young Belgian who interpreted for his French performers to move in with him as a sort of handyman, but really to keep him company, to stave off the abyss of nothingness.
            “George,” he said one morning over breakfast, “the papers are making fun of my early days as a peddler selling calicoes and silks by the yard.  But I’ll tell you something: them was the happiest days of my life.  I had friends, stock, trade, credit, the best horses in New England, and by God, a reputation.  There wasn’t no man could throw dirt onto Jim Fisk!”

            Wrenched from the rumpus of his life -- from gilt, cancans, braid, and champagne -- Jim Fisk may well have wondered who, what was he?  He had always dreaded silence and shunned it, but now it engulfed him.  He was lonelier than ever in his life.



            Lament:  What ever became of Occupy Wall Street, which I chronicled more than once in this blog?  Alas, it seems to have vanished.  When it first surfaced, commentators wondered if it was a movement or a moment.  A moment, it would seem.  Unlike the Tea Party crowd, they never organized, so they seem not to have had any long-term effect.  I miss their rousing chant:

We / are / the ninety-nine percent!  We / are / the ninety-nine percent!

In Spain, Italy, Greece, Turkey, and Brazil the people have been staging mass demonstrations in the streets, and it looks like some tangible reforms may result.  But not here.  We Americans are slow to kindle.  I'm not a rabble rouser, but nothing will change unless the impulse comes from below, from us. Meanwhile, the status quo prevails.  Well, we can divert ourselves by watching the ongoing drama of Mr. Snowden's peregrinations.  I haven't definitively made up my mind yet, but so far I'm inclined to say, "Go, Ed, go!"  I don't really want him caught and locked up in durance vile like Bradley Manning;  we lock up too many people as it is.  But at least there are moments of farce.  Snowden was supposed to have seat 17A on a special flight from Moscow to Havana, so the press filled up the other seats.  The plane took off without Snowden, taking all the journalists to Havana when their story was still back in Moscow.  The Russians are probably laughing, and so am I.

            Coming soon:  Next Sunday, as announced: Farewells (coffins, liquidators, kiss-offs, and a mother's rage).  Next Wednesday, July 3:  fittingly, just before the fireworks of the Fourth, the last of Jim Fisk.  After that, a return to the weekly posts, subjects to be announced.


(c)  Clifford Browder  2013

66. Jim Fisk, part 3: Blue Fire in His Veins

           Here resumes the saga of Jim Fisk, robber baron, impresario, pseudo admiral, and Prince of Flash, who with his partner Jay Gould ran the debt-ridden Erie Railway, whose stock he watered generously, while just as generously raining money and diamonds on Miss Josephine Mansfield, his inamorata.                        

            Colonel Charles H. Braine of the Ninth Regiment of the New York State National Guard, though dressed in civilian clothes, was an erect, slim man of fifty, crisp in his gestures, with a martial air about him and a neatly trimmed mustache.  Calling on Jim Fisk, the Colonel explained that he had come on an urgent mission.  He had served in the Ninth Regiment during the war, when it fought valiantly, and he took great pride in it.  But patriotism wanes in peacetime.  Morale was low, the regiment's numbers were depleted.  The elite youth of the city flocked to the Seventh Regiment, to which the Ninth had always been a poor cousin, looked down upon and even scorned.  The officers had talked of disbanding, but the Colonel had a solution: Jim Fisk.  Not just Prince Erie's cash -- though that would be welcome -- but Jim Fisk himself.  The Colonel would take a voluntary demotion to lieutenant colonel and second-in-command, if Fisk consented to be colonel; his election was assured.
Before his transformation into colonel.            Jim Fisk brightened.  Though he had graced the battlefields of the recent war by his substantial absence, the thought of himself as a regimental commander sparked the blue fire in his veins.  He confessed to having no military experience whatsoever, but the Colonel assured him that he, as second in command, would be on hand to prompt him with the appropriate commands.  And if the future colonel was rather amply proportioned, Braine assured him that his proportions hardly mattered, since it was his spirit that they wanted.  So Jim Fisk, eager to embrace yet another persona, agreed.
            Elected almost unanimously (a few members were Erie shareholders), the new commander addressed the regiment at its armory on West Twenty-seventh Street and  announced that they were going to be the snappiest, flashiest, most top-dog regiment in the city and have fandangos of fun.  He was wildly cheered.  After that he  urged all able-bodied Erie and Opera House employees to rally to the flag -- his flag -- which they did, and had his tailor design a splendid blue uniform rich in gold epaulets, buttons, and braid, with a cap surmounted by a plume; squeezing into it proved a bit of a tussle. 
            Prince Erie’s meteoric rise to colonelcy occasioned much comment in the city.  Some scoffed, others fretted.  Was this comic opera, or would he use his legion to conquer other railroads or even – a disquieted few claimed to be serious -- stage a coup d’état?  Wags hailed him as the first person in history to be simultaneously an admiral and a colonel and debated the proper form of address.  Colonel-admiral?  Admiral-colonel?  Neither?  Both?  The colonel/admiral relished the fuss.
            The first drills under the command of the new colonel were a bit of a fiasco, but gradually, thanks to Braine's whispered help, order emerged out of chaos.  A moonlight parade up the Fifth Avenue, a bastion of quiet elegance, followed, though the genteel residents shuttered their parlors against the bray of the band.  Colonel Fisk then ordered new dress uniforms for the regiment and enticed some of the best Opera House musicians into the regimental band.  This done, he invited the regiment to a special performance of The Twelve Temptations at the Opera House, where they reveled in free champagne, gawked at the onstage waterfall, and cheered the Demon Cancan.  Who would have thought that soldiering could be such fun?  They adored their free-spending colonel.
            Next, the colonel stunned the city yet again by announcing that the Ninth Regiment would set up its summer encampment – traditionally, an occasion for intensive drill – at the breezy coastal resort of Long Branch, for years a stomping ground of his own, and now the preferred vacation spot of the President, his cabinet, and a host of celebrity watchers and lobbyists.  The spit-and-polish Seventh Regiment sneered, predicting a week-long debauch.  But to the surprise of all, Fisk kept a fairly tight rein on skylarkers, drilled the regiment with only a few gaffes of his own, then invited Governor Hoffman of New York to a formal review that proved impressive.  And when the Ninth returned to New York, the colonel led the regiment once again up the Fifth Avenue, this time marching smartly in spiffy new uniforms with a well-tuned, vibrant band, to the cheers of bystanders.  Warned the Herald, “Let the Seventh look to its laurels.”  The colonel beamed.

            For two years Jim Fisk had capered with ebullience and flash, competing with the President to be the most reported-on man in the nation.  His daily jokes in the Erie offices kept the staff in titters.  Flanked by chorus girls and attended by two white footmen in black and two black footmen in white, he drove six-in-hand in the Park.  And at Long Branch, nursing sour feelings since Black Friday, in full martial regalia before a host of witnesses (so a Tribune scribe insisted), he had thumbed his nose at the Presidential carriage. 


            But while Napoleon was out to conquer gold and strut before his newfound legion, his Josephine had grown restless.  Yes, she enjoyed her status as the best-kept woman in the city, and liked hostessing at her Jimjim’s dinners and receptions, but she was tired of his long absences when business or his regiment claimed him, tired of his abrupt cancellations of rendezvous, his tardy arrivals, or failure to arrive at all.  She lived optimally, but how much time could she spend parading about in her carriage, or looking at her wardrobe and jewels, or giving fresh instructions to the cook?  Afflicted with a want of commitment, she was bored.
             





      
            Then into the barren vistas of her life stepped Edward S. Stokes, known as Ned.  While Fisk bounced off into multiple ventures, Mr. Stokes called on her daily, murmured enticingly, pierced her with his soft, probing eyes.  Suddenly her existence was charged with intensity, seasoned with adventure.  In rare quiet moments she pondered: Jim was pudgy, Ned was elegantly thin; Jim whooped, Ned purred; Jim’s mustache scratched, Ned’s tickled.  Her soul stirred, her bottom tingled.        
            Miss Mansfield's new admirer was a fancy dresser,  lithe and slender, who favored satin vests under a frock coat faced with silk, black satin cravats, kid-topped shoes or glossy patent leathers, moss agate sleeve buttons, diamond rings, a spotless gray topper, lilac or lavender kid gloves, and an ivory-headed walking stick.  His curly jet-black hair was always perfectly in place, while over his upper lip curled a dream of a mustache that women found irresistible, its tickle exquisite, enhanced further by aromas of scented soap imported from England and lemony aftershave arising from his taut, smooth skin.  These effects were carefully achieved by his two hours of grooming daily at the Hoffman House, the elegant white marble hotel on Broadway at Twenty-fifth Street where he resided amid sumptuous furnishings.

            Fortune had smiled on Mr. Stokes: unsmirched by toil of battle, he had thrived mightily at the Produce Exchange during the war, and then built a refinery in the outer wilds of Brooklyn and reaped another bonanza in oil, until the oil bubble burst and the refinery’s profits grievously collapsed.  From this mischance he labored to redeem it, his heroic efforts compromised by an addiction to betting on losers at the racetrack, and a tendency to spend money that he didn’t quite have.  Fortune had smiled on him again when he met Mr. James Fisk, Jr., who, seeing its potential, put the prostrate refinery back on its feet.  Thanks to its new alliance with the Erie Railway, with Fisk as president and Stokes as treasurer, the refinery prospered again, and the treasurer would have likewise prospered, had his appetite for debt not proved insatiable, and his thoughts wandered freely from business.  They wandered to his partner’s inamorata, whose green lustrous eyes, fragrant bosom, and abundance of purple-black hair were revealed to him on a number of social occasions.  To discover a nymph so buxom, blithe, and debonair in the glades of Erie astonished him; he was instantly, irrevocably smitten.

            Miss Mansfield warmed to her new admirer’s advances, being weary of Mr. James Fisk, Jr., though not of his money, which came to her in driblets, two hundred today, a hundred the day after that.  Her seasoned eye having discerned in Neddy a fervent but impecunious lover, she was in no rush to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs.  Instead, she importuned Prince Erie for a lump sum that would let her have a bank account of her own.  To which he replied with a flat no, since she would blow it all on diamonds and sables.  If she brought up his parading around in Central Park with Mlle Irma and that Montaland woman, he insisted these were business acquaintances and nothing more.  (True, or almost, since his dalliances, if any, must have been fleeting and rare.)  And always she sensed in him a deep, hidden loyalty to his wife, that starched little goody-goody lodged at a safe remove in Boston, untouched and willfully ignorant, whom he idolized, and to whom she knew she must not refer.  Clearly, vast tracts of Jimjim escaped her.  Their relationship grew turbulent with strife.

            Jim Fisk usually resided with his Dumpling at 359 West Twenty-third Street, where he hosted friends for suppers and cards.  Josie’s blond cousin Marietta Williams also lived there, providing a veneer of respectability while keeping much of the time discreetly apart.  When Fisk and Josie’s quarrels waxed vivid, he and his valet retreated to Prince Erie’s own brownstone at no. 313, a mere four minutes away, where canaries in every room lightened his exile with their singing.  From there he besieged her with numerous epistles insisting that only with the keenest regret had he folded his tent like the Arabs and stolen away, that all their differences could be settled with a kiss.  Soon enough these assurances, and the lady’s pressing need of pocket money, brought him and his valet back to no. 359.                        Fisk's partner Jay Gould had watched all this with misgivings.  To his own mind, a citadel of clean, dry thought, Fisk panting for Josie wallowed in the wet and wormy.  For Gould, Josie was a germ of scandal, a flaw in his crystalline schemes.  When he blurted out to Fisk what others had long been hinting at – that in his absence Ned Stokes was seen far too often at Josie’s – Fisk felt it like a knife in his gut.  That a ladies’ man like Stokes should be drawn to his Dolly he could understand, but that she should prefer this debt-tainted fashion plate – this fancy pants, this idler – to him, he simply could not fathom.  Infatuation; surely it would pass.  Confronted, she didn’t trouble to deny the attachment.  What did he expect, being so stingy, so busy with business, or off sleeping with his imported French whores?
            Keenly aware now that the same four-poster that had felt the imprint of his revels with Josie had borne the svelte grace of Edward S. Stokes, he folded his tent once again and withdrew to no. 313, and canceled the verbal agreement whereby that rival’s oil refinery got special low rates from Erie and supplied Erie with oil; at one swoop, Stokes’s income was wiped out.  He expected ravings and lawsuits, but instead got a message suggesting a drink at Delmonico’s.
            “Ned,” he said on arrival, “I thought I could cut nearer a man’s heart than anyone in this city, but you go plump through it.”
            Unruffled, Stokes proposed quite civilly that the two of them go to Josie and ask her to choose between them.  Fisk agreed and they went.  But Josie with dulcet cajolery proposed a solution of her own.  Why should two grown men fight like little boys?  She liked them both.  Why couldn't all three just be friends?  “No go, Josie,” said Fisk.  “You can’t run two engines on the same track in opposite directions at the same time.  You’ve got to choose between us.”  The three of them palavered into the wee hours, but no agreement was reached. 
            Over the weeks, then months, that followed, letters passed between Prince Erie and his Dumpling.  Thanks to help from his secretary, Fisk’s letters were orthographically sound and scaled at least the foothills of eloquence: “I have shown you nothing but kindness.  I have laid at your feet a soul, a heart, a reputation that cost me twenty-five years of struggle to build, and that now, but for the black blot of having in an evil hour linked myself with you, would shine brighter today than any ever seen on earth.”
            Soon after, he sent back a ring she had given him, announcing, "There is no further need of any discourse between us.”  She answered: “Your letter is cruel and unwarranted.  You have often told me that you hold in your keeping some twenty-five thousand dollars that are mine.  If you will pay me that sum, I shall never have to appeal to you for aught.  This will make possible the break between us that you, not I, so ardently desire.”  Her style too had a certain minimal polish; he suspected Stokes’s complicity.
            The proposed lump sum to be settled on her had now become a debt to be paid.  Learning from informants that Stokes had pawned his jewels, he wrote her yet again:  “How you must be saying to your paramour, ‘Man, how beautiful you are to look at, but nothing to lean upon!’"
            Josie appealed to Judge Barnard, then to Boss Tweed himself, to act as arbiter; neither could help.  Then, when another attempt at reconciliation failed, she seized his galoshes – the last vestige of him in her brownstone – and hurled them into the street.
            On New Year’s Day 1871, to efface memories of the reception at Josie’s just one year before, Prince Erie dashed off in a shiny equipage drawn by four high-stepping horses, attended by four footmen in livery, to pay his New Year’s calls.  At each stop the footmen unrolled a purple-and-gold carpet from carriage to door, then stood at attention, two on each side, as James Fisk, Jr., ablaze with diamonds, strode forth to pay his respects.  Bluebloods winced, but the rest of the city laughed, and the caller himself scantly masked the most piquant of grins.

            On a Saturday soon after New Year's Fisk had Stokes arrested, charging embezzlement of oil refinery funds.  Protesting, Stokes was hustled off to Ludlow Street Jail.  Lodged and fed like a common criminal, deprived of clean linen, scented English soap, and the Florida water in which he customarily bathed, the young man fumed with rage.  Released on bail Monday morning, he hired a lawyer and got the embezzlement charge thrown out, then sent eighteen men to seize the refinery and remove its oil to be sold.  Fisk at once countered with fifty who expelled the intruders and gained possession of the premises. 
            Soon afterward a ditty was printed in the press: 


                                    The heart that once on Erie’s walls                                       The soul of greatness shed,                                    Now sits as sad in Erie’s halls                                       As if that soul were fled.
                                    So sleeps the pride of former days;                                       So glory’s thrill is o’er                                    When Josie, in her altered ways,                                       Throws gum shoes out the door.


Beside the verses appeared a cartoon showing Fatty Fisk bedewing his galoshes with tears.  Gotham roared.
            Jim Fisk had always coasted on waves of mirth, often at his own expense, while evincing an engaging charm.  But this was different.  For the first time in his life, people were laughing not with him but at him.  He felt weak, foolish, exposed.  Stokes’s revenge; it hurt.  But worse followed when the scandal-hungry Herald printed an interview with Stokes that blazoned Fisk’s affair with Josie to the world.  “Fisk has never faced a good, square stand-up fight till now,” Stokes was quoted as saying.  “I’ll push him to the wall for sure.”
            Hurrying to Josie’s brownstone, the same reporter described its luxurious appointments and then the lady herself, in white silk, “tall and shaped like a duchess.”  “There has been a great deal said of me that is false,” she announced.  “I blame myself for nothing but my intimacy with Mr. Fisk.  He used me wrong.  If he provokes me, I can defend myself.  I know Mr. Stokes very slightly.”  She then said of  Fisk’s spoils in the Erie war, “I know all about that matter, but don’t care to betray any confidences, unless Mr. Fisk provokes me.  I have his letters.”
            Drawing on dubious classical scholarship, the Herald spared no one in its article, ridiculing "Menelaus" Fisk, "Belle Helene" Mansfield, and "Achilles" Stokes, while announcing "war to the knife all round."
            Reading the interviews, Fisk was stricken.  Not only was his affair with Josie trumpeted to the world, but she herself was sounding the trumpet, discarding any pretense of virtue and brandishing his letters as a threat.  Quickly he wrote his wife in Boston, urging her to take a long-deferred European tour, thus hoping to shield her from the scandal.  As for Josie, any faint hope of a reconciliation had been shredded; from now on it was indeed war to the knife.
            But war of another kind loomed.  To the colonel’s astonishment, the Ninth Regiment had been issued a call to arms.


            Future attractions:  Because I have an overload of posts waiting to be published, I will speed things up by publishing part 4 of Jim Fisk next Wednesday, and part 5, the finale, on the following Wednesday, July 3.  Next Sunday:  Farewells (coffins, kiss-offs, liquidators, and a mother's rage).  In the works: Trees; Secrets of New York (Browder version); Go Ahead: The Mania and Disease of Progress; Me and the Seven Deadly Sins.  Latest inspiration: Liars, Cheats, and Manipulators (no, not our elected officials or corporate CEOs, but people that I've known).


(c)  2013  Clifford Browder

65. Who is a hero?

     New Yorkers love parades, especially ticker-tape parades honoring heroes and visiting dignitaries.  This has been going on since the 1880s, the heroes being originally showered with a snowstorm of torn-up stock market ticker-tape, and more recently with shredded paper and confetti thrown down from tall office building windows, as they proceed up Broadway, the so-called Canyon of Heroes, from the Battery to City Hall.  Those honored have included royalty and foreign heads of state, athletes and explorers, flyers and astronauts, victorious military commanders, and returning veterans.  Admiral Dewey and General Pershing were so honored, as well as Charles Lindbergh and Dwight D. Eisenhower, Winston Churchill, Douglas MacArthur, and countless others, including the American hostages returning from Iran in 1981.  The only musician to receive a ticker-tape parade was Van Cliburn in 1958, after winning the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow.  The only scientist was Albert Einstein, in 1921.  Significant among the athletes was Jesse Owen, returning in 1936 from the Berlin Olympics with four gold medals.  The ticker-tape parade is an old New York City custom, and one likely to be continued well into the future.



The 1969 parade honoring the three Apollo 11 astronauts following their mission to the moon.

     But are all these people really heroes?   The crown prince and princess of Sweden, the winner of a golf tournament, the president-elect of Brazil, the governor-general of Canada, the prime minister of Pakistan, the president of Uruguay, the New York Yankees, the Pope?  With all due respect to all of them, I suspect not, though it depends on your definition of hero.  Who, then, is a hero?

     Recently I put this question to my partner Bob and to our friend John, asking them to just come up with some names off the top of their head.  John suggested Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, and then, to my surprise, Beethoven, because he continued to compose in spite of growing deafness.  Bob first mentioned Proust -- for me, another surprise -- citing his race against death to finish his long, now highly acclaimed novel.  Bob then went on to cite Columbus, Churchill, Lindbergh, and the civil rights workers who fought against segregation in the South.  Obviously these choices reflected their personal interests: John is very knowledgeable about classical music, and Bob is currently rereading Proust.

     I then gave them my definition of hero: a hero is someone who, against great odds and at great personal risk, fights on behalf of many to accomplish a worthy goal.  Admittedly, a somewhat narrow definition, since I don't think the designation "hero" should be conferred too liberally; if everyone is a hero, then no one is.  This definition is tentative, since the more I think about it, the more issues come to mind.  I have already decided that a hero -- or heroine -- needn't win his struggle; it's the struggle itself that counts.  Also, that he may have some unattractive traits; this needn't disqualify him, if he otherwise matches the definition.  And finally, it is best to let the designation be tested by time; calling a contemporary a hero is risky, since there may be much we have yet to learn.

A hero in spite of his flaws.

     So who, by my definition, is or is not a hero?  I certainly agree with my friends that Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela qualify.  Also Aung San Suu Kyi, the woman who endured more than two decades of detention in Burma (Myanmar) while fighting for democracy and human rights.  Obviously, the persecuted opponents of prejudice and tyranny rank high.  Also on the list is Gandhi, even though a Bengali friend of mine has informed me that his treatment of his women left a lot to be desired.




Bradley Manning.
A man I'd like to know. 
     Among others who came immediately to mind were Joan of Arc, Juarez, Bradley Manning, and -- for me, another surprise -- Jesus.  Bradley Manning is admittedly a risk, being very contemporary, but from what I now know of him, he qualifies, whereas I'm not so sure about Julian Assange; as for Edward Snowden, the other whistleblower who recently announced in Hong Kong that he leaked information about government surveillance programs, I need more information before deciding.  Jesus certainly qualifies, regardless of one's own religious beliefs or lack of them, and I might add other religious figures -- maybe Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism -- if I knew more about them.  I would also add Greenpeace, when it sails into areas where nuclear tests are about to be carried out, and Doctors Without Borders, when they operate in areas plagued with great violence.




Ralph Nader, 1975.
Heroes don't have to look heroic.
     Sometimes only one phase of someone's life deserves to be labeled heroic.  Ralph Nader, when he first took on General Motors and proclaimed one of their cars "unsafe at any speed," was, to my mind, heroic, since GM hired private detectives to tap his phones and investigate his past, and had prostitutes try to entrap him in compromising situations; but later, when he became well known, the label seemed less appropriate.  Similarly Fidel Castro was a hero when he fought to overthrow the Batista dictatorship in Cuba, but later, when he himself assumed power, he became an autocrat -- an autocrat who accomplished some worthy things, but nonetheless an autocrat -- and therefore no longer a hero.  The same applies to Charles Lindbergh, a hero when he flew across the Atlantic, but controversial later when he urged this country to sign a neutrality pact with Nazi Germany so as to ward off the menace of the Soviet Union.  And if Columbus was heroic in crossing the Atlantic, for me he loses that status when, upon arriving on the coast of North America, he sees the natives and notes how easily they could be enslaved.



     Who does my definition exclude?  Abraham Lincoln, our greatest president, for one, since his life was not in danger daily and he exercised great power.  There are many admirable figures in history who don't quite qualify as heroes.  Athletes are also to be admired for their accomplishments, but I see those accomplishments as personal and not benefiting others, with Jesse Owens a notable exception.  Which raises a related question: if someone strives to overcome a physical handicap -- victims of the Boston bombing, for example, or wounded veterans struggling to recover use of their limbs, or to learn to use prosthetic limbs instead -- is their struggle to be considered heroic?  By my definition, no, since this is a personal endeavor, not one that will affect large numbers of people.  But this is well worth debating.  Maybe my definition should include a separate provision for those afflicted with a handicap and determined to overcome it, the supreme example being Helen Keller.  A personal struggle, to be sure, but one that can inspire others.

     I find it hard to include political and military leaders, if they exercise power, since they are usually not exposed to great personal risk and often pursue controversial policies.  So I eliminate Churchill, Roosevelt, and de Gaulle, as well as Eisenhower and MacArthur.  But we should not exclude those capable of heroic acts in opposition to our own forces or policies, such as Aguinaldo, who fought for Philippine independence after we acquired the Philippines from Spain, and the niños héroes (boy soldiers), six teen-age Mexican cadets who died valiantly while helping the outnumbered Mexican forces defend Chapultepec Castle against a U.S. attack in 1847.  And of course all the native peoples of North America, who resisted our encroachments in a desperate attempt to preserve not just their lands but their way of life.

John Brown in 1856.
Not a man I'd care to meet.     Perhaps the most controversial figure in American history is the abolitionist John Brown, who in 1859 seized the U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in hopes of starting an armed slave revolt that would lead to the freeing of all slaves in the United States.  Defeated and captured, he was tried for treason against the commonwealth of Virginia, convicted, and hanged.  On the day of his execution he predicted that the crimes of this guilty land would be purged only with much bloodshed -- a prediction soon confirmed by the Civil War.  His raid was at first condemned even by Northern abolitionists, but his trial turned him into something of a martyr, and opinion about him began to change in the North in the course of the war.  Even today it can be hotly debated whether his action was justified.  In other words, does the end justify the means?  I have trouble with this myself, and can't forget how in Bleeding Kansas in 1856 Brown and others pulled several proslavery men out of their homes in the middle of the night and hacked them to death with swords.  If Brown is allowed the status of hero, how can it be denied to the 9/11 terrorists, or any terrorists devoted to their cause?  For me, he is not a hero.  But I freely grant that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, and one man's hero another man's villain or fool.  These judgments, alas, are always subjective.

Saint George slaying the dragon.
Rogier van der Weyden, ca. 1432.
That's how they did it in the old days.
For us it's not so simple.     John Brown surely thought of himself as a hero and martyr fighting the monster of slavery.  In myth and legend the hero is a man (almost never a woman) who kills a dragon or other monster and in so doing wins for himself a maiden in distress, or a treasure, or both.  Siegfried in Wagner's Ring kills the dragon Fafner and then is lucky to get -- for a while -- both a magical ring forged from a treasure of gold and also the sleeping Brunnhilde.  But these stories can also suggest the creation myths of many cultures, where a creator god who represents light slays a dragon or she-monster who represents darkness, and from her body creates the world.  In Mesopotamian myth the hero Marduk slays the monster-goddess Tiamat and from her ribs creates the vault of heaven and earth, while her weeping eyes become the source of the Tigris and Euphrates.  The she-monster is primordial chaos, the dark watery mass of unformed matter out of which cosmos is formed.  Some scholars also see in these tales the triumph of a patriarchal society over an earlier matriarchal society that worshiped an all-powerful goddess, which brings us back to the Earth Goddess of post #59; indeed, Big Mama is hard to avoid.


     Today, in our less mythic age, dragons are in short supply, not to mention sleeping Valkyries or other maidens in distress, whom feminism decidedly discourages.  But, metaphorically speaking, there are dragons aplenty meriting destruction: the GM that Nader attacked, other oppressive corporations, malfunctioning government agencies, the military-industrial complex, the prison industrial system, lingering racism, pervasive poverty.  (Post #60 on fascism offers a slew of contemporary dragons.)  Yes, dragons and monsters abound.  If we can't kill them, we can at least lop off an ear or two, defang them, slice them down to size.  But there are risks involved, as Mr. Nader learned early in the game, and Bradley Manning is learning now; those dragons play nasty.

     Here is a list of twelve well-known persons, living or recently deceased.  Which of them, if any, merit a ticker-tape parade up the Canyon of Heroes on Broadway?  How would you describe them?  Select one or more of these terms for each:

hero/heroinealmost hero/heroinetrailblazermartyrtroublemakerliarhypocriterascally yeaforsooth knave (from Shakespeare)criminaltraitormurdererfool
Barack Obama                                   the Dalai LamaLance ArmstrongJohn McCainex-Pope BenedictMichelle ObamaMayor Bloomberg of New YorkHugo ChavezBradley ManningJulian Assangeex-President George W. BushDick Cheney

     Finally, what dragons would you like to slay?  Name five or more.  Here are some suggestions.
J.P. Morgan Chase (or any other big bank)labor unions (one or all)your state legislaturethe CIAthe FBIthe National Rifle Association (NRA)the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)ALEC (see post #60, May 2013)the IRSthe military-industrial complexthe Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA)the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)Roe v. Wade
     Coming soon:  Jim Fisk, part 3: Blue Fire in His Veins (Jim Fisk, corpulent and unmilitary, becomes a regimental commander, while his lady friend begins to stray); Farewells; Trees; Secrets of New York (Browder version); Go Ahead: The Mania and Disease of Progress.  Still in the works: Me and the Seven Deadly Sins (startling revelations!).

(c)  2013  Clifford Browder

   

64. A West Village Murder and the Fear of Night

     In the early hours of Saturday, May 18, two young gay men were walking north along Sixth Avenue in the West Village when they encountered three other young men, one of whom, Elliot Morales, accosted the first two, voiced antigay slurs, and asked one of them, Mark Carson, an openly gay man, "What are you, a gay wrestler?"  Carson and his companion then turned into West Eighth Street and walked east, but Morales followed them and asked Carson if the friend with him was his partner, and when Carson answered yes, Morales drew out a revolver and shot Carson at point-blank range in the face.  Emergency workers came, tried to revive Carson, then took him to Beth Israel Hospital, where he was pronounced dead on arrival.  Morales fled, but a description went out over the police radio, and an officer on foot patrol nearby recognized the suspect and arrested him; he is now being held without bail on a charge of second-degree murder as a hate crime, and illegal possession of a weapon.  Morales, it turned out, had already threatened a bartender in a nearby bar with antigay slurs, showing him a silver revolver in a shoulder holster and threatening to kill him if he called 911.  State correction records indicate that he has served more than ten years in prison for a robbery conviction.  The police immediately labeled the killing a hate crime.  A photograph of Carson shows a black man in his early thirties with a thin mustache and short, closely cropped beard, and a partly shaved head with a thick tuft of hair on top: nothing eye-catching in the West Village, but an appearance that might attract the attention of a homophobe.  Morales's sister has said that he told her he was drunk that night and remembers nothing.

     The whole West Village community, gay and straight, was shocked by this crime, which took place in a gay-friendly neighborhood not far from the Stonewall Inn, where gay liberation first began, and only a short ten-minute walk from my apartment.  Residents immediately brought candles and flowers to create a makeshift memorial for the victim on the site of the killing, and on Monday, May 20, thousands marched through the streets to denounce the murder, chanting "We're here!  We're queer!  We won't live in fear!"  Carson's murder was the first in the West Village precinct this year, but through the first week in May there have been 57 assaults, a sharp increase over the 33 reported in 2012.  Just hours after the Monday march the police received reports of two other antigay bias attacks in downtown Manhattan, unrelated to the West Village attack or to each other.  Others, of course, go unreported.

     Crimes of violence seem to be especially frequent at night.  The West Village march brings readily to mind the Take Back the Night campaign that began in Belgium in 1976 and has since spread worldwide, as women in many different cities march together at night holding candles to protest the violence that often threatens women walking alone at night.  But that such demonstrations are held is in itself an indication of the power of night and the fear it can inspire.

     When I ask myself what the word night suggests to me, I immediately think of darkness, danger, crime, and violence.  If you live in a big city and hear the news, it can hardly be otherwise.  Next, I think of nightmares, pain, insomnia, but also the irrational, the unconscious, the unknown.  And, to be sure, mystery and adventure.  But always, night suggests something wild and primal, something to guard against, something to fear.

     Wait a minute, you may say, New York is the city that never sleeps, a fun city, a place full of night life; at night people flock to night clubs and restaurants and bars, to theater and opera, to parties, to all kinds of amusement, licit and illicit.  And think of Times Square at night -- an amazing light-filled spectacle.  And seen from a distance -- from Brooklyn, for instance, or from the air -- isn't the city, with all its buildings and avenues and bridges, a brilliant, almost magical display of light?

  A feast of light in the heart of darkness.
Rafi B.
     Yes, of course, but this is light surrounded by darkness, triumphing over it through modern technology and wholly dependent on that technology.  Darkness is primal; light in darkness is a marvelous human invention, a contrivance, a defense against menacing, all-encompassing night.

     Some politicians are not above appealing to our fear of night to win votes.  Years ago a candidate for mayor ran an ad on the radio where you heard a lone pedestrian's footsteps on pavement, and then a voice asking if that pedestrian would get to his (or more likely her) destination safely; to guarantee such safety, vote for Candidate X.  I resented that ad then and still resent it now, since Candidate X was not going to appear like Superman to protect the lone walker from whatever threat might materialize.  I detest the politics of fear and will not vote for any candidate who resorts to it.

     City dwellers have little awareness of what night really is.  When, long ago, Bob and I discovered Monhegan Island off midcoast Maine and began vacationing there in the spring and fall, we rediscovered the reality of darkness, the very essence of night.  On Monhegan there are no paved streets and no streetlights, so if you go out at night, you carry a flashlight and slowly grope your way.  The darkness envelops you, and with it a silence unknown in the city, and overhead on cloudless nights there is a feast of stars.  But the night there doesn't threaten; it is vast and awesome.

What we miss in the city.
Michael J.Bennett
     Be that as it may, in the city many people venture out at night.  Yes, but not everyone.  When I go out in the daytime, I see the very old and the very young.  The elderly are often going about with an aide, or with a walker or in a wheelchair, and the very young, well escorted, including even toddlers linked together by a rope, turn up in the greenmarkets, where they are instructed in the mysteries of food and its origins.  But these are the most vulnerable of the city's residents and by evening, if not long before, they vanish from the streets.  Evening and night belong to the young and adventurous; they above all are the ones who patronize the bars and restaurants and movie theaters, the ones who revel in the city's infinite offerings of entertainment and adventure, and its opportunities for mating.  Bob and I were among them once, but no more.

The Nightmare, by the German artist Johann Heinrich
Füssli (1741-1825).       Night is when inhibitions fall, when all that we have mastered or suppressed during the day returns  to haunt us: pain, worries, obsessions, savage and even murderous impulses, and the urge to suicide.  They come in waking thoughts, in dreams, in nightmares.  The mare in the word nightmare, by the way, has nothing to do with horses; it comes from the Old English maere, designating an evil spirit that settled on a sleeping person's chest, causing bad dreams.  In time the word nightmare came to mean, not just those dreams, but any bad dream.





     As the derivation of nightmare makes clear, night has always been associated with the forces of evil, with witches and demons and evil spirits of every kind, and in Christianity with Satan, their lord and master.  In the Middle Ages people believed quite literally in the Witches' Sabbath, a gathering from midnight to dawn in some desolate place of witches and demons and their master, who was often present in the form of a goat or satyr, for a feast, wild dancing, and a Black Mass, followed by a sexual orgy of male and female demons.  Whether they believed in it literally or not, many artists from the Renaissance on have portrayed it, including Dürer, Hans Baldung, and Goya.  The same subject is conveyed musically in Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain, and literarily in the Walpurgisnacht scene of Goethe's Faust. The problem for all writers and artists, I suspect, has been to make the Sabbath fascinating but not too enticing; evil always has its attractions.


A Witches' Sabbath, an engraving by the Dutch artist Andries Jacobsz Stock, circa 1610.
     Many myths and religions have described a cosmic battle between the forces of light and darkness, heaven and hell, good and evil, a struggle that the forces of good are by no means destined to win.   Norse mythology presents Ragnarok, meaning Destiny or Twilight of the Gods, when three winters come without summer, brothers kill brothers, the stars disappear, mountains topple, and the wolf Fenrir, long bound by the gods, bursts loose and swallows the sun and then in battle devours Odin, the ruler of the gods, while the thunderer Thor and other gods are slain by other monsters, and the whole world burns and sinks into the sea.  This cosmic cataclysm, followed by the earth's rising beautiful and green again, and the survival of two humans whose progeny will repopulate the earth, influenced Wagner in the composition of his Ring cycle.

Hell, a mosaic by Coppo di Marcovaldo in the baptistery of the cathedral of Florence.
The Christian hell was never meant to be fun.  Installed circa 1301, for me this work
seems surprisingly modern.  
     In traditional Christianity the underworld of darkness is hell, where demons torment the damned, a subject that medieval painters and sculptors have rendered in vivid detail.  Milton, at the beginning of Paradise Lost, tells how Satan and his followers, having revolted against God in heaven, are hurled down into a "dismal Situation waste and wilde, / A Dungeon horrible, on all sides round / As one great Furnace flam'd, yet from those flames / No light, but rather darkness visible ..."  But if Satan and his cohorts are banished from the realm of light, their bleak new abode proves rather fascinating for the reader, and they themselves far more interesting that the light-bedizened denizens of heaven.


Satan and his cohorts are cast down into hell.  Illustration for 
Paradise Lost by Gustave Doré, 1866.

     In mythology the darkness of night also characterizes the underworld, the land of the dead, usually a gloomy place contrasting sharply with the celestial realm of the gods.  It also characterizes the chaos preceding cosmos, a formless, fluid realm out of which the Creator God, often a god of the sun or of light, brings forth the created world where humans live.  Sometimes chaos is a she-monster or sea serpent or dragon that the hero of light slays and then, from her body, creates the world.  (Big Mama again; see post #59).  In Genesis, darkness is on the face of the deep, until God initiates Creation with the command, "Let there be light!"  So night can suggest both death and the potential for life.

     But it suggests other things, too.  It inspires in some of us a wild freedom, a feeling that no one is watching, that we can get away with things.  My own participation in this has been mild enough: in high school, occasional mindless hollering when out with the guys on Friday night.  And once, when a student in Besançon, France, I joined with other students in an impromptu all-night rural promenade by moonlight, almost noiseless, but just disturbing enough that watchdogs barked, and peasants turned the lights on to ward off these mysterious intruders.  More sinister was my return to the city by train during the blackout of 1977, when I was a target, not a doer.  As the train crept slowly toward the 125th Street station in Harlem, I and the other passengers, all white, could see bonfires in the streets, and suddenly heard two male voices screaming insults and obscenities at us from buildings near the track -- only two, but it seemed like a chorus of hate.  Yes, a wild freedom, a release of fierce passions kept in check by day.

Beautiful at night.  But if those lights go out ...
Stuart Sevastos     So night is with us even today, when we live surrounded by amenities in towns and cities blazing with light.  Deep in our psyche maybe there lurks the faintest memory of prehistoric times when humans huddled in their caves, guarded by fire at the entrance, wary of the wild creatures prowling outside in the night.  Yet many of us in an urban setting venture forth into that night, going to pleasure, to excitement, to freedom, or to our death.

     A triple invasion of New York:  This week New York has been invaded thrice, twice in Manhattan and once in Staten Island and the suburbs.

1.  The Left Forum, an annual gathering of socialists, Marxists, libertarians, radicals, and progressives of every stripe and hue, is taking place at Pace University June 7-9.  There are more than a thousand speakers, prominent among them Noam Chomsky, filmmaker Oliver Stone, and Garcia Linera, the vice-president of Bolivia.  This year's theme: Mobilizing for Ecological/Economic Transformation, verbiage that in my opinion shows how far the Left still has to go, in order to appeal to a wide spectrum of voters in this country.

2.  Also visiting the city are members of Pussy Riot, the Moscow-based activist group whose 2012 performance of an anti-Kremlin song inside the main Orthodox cathedral in Moscow got three of them convictions for hooliganism and a stay in prison, where two are still confined.  They are here to promote an HBO documentary, "Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer."  They continue to wear masks in public and use pseudonyms, to avoid further trouble with authorities in Russia.  I confess that I have reservations about their disrupting a religious service; they could have demonstrated outside.  I had the same reservation about gay activists who some years ago rushed into Saint Patrick's Cathedral to disrupt a Mass.

3.  Seventeen-year locusts have now awakened from their lengthy slumber so as to spawn, and are now sounding their cacophonous rasp high in the trees, smashing against windshields, mating on plants and porches, infesting suburban lawns, and crawling up the pant legs of Staten Islanders, under whose feet they perish with a crunch.  Mercifully, they will be gone in about two weeks.

     The newspaper of record gave ample space to Pussy Riot and the locusts, but as of Saturday, none whatsoever to the Left Forum.  In their judgment, I presume, not "news that's fit to print."

     Coming next:  Who is a hero?  My definition, who it includes, and who it excludes.  Bradley Manning?  Julian Assange?  Obama?  Martin Luther King?  John Brown?  Ralph Nader?  The Dalai Lama?  And so on.  Feel free to add your own choices, especially if different from mine.  Also, since heroes traditionally slay monsters, what monsters would you like to slay today?  Not people (I don't encourage murder or mayhem), but monstrous laws, customs, institutions, corporations, and such.  Newly in the works:  Secrets of New York (Browder version), presenting mystery houses, a hidden meadow, Moses' Folly, the groin of summer, and other overlooked or hidden locales.

(c)  2013  Clifford Browder

63. Jim Fisk, part 2: The Great Gold Corner of 1869, or, Can't a fellow have a little fun?

         
            Most of us have dreamed of doing the impossible, but few have really attempted it.  In 1869 Jay Gould and Jim Fisk really attempted it, and in so doing convulsed markets on both sides of the Atlantic.  This is their story, continuing the saga of Jim Fisk, which began two weeks ago in post #61.


            To corner gold:  speculators on Wall Street had dreamed of it, but no one had ever tried to do it,  since the Treasury Department could sell just a fraction of its gold and smash the corner.  But one day in the spring of 1869 Jay Gould suggested to his partner Jim Fisk that they do exactly that.  Fisk probably raised the usual objections, but Gould countered with the assurance that the Treasury would not sell gold.  How could he be sure?  Because he had made the acquaintance of one Abel Corbin, a speculator of somewhat dubious reputation, who had married the sister of President Ulysses S. Grant.  Jay Gould had made Mr. Corbin’s acquaintance and explained to him that if the Treasury didn’t sell gold, farmers would get good prices for their crops, workers would prosper, industry expand, and the whole economy benefit.  But if the Treasury  -- God forbid! --  sold gold, the whole nation would be stricken.  Mr. Corbin was very impressed.  So when he visited the President recently, he advised him against selling gold.
            By now, Jim Fisk’s eyes must have grown wide with wonder.  Did Jay Gould have the President fixed?  Just about.


            Except as small, bright specks of glint, Jim Fisk had never seen gold, didn’t know what the substance in bulk looked like.  He only knew that it was valued something fierce; that men had toiled and fought and killed for it; that it was dug out of the earth as dust or bits of rock and somehow got converted into big metal chunks – bars, maybe? --  that were locked away in vaults; and that, in the form of paper contracts and certificates, it was traded daily in the Gold Room, where no one had ever cornered it or even dreamed of trying.  To corner gold:  in his mind the impossible – the unimaginable – became a dazzling, tantalizing prospect.  He tingled at the thought of it.
            In a couple of weeks, Gould continued, the President would be passing through New York on his way to a Peace Jubilee in Boston.  What finer way for him to get from here to there than on one of Jim Fisk steamers, with the two of them as his personal escorts?  Mr. Corbin thought it an excellent idea, would put it to the President at the earliest opportunity.  At the merest possibility of having the Chief Executive to themselves all the way to Boston, the duo simmered with excitement.  But would it really happen?
            On the afternoon of June 15, 1869, at the Chambers Street dock, where his Providence was tied up with its decks scrubbed, brass gleaming, canaries warbling, and pennants aflutter in the breeze, Jim Fisk strutted in his naval uniform and lavender kid gloves, sporting a diamond breastpin, his mustache fiercely waxed.  For this event beyond belief he had marshaled all his reserves of daring, his armament of Flash.  Amid booming cannon and the blare of a band, the President and his entourage arrived.  Fisk at once introduced himself, welcomed the President, and waved him aboard the Providence.
Chances are, he didn't even laugh at Fisk's jokes.
            Ulysses S. Grant hardly had a martial air.   A bit of a sloucher, he mumbled a greeting and offered a handshake, then shuffled aboard with other dignitaries; Fisk waved him to the grand saloon.  There, as the Providence glided away from the dock, the admiral and Jay Gould offered cigars and champagne, then deftly initiated a discussion about the merits of not selling gold. 
            Bumper harvests were expected, Gould expounded in his silver-toned voice.  If the price of gold stayed high, farmers – the very bedrock of the nation – would get good prices for their crops, millions of bushels of grain would be shipped, railroads would thrive, and tons of breadstuffs would be exported to Europe, bringing in another bumper harvest in the form of foreign exchange.  Jim Fisk vigorously agreed.


            Some of the gentlemen present evinced glimmerings of doubt, others nodded, but the President himself, square-jawed with a close-cut, grizzled beard, proved to be as mumbly and reticent as his hosts were expansive and verbose.  All the way to Boston everyone opined except the presidential sphinx, who puffed on his cigar, said nothing.
            “What do you think, Mr. President?” Fisk finally mustered the temerity to ask.
            “There’s a certain fictitiousness about the country’s prosperity,” he said, flicking an ash from his cigar.  “The bubble might as well be tapped in one way as another.”
            Chilled to the quick, Fisk and Gould exchanged a frantic glance, redoubled their efforts.
The Peace Jubilee.  For Admiral Fisk, a stage
that proved irresistible.
            In Boston, where the President and other notables proceeded to the Jubilee amid great acclaim, Admiral Fisk in full naval regalia accompanied them, acknowledging with smiles and gestures those large portions of the applause that he thought intended for himself.  Some spectators took him for Admiral Farragut; others, for the President.  From then on he was known as Jubilee Jim.
            Two days later, when the President passed through New York on his way back to Washington, the duo entertained him, his wife, and the Corbins in a box at Fisk’s Fifth Avenue Theater, chatting with the Chief Executive in full view of an astonished audience packed from dome to pit.  The two ladies swayed gently to the strains of Offenbach’s La Périchole, and Abel Corbin probably quickened to a cancan, but the President watched expressionless, as withdrawn and enigmatic as ever.

            Viewing the box from a distance, respectables in the audience wondered how Grant could appear in such company.  What next?  Would the brazen Fisk dare to present his mistress to the President?  Bets were placed by some, but Josie, though pent with longing and splendidly attired, remained in her own box opposite, briskly fluttering her fan while stealing glances at her Jimjim conversing with the President.
            Over the weeks that followed, Jay Gould had numerous interviews with his newfound friend Mr. Corbin, a jowly old man with thinning hair and a slick manner, who assured him of his influence with the President.  Gould then assured Fisk that, thanks to Corbin’s intervention, the Secretary of the Treasury was “all right,” as was the Assistant Secretary for New York, and even the President himself!
            Nagged by doubts, Fisk went to see Corbin himself.  In his parlor on West Twenty-seventh Street, Abel Corbin swore piously that he had the President’s ear: the Treasury would not sell gold.  Fisk came away half convinced, half teased by flutterings of doubt.  Corbin struck him as slick as a freshly printed bank note, as innocent as a newborn babe.  Could his whiny earnestness and mealy-mouthed piety be trusted?  But Gould assured him that, with help from Gould himself, Corbin was into the speculation for thousands.  Impressed, Jim Fisk too bought gold.
            On the night of July 14, while the masters of Erie were preoccupied with the price of a precious metal, two Erie trains collided in Pennsylvania; nine passengers died in the flames, three of them burned beyond recognition.  “The long, dismal, and bloody catalogue of disasters that marks the history of the Erie Railroad," said the New York Herald, “is made again to bear another burden of human slaughter.”
            Steadily the price of gold rose in the Gold Room, as feverish brokers bought and sold before a crowd of spectators that each day grew larger and more excited, drawn there by rumors of a prodigious feat unheard of: an attempt to corner gold.
            “It can’t be done!” said some.
            “It is being done,” said others.
            Gold: the mere idea of it, that wondrous metal coveted by all but seen by few – less a hard reality than a shimmering illusion, a dream -- gripped the city, the nation.  And it was being cornered on Wall Street!

            On September 2, when Grant, en route to Saratoga, came through New York and breakfasted with the Corbins, Gould called on Corbin and was admitted, though he didn't see Grant.  Gould evidently held a whispered conference with Corbin while the President was in another room and received further assurance that the Treasury would not sell gold.  Exultant, Gould bought more gold.
            But the situation changed dramatically on the evening of Wednesday, September 22, when he called again on Corbin, who showed him a letter that Mrs. Grant had sent to Mrs. Corbin, Grant's sister: "Tell Mr. Corbin that the President is very much distressed by your speculations and you must close them as quick as you can."  Obtuse as he was, the President had finally caught on.

           "Mr. Corbin," said Gould, "I am undone if that letter gets out."

           There was now mistrust between the two, and Corbin wanted out.  Gould promised to think this over, and Corbin agreed to keep the letter to himself.  But Gould now knew for certain that he was dealing with a fixer who couldn't fix.  Having bought fifty million in gold on margin, he had to start selling even while he continued to buy.  Who but Jay Gould could contemplate such a double game?  Of all this, not a word to Fisk.

            On Thursday, September 23, while Jay Gould hovered in the offing, Jim Fisk came bounding and whooping into the Gold Room.  Gold was at 137, he said, but he'd bet any part of $50,000 that it would go over 145.  So unsettled were the bears by now, he found no takers.  Meanwhile it was being whispered that the President and his cabinet were in the game up to their ears.  With gold in turmoil, stocks were plunging, money was scarce, trade disrupted, and markets shaken on both sides of the ocean.  SELL  GOLD  urged an avalanche of telegrams to Washington, while honest men and connivers alike rained curses and threats on Prince Erie, who when the Gold Room closed with gold at 144, departed merrily with a cigar in his teeth at an angle.  Despairing speculators made a dash for Delmonico’s on Broadway, crowded the bar, drank their whiskey straight.  By all accounts, panic loomed, chaos threatened.  Would the government sell gold, or not?
            On Friday morning Jim Fisk reappeared on Broad Street in a stylish carriage, flanked by two glittering actresses under laced domes of parasols, amid the stares and oaths of onlookers.  Well aware that he might be mobbed in the Gold Room, he went to his broker’s office just across the street, bade farewell to the parasols, then commandeered a back room for Gould and himself.
            All morning the Gold Room was jammed with hoarse-voiced brokers and speculators, yelling and jostling, some drunk, all frantic, many of them rushing at intervals to splash water on their fevered faces at the cupid-and-dolphin fountain bubbling in the middle of the room, while a mechanical indicator overhead proclaimed the price of gold.  Small operators had been ruined the previous day; now the bigger bearish houses were crumbling.  A huge crowd seethed in the street outside, while stocks plummeted and business throughout the country was paralyzed. 
The crowd outside Gould's office, just across Broad Street from the Gold Room,
on September 24, 1869.  From a publication of the time.
            In their back office across the street, Jay Gould, a mastermind of cunning but a glutton for anxiety, was tearing stray bits of paper to pieces and whispering orders to messengers, while Jim Fisk strutted up and down, coat off, gripping a gold-headed cane as he dispatched more orders to buy.
            “Put it up to one fifty!  … Put it up to one fifty-five!  …  I’m the Napoleon of Wall Street!”
            With each new high a roar erupted in the Gold Room, echoed by a roar in the street: music to Fisk’s ears.  At 12:30 a deafening howl was heard: gold had hit 160; men were weeping or fainting.
            Jim Fisk exulted.  A peddler from Vermont had cornered the world’s most precious metal!  His spirit soared, his feet barely touched the ground.
            Then, suddenly, a messenger rushed in with dire tidings: the Treasury was selling gold. 
            “That can’t be!” shrieked Fisk.
            Chaos in the Gold Room.  Within minutes the price plummeted to 135; the corner was bust, and with it innumerable denizens of Wall Street.  Several brokers were reported to be raving; one had shot himself.  Standing in a ring of shredded paper, Jay Gould was distraught.

Blackboard of the Gold Room on September 24.  Gold peaked at 162 1/2 (2nd column), then
plunged to 133.  This photograph was used as evidence in the 1870 Congressional hearing.
            “I’m forty miles down the Delaware!” shouted Napoleon Fisk, dazed, out millions.  “Old Corbin run a saw right through us!  We’re skinned!  We’re hung out to dry!”
            Suddenly they heard a commotion outside -- “Lynch the bastards!”  “Hang them!”“Shoot them!” – as a mob of ruined speculators burst into their broker’s front office.  In a flash, portly Jim Fisk, coatless, and frail Jay Gould were out a side door and darting down the street.  Threats and oaths pursued them as they dashed past startled bystanders and yelping dogs toward the bustling throngs of Broadway.  There they lost their pursuers in the crowd, hailed a cab, and rushed uptown.
            Arriving at the Opera House, the fugitives took refuge behind its thick marble walls, guarded by a squad of Erie stalwarts.  While Jay Gould, shaken to the depths, collapsed on a couch in Fisk’s office, Jim Fisk took sober stock: a fortune lost, markets convulsed, mortal threats still ringing in his ear …  What a lark!   Soon after, performing ablutions at a rose-tinted marble sink adorned with sculpted nymphs, he washed away the toil of the day.  Clean-shirted, donning another coat, he joined Gould in the Erie banquet hall to dine sumptuously; he gobbled, Gould nibbled. 
            Gould, having assembled the scattered fragments of his being, now probably confessed to Fisk that while Fisk was buying, he had been selling.  So Gould had limited their losses and presumably -- there is no record of this, but the assumption is safe, since he and Fisk remained friends -- presumably he shared his profits with Fisk.  But Fisk had contracts to buy gold; he owed millions.  The solution: repudiate them -- in Wall Street parlance, "squat" on them -- don’t pay.  This would mean scores of lawsuits, but their pal Judge Barnard could enjoin the plaintiffs; it would take them years to even try to collect.  So from the depths of his marble fortress, Jim Fisk squatted on his contracts, got sued and denounced and cursed.
            “Rogues!  Knaves!  Thieves!” cried Stock Exchange and press, as tides of scandal, washing over Wall Street, lapped at the White House gates.  The President had in fact had no part in the corner, but his fleeting acquaintance with the conspirators seemed to imply otherwise.  Meanwhile everyone was talking about it: September 24, 1869 -- Black Friday.
            For two weeks Jim Fisk and Jay Gould stuck it out in Castle Erie, conducting business by wire, sipping champagne and feasting on pheasant and quail, while speculators, process servers, and journalists pounded at the door downstairs, until shooed off by Erie thugs reinforced by Tweed’s police.  When word spread that Fisk had been shot dead by a ruined victim, toasts to the assassin were raised at Delmonico’s, until the report proved false.
            At this point Jim Fisk may well have reflected.  No one was toasting the death of Jay Gould.  Had Jay wangled him into this, so Fisk would bear not just the losses but the blame?  Who could fathom Jay Gould’s mind, where schemes masked schemes, subtleties enhanced subtleties, and cunning underlay cunning?      
            Meanwhile Abel Corbin, his role in the affair exposed, had taken to his bed and was whining and weeping to reporters.  Said Fisk, “He’s bleating like an unweaned calf!”
            A reporter was finally admitted into the marble confines of the Opera House.  Announced Gould, “I had nothing to do with the panic.”  Said Fisk, “Can’t a fellow have a little fun?” 
            Months later, freed from their fortress at last, the two conspirators were summoned before the House Banking and Finance Committee to testify with others about the Black Friday panic in gold.  Abel Corbin admitted to a tiny speculation: “Not for myself.  For the sake of a lady, my wife.”  Jay Gould explained that civic duty had caused him at great risk to support the price of gold for the good of the Erie Railway and the nation.  When Fisk’s turn came, he mounted a buoyant spiel about the complexities of railroading and the intricacies of gold, which he too denied ever having tried to corner. 
            Chairman James A. Garfield, a future president, was at a loss in this maze of deceit.   Millions had been at stake that day, yet no one admitted to a profit.  Where did all that money go?”
            “Mr. Garfield,” said Fisk, “it went where the woodbine twineth.”
            Silence among the Congressmen, then ripples, tides of laughter.

            The Committee  vigorously denounced Fisk, Gould, Corbin, and others, but since there was no law against speculating in gold or cozying up to a President, they otherwise escaped unscathed.


These are what it was all about, though no one involved in the
corner ever laid eyes on them.  Yes, they really do exist, in the
vaults of Fort Knox and elsewhere.

            On New Year’s Day, when gentlemen in Gotham went calling on ladies, and ladies stayed home to receive, Jim Fisk remained with Josie Mansfield, his lady friend, at 359 West Twenty-third Street to play host to a galaxy of callers.  Boss Tweed and his Tammany cronies, judges, bankers, and railroad presidents rubbed elbows in the parlors, treading on thick carpets under frescoed ceilings as they nibbled assorted goodies while quaffing whiskey and champagne.  Among them was Judge Barnard, black locks lustrous as always, eyes flashing, diamond studs gleaming. 
            Also present, no doubt, was Edward S. Stokes, a dapper young man about town dressed in the very pinnacle of fashion, whom Fisk had taken as a partner in an oil deal.  On this or another occasion, Fisk introduced him to Josie, thus setting in motion the engine of his fate.  But Fisk, with the turmoil of gold -- aside from seventeen lawsuits -- behind him, surely proposed a toast to the New Year, 1870, confident that it too would be a ripsnorter.  For Jubilee Jim, the sky was the limit.


            Scandal tours in the Big Apple:  Most cities like to put their best foot forward; they don't want to show their warts.  (If that's a mixed metaphor, forgive.)  But not New York.  According to an article in last Friday's Times, two tour companies now offer guided tours of Manhattan sites where celebrities have misbehaved.  One sponsored by the Post and costing forty-nine dollars revisits sites immortalized by that tabloid's headlines.  Thus the tour bus, going past the Helmsley Park Lane Hotel on Central Park South, recalls the headline "Rich Bitch" hailing the death of Leona Helmsley, the hotel's owner, who left twelve million dollars to her Maltese lap dog.  Passing the fabled Plaza Hotel, it salutes film and TV actor Charlie Sheen's ravaging his room after a fun-filled night with an escort, convinced she had stolen his $165,000 watch, as reported in the headline "Trashed!  Sheen in Coke-&-Hooker Rampage at the Plaza."  But the Post's most famous headline, "Headless Body in Topless Bar," is not included, since it would involve a long trip out to Jamaica in Queens.  These tours must be successful, since a rival company has initiated similar tours.  Where but in New York?


            Coming next:  A West Village Murder and the Fear of Night, prompted by the recent murder of a gay man not far from my apartment.  Our irrational but very real fear of night.  Still in the offing:  Trees; Farewells; Go Ahead: The Mania and Disease of Progress; and Who is a hero?


(c)  2013  Clifford Browder

62. Abnormal and Paranormal Adventures

     The blob of orange yam, amorphous, slovenly, absurd.  How can I eat something so ridiculous?  But beside it on the plate, the neat little peas, pert, distinct, charming, so friendly in their green collective, the very opposite of the ludicrous and shapeless yam.  I force myself to eat them: cannibal!

     I leave the diner, go out on the street.  Faces glow, voices squeak and boom.  The façades of the West Village houses, lavender and pink and rose, are luminous.  A folded newspaper falls from a windowsill, lands on the sidewalk with a thump: for me!  Everything that happens is for me!  Someone approaches, looks right at me, his lips move.  Slowly my mind registers: He's looking at me ... he's saying something ... I'd better listen ... I'll have to answer him ... will he notice? ... what is he saying?  The man asks directions and I reply apologetically, unable to help; he notices nothing.  So my decelerated mind is in perfect synch with that outer world proceeding at normal speed!  Then, turning a corner, I'm ambushed by the sun, already low in the sky.  The sun!  The sun!  Inexorably, its pulsing yolk lures me westward, block after block, my eyes riveted to its magnetizing yellow, until the elevated Westside Highway looms up and blocks it out, breaking the spell.

     Back in my room -- a shabby little room on West 14th Street -- the ceiling's chipped paint becomes a cratered lunar landscape, then a pocked face flowering with sores: beautiful!  Next, I gaze at my armpit, see a jungle with jewels.  My mind is loose yet focused, stripped of doubt, immersed in the immediate; I conceive an immense scorn for the blurred vision of alcohol, the slurred speech and mushy sentiment of drunks.

     I shut my eyes: domes, towers, spires of Babylon; hewn into cliffs, Egyptian colossi overlook the Nile; lagoons, purple ants.  Bearded Hittites parade, then humpbacked snails like linked sausages;  under an archway, trilobites jerk in a dance.  But at intervals troops of little cartoon men, mute, deadpan, squat, all triangular in shape and all identical, sneak into these grandiose visions by helicopter, motorcycle, and bike carrying Coke bottles twice as big as themselves, as if to provide comic relief.  Amused, I label them the Hucksters, but strive to preserve the visions.

     I open my eyes: a poster on the wall showing an Alpine village and above it a parade of clouds.  "Green!" I cry.  "Green!"  The white clouds turn green.  When they revert to white, I shout "Green!" again and they at once turn back to green.  I have the secret of green!  No other color, just green.  Exulting in my newfound magical power, time after time I turn the white clouds green.

     Naked, I sprawl on the bed, a lithe little boy, totally self-absorbed and ripe for nibbling, then an awestruck adolescent, thighs spread lewdly yet innocently, chosen of all mortals to give his seed to the sun (a bare lightbulb overhead), this sacrifice empowering the whole earth's fertility.  With all creation waiting, alas, I can't get it up.

     All is not lost.  The Hucksters appear in a long single file carrying above their heads a huge limp penis that with ropes, pulleys, levers, and windlasses they heave and strain to hoist up into an erection --  without success.  Desperate, I blink my eyes till the lightbulb and the whole room pulse, and so fake orgasm, pretend to juice the world, feel drained.  The world is saved.

     I wake up tired, groggy; the clock says six p.m.  My eyes ache; a whole day has somehow disappeared.


These little guys swung the doors
of perception wide open.
Frank Vincentz     Such was one of my peyote adventures in October 1959 when, having finished my dissertation on André Breton (though not the oral), I left the Columbia campus and moved down to the West Village, so as to get free of academia and be nearer the beatnik scene on Macdougal Street, where in a scruffy little café
I heard scruffy poets read scruffy poetry to eager weekend crowds.  In a Village bookshop I encountered a mimeographed newsletter (no xeroxes then) by a guy named Jack Green, extolling his adventures high on peyote.  Fascinated, I did a bit of homework, reading an 1897 article by Havelock Ellis, and Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception.  Then, assured that peyote, a cactus growing in the Rio Grande valley, was quite legal and not addictive, I contacted Green, a bearded, heavyset beatnik whom I found hunched over a manuscript in a tiny office on East 5th Street, and got the address of an outfit in Laredo, Texas, that could supply me with the cactus.  I should add that I was middle class to the core, no beatnik, no taker of immeasurable risks.  But for the second time in my life (the first being a trip to Alaska, where I had worked one summer), I was in the mood for something totally and startlingly different, and peyote enticed me.  Soon I had in my possession a small box containing twenty little gray-green thornless cacti nestled close together: the means, I dared to hope, of achieving Rimbaud's disordering of all the senses in order to arrive at the Unknown.

     The peyote buttons proved nauseously bitter to the taste; I could consume them only by simultaneously gobbling a handful of raisins.  The first attempt, with three buttons, was futile, but I persisted.  The next night I managed to gobble seven of them and, with my teeth chattering slightly, lay down, eyes shut, and waited.  What followed was a series of vivid fantasies, the most significant being the African one mentioned at the beginning of my post on earth goddesses (#59, May 2013), which I won't repeat here.  Other adventures followed, including what is narrated above.  Fascinated, I wrote off for another hundred cacti so as to continue the adventure.  The result was more highs with similar vivid impressions: when I went outside, heels clicked sharply on pavements, people's high-pitched laughter resounded grotesquely, every doorway offered up a unique set of sounds.  And when, back in my room, I lay down and shut my eyes again, the inner fantasies resumed, always exotic, always in Technicolor: a turbaned bugler, pyramids, mosaics, strange fish, gaping monsters with jagged teeth, tiny eyes, bands of color, gems, as well as hints of Gauguin, Van Gogh, Dali, Michelangelo, Tanguy, Klee, Picasso, and Chagall -- a feast of modern art.  On one occasion, however, a hideous ape-man appeared -- a kind of missing link, half human, half brute -- who eyed me fiercely with malice, causing me to open my eyes and eliminate this threatening vision, my only experience of fear.



Figures walking in profile from Egyptian tomb murals
and papyri manuscripts peopled my visions, even
causing me unconsciously to attempt a similar
 posture while lying on my bed. I often saw mosaic-like patterns.
Michael Coghlan
































             



Mexican serapes also appeared.
















    Once, as the high diminished, I went into a coffee house and studied those around me, registering images that are with me to this day: a thin, angular girl beside a round-faced, chubby boy, and two chess players, a girl who, having made her move, slumped back relaxed on her chair, her body loose and slack, while her opponent, a boy, sat forward hunched and tense as he studied his next move.  For the first and probably last time in my life, I had the artist's eye; with a sketch pad I could have sketched both couples instantly.

     These adventures I mostly kept to myself.  One friend knew of them, but when, slightly high, I went to him eager to recount these experiences, he greeted me at the door with a weary know-it-all look, informing me that, having taken anti-depression pills for years, he knew all about heightened perception, had nothing more to learn from me.  Why he wanted to kill my adventure I still don't know.  I didn't argue, couldn't, but knew for certain that, had he experienced anything like what I had, he would have raved ecstatically.  Another friend who lived upstate, when informed feverishly by mail, registered astonishment and interest.

     In time, these visions faded, more buttons produced less, I couldn't turn the white clouds green.  But I had learned a lot.  The beauty of every surface, for instance, when studied with a microscopic eye.  A world that was bright, clear, and focused, delivering its essence at every moment.  No strong emotion while under the influence of peyote, no brooding or self-pity or hysterical joy, only a quiet satisfaction with the world as it was.  Intense lucidity, no interest in abstractions or value judgments, only in immediate sense perception; if I had seen a beautiful painting beside an ugly one, I would have been equally absorbed by the lines and colors of each.  This was not hallucination, but simply heightened perception; the real world, only better.  But peyote allowed no opportunity for the practical; had I tried to cook, I'd have become so absorbed in the dancing flame that I'd have forgotten  to put the dish on the stove.  And no possibility for concentration; had I tried to read, the subtle contours of the page would have completely upstaged its content.  But always I was certain that whatever wonders I'd experienced could be explained, even if I myself lacked the means to do so.  Marvels, not miracles.

     Once I realized that I had received all I could from peyote, and that any further experiments would yield only diminishing returns, I gave it up.  It was beautiful, memorable, unique, but also intensely artificial, never the real world that I knew.  Everything it offered me was distorted, beautifully distorted,  as if some gifted artist had imposed his style on it.  I wanted heightened perception in the real world, without an artificial stimulant.  Also, while peyote was not addictive like nicotine, I suspected that for some it might become a gentle refuge from the fierce to-do of living, and that I did not want.  So good-bye to sublime grandiosity, to comic strips of dream.

     I don't recommend peyote to others. First of all, it's been illegal in the U.S. since 1970, though a 1994 statute makes an exception for members of the Native American Church, when they use it for spiritual or religious purposes.  And while I had a benign experience, that might not be the case for everyone.  When my friend upstate tried it, he became paranoid, was certain that people were watching him -- a reaction that I had never had.  Wisely, he too gave it up.  Peyote was my only drug experience ever; I have done no other, not even marijuana.  I don't need it.


     And now for a very different experience.  One September long ago Bob and I arrived on Monhegan, the island off midcoast Maine where we used to vacation, anticipating the usual idyllic two weeks in the cabin that we rented from our friend Barbara.  We spent the first day settling in and by bedtime were more than ready for sleep.  And yet, no sooner was I in bed than I sensed vaguely that something wasn't quite right.  Getting up to go to the bathroom, I sank gently to my knees when I got there, and my mind split in two, an observer floating off in space nearby as he observed the other part of me,  the doer who was on his knees.  The observer watched this spectacle with the utmost detachment and calm, simply noting with casual interest that the doer was on his knees and wondering why.

     How long this went on I have no idea, but Bob, becoming alarmed, came to the bathroom, saw me on my knees, and feared the worst.  But with his help I got back on my feet, the observer vanished, and I got back to bed.  We were both in our separate beds now, but neither fell asleep.  "Let's open the windows," I said, without knowing quite why.  By now it was stormy and raining outside, with occasional bolts of lightning -- not the kind of weather when one would open windows wide, but that is what we did.  Back in our beds, we still couldn't fall asleep.  "Let's go to Barbara's," I finally said, again without knowing why.  Tossing coats over our pajamas, we hurried across the yard to her house, pounded on the door.  By luck, she was still up and came to let us in.  We explained the situation as best we could, and I promptly fell onto one of her two sofas.  Bob and Barbara then returned to the cabin, where they opened more windows, and Barbara, who had a hunch what the problem was, turned off the refrigerator.

     Bob and I spent the night on her sofas and then, the next morning, went back to the cabin.  Barbara came soon after breakfast with a handyman, who took one look at the gas-operated refrigerator and confirmed her suspicion: the motor was caked with carbon and as a result had been emitting carbon monoxide.  We had had a close, near-fatal call.  The handyman cleaned off the carbon, which made the refrigerator safe to use, but Barbara wasn't taking any chances: soon afterward she replaced it with a new one.  Today, such incidents are impossible on the island, for gas-powered refrigerators have been replaced by ones that run on electricity.  They may konk out in a power outage, but they don't give off monoxide.

     What I most remember about this incident was how my mind split in two, with one part observing the other with detached curiosity, but nothing more.  I wonder if people drowning undergo the same bifurcation, with an observer watching calmly as the doer splashes about in desperation and then, exhausted, drowns.  This is the only full-fledged out-of-body experience that I have ever had, though today, in my dynamic maturity, I sometimes briefly observe myself in action as if that acting self were a different person: interesting, but a pale imitation of what I experienced on Monhegan.  These experiences are not uncommon, since one person in ten is said to have had them, but science has yet to find an explanation.

An artist's attempt to render an out-of-body experience.
But I doubt if any art work can adequately convey it.
     So we can have two selves simultaneously, one observing the other.  Only two?  In a poem I have listed nine -- not nine totally distinct selves, which would be schizoid, but nine different fantasy personas that vie with one another for precedence:
A bisexual stud equally attuned to spankings of bare-bottomed boys and penetration of the jungle of Woman;A naughty little nitwit queer who revels in submitting to male dominance, shocking prudes and jocks with his cry, "I'm fruit!  I'm fruit!  I'm fruit!"A seeker who with prayer wheels, mandalas, and yogurt would renounce blind lust, aspiring to high and low nirvanas and fragrance of grace;A sour-tongued critic who denounces this theater and playpen of the mind, reviling these eroto- and mystomaniacs as crazed, depraved, inane;A remote observer who views all these selves serenely with detachment and amused tolerance;A blathering poet;A scheming greed creep;A health nut;A weepy suicide who skulks in self-pitying woe.Yet even this list is not complete, since the observer is eyed in turn by an observer who is likewise eyed by an observer through a mirror maze of infinite regression.  To put it mildly, we are complex individuals comprising many masks or personas, no one of which dominates for long.  Which makes it tough for biographers.  Confusing, to be sure, but fascinating.

     And  now to dreams.  Not exactly abnormal experiences, since we all have them nightly, but experiences that follow patterns and rules quite different from our waking experience.  Since other people's dreams can be a bore, I will cite only one, the most memorable dream I have ever had to date, quite unique and never repeated since.
     I was in our garage at home -- "home" being the house where I grew up in a suburb of Chicago -- where lawnmower, rakes, shovels, my father's bait cans and outboard motor had all been mysteriously removed, and the space usually occupied by my father's car was empty, with grease spots on the floor.  There had been a disappearance, with violence suspected.  A murder, perhaps, but who was the victim and who the murderer?  Locked deep in my throat, I detected a wedged obstruction.  Coughing, heaving, I felt the blockage loosening, the buried evidence at hand.  Doubled over, choking, gasping, I heaved again, strained, felt a great mass moving, and as hot blood gushed from my mouth, I retched up and beheld, torn out at the roots and thrashing in spattered gore on the pavement, a huge tongue.
     This dream has always baffled me.  The garage was my father's domain, and he was a dedicated fisherman and garrulous to boot, always full of stories, many of them hilarious.  Does that make him the victim, and me the murderer?  Or are we both victims?  And is the tongue to be interpreted as phallic, or is that too simple, too obvious?  I leave it to the amateur Freudians out there, but with this warning: what you come up with may be a projection more of your own psyche than mine.  Analysts, beware.

     Finally I want to look at near-death experiences and what they tell us about the hereafter.  Once known as soul travel or spirit walking, in our more secular age they are referred to as NDRs.  I first heard of them long ago on WBAI (yes, them again!), when a doctor was interviewed who told about attending a little boy who was dying, he didn't say of what.  The boy was not in pain and, unlike most adults, was comfortable with the fact of his dying.  But he asked the doctor what it would be like, and the doctor told him what he had learned from other patients who had died and then come back.  Freed from the body, the mind or awareness hovers for a short while at the death scene, aware of what is happening but unable to communicate with anyone there, as if watching through a thick glass pane.  Then it moves away from the scene of death toward a dark tunnel, at the end of which is a brilliant but restful light.  At this point some express a wish to return to life so as to finish something they have left undone, and if the wish is granted they do indeed return, come back to life in their body, and report their experience.  Which was as much as the doctor knew, since those who go deep into the tunnel toward the light never return.  The boy found the doctor's account very comforting; there was nothing to be afraid of.
     Sometime later the boy died quietly in the night, but then returned to life.  His first words: "It's just like the doctor said."  He then explained that he was a bit uncomfortable dying in the darkness of night, and so had asked if he could come back to life for a little and die in the daytime.  His wish had obviously been granted, and on the following morning, in broad and comforting daylight, the boy died again, peacefully.
     This story moved me very much.  Wanting to learn more, I got hold of a book on near-death experiences that said a great deal more about them.  As in the doctor's account, the near-death subject hovers over the body for a while, surrendering without fear or grief or despair to this new state of being, while feeling a calm seriousness, mental quickness, and sense of surety.  There is no doubt, no debate; this simply is.
     Next, some hail a cab or cross the River Styx, or spin in spirals or descend into a well or cave, but most feel propelled through a dark tunnel toward a welcoming light.  Critics have seen this as a replay of passage through the birth canal into the glare of the delivery room and its white-garbed personnel.  Medieval accounts involved a parting of the ways, one toward heaven and the other toward hell, but  today all subjects move toward light.

     The light at the end of the tunnel is described as clear, white, orange, golden, or yellow, but always as brighter than ordinary daylight, yet welcoming and soothing.  It radiates wisdom and compassion, flooding the mind until one seems to understand everything in a single gaze.  The light is God made visible; Christians see it as Christ.  In medieval accounts the light judged the deceased, but in modern accounts it simply questions them so as to help them remember and understand their life.  Some see their whole life in an instant, as if watching a movie or leafing through pictures in a family album.  There may be regret, but not guilt; there may be consolation, or learning that increases self-awareness, or even a feeling of omniscience.  Some report experiencing a glimpse of heaven, or colors more beautiful than those of earth, or verdant lawns, or blue sky and lakes, flowers and rainbows, precious metals and jewels, trees and fountains, golden gates, or shining walled cities.  There may also be throngs of white-clad beings, usually deceased relatives and friends.

     These spiritual beings are guides and gatekeepers who send the deceased back to life if they are destined to return, or if they feel a compulsion to return because of family bonds, unfinished business on earth, or some newly conceived mission to undertake.  This decision is made at some barrier -- a wall or fence, river or mountain, or door or gate or curtain of mist -- beyond which there is no return.  Following the decision to return, revival is usually instantaneous and may be jolting, as if soul and body are out of synch.

     Those who return are filled with an awareness of the importance of love, and a realization that life continues in some form after death.  They may have newfound psychic powers, feel zest for life, show less interest in material things, have a strong sense of purpose, take delight in the natural world, or feel compassion toward others.  But they may also feel regret at having lost the omniscience once briefly acquired, and may find life on earth trivial by comparison with what they briefly glimpsed.  "Why did you bring me back?" asked one.  "It was cosmic!"

     Source note:  For the preceding account of near-death experiences I am indebted to Carol Zaleski, Otherworld Journeys: Accounts of Near-Death Experience in Medieval and Modern Times.  I strongly recommend it to anyone interested in the subject.

     These accounts of near-death experiences are not without their critics.  Some psychologists see them as fantasies of immortality inspired by the mind's refusal to accept the fact of death, and some Christian thinkers attack them for reporting deliverance without conviction of sin, salvation without judgment, redemption without faith.  Certainly NDRs reflect the deceased's beliefs: Catholics report seeing the Virgin and saints, Protestants experience Jesus, those of other faiths encounter the deities, saints, and guides of their faiths.

     I myself have often wondered if the dying might not encounter exactly what they anticipate: if you hope for heaven, you'll end up in vistas of light; if you dread hell, you'll be cast into the flames of perdition; if you have no belief at all, you'll drift aimlessly in limbo forever.  An interesting notion and a great motivation toward faith, but little more than an amusing conjecture.  I take near-death experiences as true and valid, but perhaps as mere hints and suggestions of what is to come, which we can only know for certain once we have passed beyond the point of no return to be immersed in the immensity of light.  There, I suspect, we'll all find some surprises, though I don't presume to say what.

Orpheus and Euridice, Frederic Leighton, 1864.
     The mystery of death and the afterlife have always haunted mortals, who have dealt with them in countless myths and legends.  For me, the most moving is that of Orpheus and Euridice.  When his beloved Euridice dies, Orpheus, the world's greatest singer, poet, and musician, plays on his golden lyre so beautifully that even Hades, king of the underworld, is moved to the point of allowing him to lead Euridice back to earth on one condition: he must not look at her until both have left the underworld.  So he leads her back, but on arriving in the upper world he looks back at Euridice, who is still just barely in the underworld, and she is lost to him forever.  Many artists have rendered the story, and Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice is in the standard opera repertoire.




     But for me, the work of art best expressing the journey after death is the nineteenth-century Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin's painting The Isle of the Dead.  In it we see a desolate, rocky island with steep cliffs rising from the sea, a dense grove of tall, dark green cypresses, and what seem to be portals or windows hewn into the face of the cliffs.   Approaching it is a small boat with an oarsman at the stern,  a standing figure clad all in white who faces the island, and also in the boat a white object that could be taken for a coffin.

Arnold Böcklin, The Isle of the Dead (1883).
When, long ago, I first encountered a reproduction of this painting, I was mesmerized.  I took the standing white-clad figure to be a deceased soul crossing over to the afterlife, which the island represents.  No more explanation was necessary; the painting said it all.  Like a good poem, it didn't state, it suggested, and in so doing conveyed the mystery of death.

     Böcklin never gave an explanation of his painting, though he described it as "a dream picture: it must produce such a stillness that one would be awed by a knock on the door."  Most interpretations are similar to mine.  He painted several versions of it in the 1880s, and prints of it found their way into many homes.  Freud, Lenin, and Clemenceau had prints in their offices, and Hitler acquired one version  of the painting itself; it was his favorite work of art.  Today there are versions in Berlin, Basel, Leipzig, and New York, where the Met possesses one.  A fifth one -- the one owned by Hitler -- was destroyed in the bombing of Berlin during World War II.

     So what do I conclude?  That death itself is not to be dreaded.  Some of us have adventure in our earthly lives, and some do not.  But in the end we will all experience the greatest adventure, beside which earthly adventures are trivial indeed.  No need to rush, but when the time comes, why linger here when one could experience such marvels?  Instead, bon voyage!

     A bite into Apple:  It seems that Apple, the company I love to love, has been stashing billions overseas so as to avoid paying taxes here.  No surprise: all multinationals do this quite legally; it's just that, having vastly more profits, Apple stashes vastly more money abroad.  Congress is -- belatedly -- up in arms about this, just as the British Parliament is raging over Google's avoidance of taxes over there.  Do I still love Apple?  Yes, with all its giant warts.  Do I want Apple to pay its fair share of taxes?  You bet!  And if its actions are legal, let Congress stop ranting and raging and get started on serious tax reform legislation.  If the 99% pay taxes, it's time the 1% did the same.  Or will this all blow over and nothing get done, as usual?  Time will tell.

     P.S.  The Congressional confrontation with Apple turned into a love fest, with our elected officials proclaiming their love for Apple's gadgets and hailing it for changing the way we live.  Quite a contrast with their onslaught against the IRS.  As one journalist observed, these days it's better to be a tax dodger than a tax collector.


     A bite into Monsanto:  Yesterday, Saturday, March 25, a chilly, windy day with rain, there was a march against Monsanto at Union Square.  As those who follow this blog know, if Apple is the company I love to love, Monsanto is the company I love to hate (post #58, April 2013).  So I thoroughly applaud this march, even if I couldn't myself be there.  And I applaud even more the fact that tens of thousands of activists the world over, in some 40 countries and at least 48 U.S. states, participated.  Other cities holding marches included Chicago, Cleveland, St. Paul, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, Boulder, Harrisburg, Orlando, Montreal, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Melbourne, Berlin, Paris, Brussels, and even Moscow.  The protest against GMOs is worldwide, because they threaten the whole world.  And this is a grassroots movement organized by ordinary citizens angered by the lack of action by governments -- and even by mainstream environmental organizations, some insist -- on this all-important issue.  Last March, in fact, Congress passed a biotech rider now dubbed the Monsanto Protection Act that lets Monsanto and other companies continue to plant and sell their products even if legal action is taken against them, which once again shows whose side our government is really on.  And last Thursday, just two days before the march, the U.S. Senate voted 71 to 27 to reject a bill that would have allowed states to decide whether or not genetically modified food should be labeled, a provision that polls show most Americans favor.  Need I add that former Monsanto employees have often worked for the FDA, and still do?  And if you don't know what GMOs are, you'd better find out fast, because they're in your food already and will be in it even more, if no one stops Monsanto.

     Coming next:  Jim Fisk, part 2: The Great Gold Corner of 1869, or, Can't a fellow have a little fun?  After that, in whatever order: Trees, Farewells, The Mania and Disease of Progress, Who is a hero?  And newly in the works: A West Village Murder and the Fear of Night.

(c)  2013  Clifford Browder