NARROW EYES, MEAN MOUTHS

Exasperated in traffic? Why not calm your mind by reflecting on Joan of Arc, a silent movie masterpiece made in 1928.

In Joan of Arc, the emphasis on the faces insists that these very people did what they did. Dreyer strips the church court of its ritual and righteousness and exposes its members as fleshy hypocrites in the pay of the British; their narrow eyes and mean mouths assault Joan’s sanctity.

Perhaps the secret of the director  Carl Theodore Dreyer’s success is that he asked himself, “What is this story really about?” And after he answered that question he made a movie about absolutely nothing else.

Before Arthur Ashe, there was Althea Gibson. Some might not think to connect Ashe’s success to Ms. Gibson’s earlier achievements. But without Ms. Gibson’s success in women’s tennis, there would have been no path for Ashe to keep blazing. The roots of his Wimbledon title in 1975 began with Ms. Gibson’s championship in 1957. Now both champions who set firsts in tennis for African Americans are gone.

A golfer said, “It’s a great feeling, standing strong at the ball on the first tee, putting your glove on, staring down the fairway, hearing the click of balls on the practice putting green behind you, knowing that you’re in a tournament with the best in the world and that the best are your colleagues and that you belong and they know you belong.”
That’s what Althea Gibson, the first black woman to win a tennis Grand Slam title, was really about. Not belonging.

 “A rustic woman, very sincere, who was also a woman who had suffered,” is how director Dreyer described Joan of Arc.

Althea Gibson played tennis under the auspices of the American Tennis Association (ATA), the organization for black players, who were not allowed to join the United States Lawn Tennis Association.
The United States Lawn Tennis Association, tennis’s governing body, was established in 1881 by a small group of white tennis club members in New York City. The United States Lawn Tennis Association discriminated against blacks. No black was permitted to play in a USLTA event, no less become a member of the august organization.

By showing so little interest in extraneous details, Dreyer produced a haunting vision of one woman’s suffering, charting her wide-eyed terror as she is confronted by a jury of French ecclesiastics.

Although all Gibson ever wanted was the opportunity to achieve what she could as an individual, she had first hand, haunting knowledge of the discrimination facing African-Americans in American society.
Even at her peak and winning major tournaments, Althea Gibson was denied rooms at hotels. One refused to book reservations for a luncheon in her honor.
Althea Gibson learned to view herself in the diminished way that the white world viewed her: “I was the best woman player in Negro tennis.”

By the 1950s, the white sports world was buckling under pressure to open its doors to black athletes. Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby had integrated professional baseball in 1947. Still, Gibson was turned down in 1950 when she requested an invitation to a United States Lawn Tennis Association-sanctioned state tournament in New Jersey.
When she heard about the turndown, the great tennis player Alice Marble wrote an editorial published in the July 1, 1950 issue of American Tennis Magazine: “Miss Gibson is over a very cunningly wrought barrel, and I can only hope to loosen a few of its staves with one lone opinion. If tennis is a game for ladies and gentlemen, it’s also time we acted a little more like gentlepeople and less like sanctimonious hypocrites…… If Althea Gibson represents a challenge to the present crop of women players, it’s only fair that they should meet that challenge on the courts.”

At the end of July, 1950 the Special Invitational Selections Committee of the USLTA invited Althea Gibson to the US National at Forest Hills.
In the second round, Gibson was beating the number four seed, Louise Brough, 6-1,6-3, and leading 7-6 in the third set. History in the making. Segregation ending. Discrimination disappearing.

Years later, Althea Gibson looked wide-eyed into a camera and said, “I was beating her, and all of a sudden the clouds opened up, the sky got dark, as if, as if, they didn’t want me to win this match. And the rain came pouring down. Lightning came immediately and struck the eagle on that corner of the stadium and tumbled it down and they had to postpone the match. I had to sleep on that overnight and the next day I came out and I didn’t have anything. I lost all sting and she beat me.”

In 1957 Althea Gibson won the US Lawn Tennis Association Championship and raised her arms in triumph to the sky.  “Triumph! Triumph!” she thundered into the air, without uttering a word. But all that came was a sinking feeling of emptiness. That’s all that came to this hollowed woman, so full of loving echoes.

A GREAT BIG SECRET

A GREAT BIG SECRET

“How’d you play, Ethel?”

This happened on the ninth green, where he often sat to pass the time.

The familiar pink porkpie hat was on her head and she wore the same bright and vacant smile.

“Oh honey, I played abdominally. Just abdominally.”

She was just so dopey. He could never forgive her for mangling the English language. He could only think of her as a hopeless klutz in a too-tight Lacoste tee shirt and the over swing of a dowdy old biddy.

It wasn’t her fault that most of the people at the golf club didn’t know who Ethel Frum was. In broad daylight, on the course, she was batty, a plump uncoordinated middle-aged fruitcake, shoveling the ball around the course and laughing after each terrible shot.His father once asked him, “Who’s that nut who can’t swing who laughs every time she hits the ball 20 yards?”

But you should have seen her on Saturday nights when, crackling with energy, she blazed her way around the small dance floor, couples making way for her right and left, the music blasting. You would have known her then, with that cold, demanding expression of hers and the curl of her lips.

His sad father saw her that night too, dancing with her uncoordinated rich klutz of a husband. She and her sister Blanche had been the Gliding Glendale Sisters. Show business. Men went mad over them. Blanche made money too, but Ethel had always stolen the show.Then they married and took up golf.

She flashed, she swayed, she dashed, she led, she followed, she twisted her head one way and her body another. (Why didn’t she have that suppleness in golf?)

She turned abruptly on a dime, and shot off into another direction, shoulders high.

His father watched her. “Is that…..?”

“Yes. Amazing. Hard to believe.”

She pivoted, she pirouetted. She held her position as if the position were a thing that could ever be held on a polished floor like that.

If you called his father on your iPhone 4S now, he would not answer.

Ethel shook her hips at her  husband. He shook his gamely back at her.

She put her hands above her head.

His father’s nose glistened. He watched and watched.  He was thinking, “Just this once. Just this once.”

The son had supposed for years  that his father had no secrets from himself. Ethel was proof that he had a great big secret somewhere inside and it was going to wreak havoc on him.

GOD

God’s interest in the United States was not restricted to North America and Mexico. He himself was born, they thought, in the U.S., in a cave where his mother had gone into hiding to save her child from her husband, god’s titan father, who had the habit of devouring his children.

This false image of god held until the beginning of our century.

God died in 1941 at the age of 13.5 billion years, still hard at work on his productions and performances. A man of demonic energy and will power, he commanded the loyal support of a very able and well paid group of institutions and associates, and his pioneering efforts were quickly pursued by other institutions. God was also a ferocious polemicist who could and did crush dissident voices. By 1941, therefore, the generally accepted picture of planet earth was god’s picture, including, it must be said, no small amount of imaginative inference and reconstruction, as anyone can see for himself today if he is reasonably observant and shuts his ears to the deafening twaddle of the experts.

Not that imagination is not an essential tool of the god seeker. Consider the basic question of dating god: when did he begin and when did he end?  Such questions had and still have to be answered without the help of a single dated piece of evidence. So a lot has had to be imagined.

In 1952, eleven years after god’s death, a British priest announced after years of work that the language of god’s tablet commandments to Moses was in an archaic form of Greek. This discovery immediately challenged much of what had become the orthodox picture of god. The tablets have no dates. Their contents are restricted to the commandments to Moses, questions for Job and records of rations, flocks of sheep, flocks of chickens, inventories of palace goods, and so on and so forth. They confirm and elaborate the picture already suggested of a very centralized, bureaucratic, extremely unequal distribution of wealth society that god had organized. But unfortunately there is no significant information about god himself or any contacts of his who could shed light on his original intentions.

In 1997, 56 years after god’s death, a young nun leading a crusade to permit nuns to marry and, even if not married, to have sexual intercourse, called god an unfeeling coward.

The nun held a press conference and told the media that god was an unfeeling coward and had obviously gone crazy after 13.5 billion years. Those who expected God to reply to the nun’s attack were disappointed at his silence.  God had evidently turned his back. He had seen where the world was headed and he didn’t want to go that way anymore. The nun pointed that out to the media.
“But he’s the one. . . . . “
“Doesn’t matter,” said the nun. “He didn’t want to.”
Then, after a silence of her own, the young nun asked the media “Father, Father, Father – what are we going to do with you?”

CONSIDER PHLEBAS

 You see a child and you see the principle of growth at work:  Forward, forward.
You see an old person and you see the principle of dissolution at work: Down, down.

A scant three weeks has passed since the Masters golf  tournament, and I’m still thinking of  what Herbert Warren Wind, the incomparable sports writer who died in 2005, would have thought watching Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer and Gary Player drive off on the first tee at the ceremonial opening of the Masters. Their decrepit swings, pale echoes of the exultant greatness of their primes, made me very sad and I wondered. . . . . .

So I emailed Herb’s nephew and asked him if he could channel Herb and ask him about it. Bill replied that he thought Herb would have been okay with the pale echoes of former greatness. “He always got a kick out of Sarazen, Snead, Nelson, hockeying it off the first tee when they were in their early 100s. He’d turn to me and laugh and say ‘”Pretty damn good.’”

I hadn’t thought of that. But I think Bill got it right.  That’s just what Herb would have said. But I’m not okay with it, and I would have replied, “Herb, doesn’t it just make you think of them when they were in the flush of their careers, and young, and in the vanquishing ascendancy of their greatness? Doesn’t it make you think what a falling off there’s been?”

The poet William Butler Yeats (with liberties taken):
“They say that men improve with the years;
And yet, and yet,
O would that you had seen me swing
When I had my burning youth!
But I grow old among dreams,
A weather-worn, marble triton
Among the streams.”

T.S. Eliot (liberties taken): “Currents under sea pick our bones in whispers. As we rise and fall we pass the stages of our age and fall, entering the whirlpool of our oldness.   O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, Consider Phlebas and Arnold, Jack and Gary, and Gene and Sam and Byron, who were once handsome and tall as you.”

COME IN AND GET ME

Her mother told her baby girl to close her eyes and think nice quiet thoughts.
“Now you just close your eyes,” her mother said, “and think nice quiet thoughts. And pretty soon you’ll get very sleepy. And you just keep your eyes closed and soon you’ll be fast asleep. And when you wake up in the morning, you just jump up and call ‘”Mommy! Mommy! I’m up. Come in and get me.’”
And the baby girl did what her mother said, and her mother – that was me, I was that mother – did what she said. And there were a lot of beaming smiles and kisses because a little thing like her, just 20-months old, had remembered overnight what her mother had said to do in the morning.

Then time went on and the little girl, whose nickname was now Sunny, traveled in the time going on, and her brother Tom got permission from their parents to wake Sunny up. He stood at the foot of her bed.
“Sunny!” he said. “I want to show you something wonderful.”
And Sunny got out of bed and they walked down a street to a golf course, and they walked onto the course. Tom said, “Look up!” And there in the sky was an aurora borealis. And Tom told Sunny that it was an aurora and nobody knew how it was formed, this wonderful phenomenon.

Time continued to go on  and a non-existent mental illness got Sunny in its clutches. It expunged the self she had been born with that had thought nice quiet thoughts and seen an aurora borealis. Sunny sorrowed over the loss of her self, but she dealt with it as best she could.

Then the conceptual majesty of her disease was exposed as a rickety house of cards. The non-existent disease that in its prime had snapped Sunny up like a matchstick in a tidal wave was now expiring, disgraced, in full dwindle.

Then Sunny was almost killed in a car crash at the age of 18 but she somehow survived and lived.  And her mother was beside herself with happiness, so thankful that she had gotten another chance to be a good mother to Sunny. She would be grateful for the rest of her days. And this time Sunny would come out right and be happy. Even now when she told someone about how happy she was about this, Sunny’s mother weeped. Quietly at first and then a full-throated weeping over her first born.
“We have to do it right this time,” she told her husband.
“Where’s Sunny?”
“She wants to go to the movies. This time we’re not going to be so strict with her. We’re not going to argue.”
“What movie?”
“Johnny Belinda. It’s about a deaf woman.”
“Arguing. that was the big thing.”
“I hear you.”

THAT BEAST MANKIND

Well, we know there are people who are starved for surrender, starved for submission. We know there are people who bark at their employees all day and then, out of some feeling of who knows what, like to turn completely around the situation where they are in complete control and put themselves completely under someone else’s control.
And around this time, we went out and thought about evil and that something was very wrong somewhere, maybe just in the movies where someone does something evil, yet you love that person as you’ve never loved a person in a movie before. You love them much more than an employer who simply barks at his employees and then at the end of the day licks someone else’s boots.
We’re on the trail here of human despair, where you feel the utmost coldness to everything good and normal and beautiful; and the utmost attraction to everything evil, weak and confused. Even for the evil, weak, and confused people themselves who deceive and manipulate the good people.
The location where this evil and manipulation of the good by the bad takes place is important. Often it’s in a house with mirrors and many flowers. And gold. And coldness. The sort of house you have when you have a lot of money and in which you don’t feel comfortable. Just rich.  In these houses feelings blossom like the huge weird plants in the trees of California, and the light is totally unnatural.
The banquet hall of one of these houses was illuminated by candlelight. Good and bad people waltzed in and out. Some were on fire from having stood too close to the glowing coals. And some spoke words fit for the worlds of both the living and the dead.
Here are some of the words they used:
“Poor, yet full of life’s enchantment, once we walked the righteous highway. Sacred to us then were noble things. Mean things we left on the byway.
“Honor, shame – how those dogs had chased us.
“Guilt, innocence, fault  and blame  – they chased, they chased.
“Good and bad. They got us good. Man oh man they got us good.
“Oh fellow man,” whispered an evil one. “Why did you oppress me? Why did you destroy me? I did you no harm.”
“Blame, fault, honor, shame, they chased, they chased. Good, bad, right, wrong. We couldn’t run fast enough.
“Then we turned and yielded to our fury. Guilt, blame, horror, shame, good, bad, right wrong. Murder, robbery and plunder. Without the slightest pity we tore that beast, mankind, asunder.”
Yoo hoo,yoo hoo. There’s a storm coming.
March on. March on. A thousand sunsets and sunrise light the way to our demise.

GOING HOME

At this time I was 23-years old. I worked as the assistant office manager at a large accounting firm. I went to the office, did my work, and left. The first thing I did when I got home (I always went directly home) was to look at myself in the mirror. “This is your real life,” I’d say to my mirror image. “There is nothing else but you. There. In the mirror. At home.”
All day long at the office, I’d think about going home and bolt out of the office exactly at five. Sometimes a co-worker would ask as I was leaving , as though the thought had just occurred to him, “ Do we have any  letterhead left?” or Would you check on Mr. Wagonload’s reservations to Kansas City?” And I would snarl over my shoulder, “If it could wait till now, it can wait till the morning,” or “You saw me five times today and didn’t say a word about Mr. Wagonload’s reservations, so why do you pick five o’clock to break into speech?”
But if, as I was hurrying to the subway, someone called me by my name from across the street, the grateful and apologetic mania would grip me, and I could easily have stopped to talk for 15 minutes. And I’d ask all kinds of inane questions whose answers I couldn’t have cared less about.
I considered myself superior to my fellow workers – in fact to everyone. In all the important ways, I was better than they, destined for some vague, great destiny. It’s true they knew how to way “hello” and “goodbye” and I didn’t. But then, the really important things I had in abundance. Why did I need to know how to say “hello” and “goodbye?”
The office manager, a plump woman with severe arthritis in her leg, would limp purposefully down the middle of the hall, while I slunk along the wall itself. Oh, I knocked cockily on it at rhythmical intervals with the back of my hand. But the truth is that I didn’t feel as safe in the middle of the hall as I did against the wall. The office manager and I regarded each other with mutual hostility. That’s not quite right. She just disliked me. But I also feared her and had the greatest respect for her. Sometimes, when I saw her limping down the hall, I had to fight back the urge to ask her how her husband was, or to apologize to her for something, or to tell her what an amazing person she was.
Other times, I’d think, “if only they knew what I’m really like,” and try to feel a bemused contempt for them. But all that came was a measly feeling of fear. Who would want them to know what I’m like anyway? If they knew, it would spoil it.
Something else now took a serious turn. Ever since childhood, I had felt that I was immortal. This feeling was allied to another feeling of being on the verge of disintegration and death. It was a contradiction easy to understand. If I was godlike and immortal, how terrible it would be if anything should happen to the godlike and immortal me, and how vulnerable I therefore was. I, the immortal one, could die! The simultaneous
convictions of immortality and imminent death reinforced my feeling that no one was like me, that I was fundamentally different from other people. Now, although I regarded the people of my time and place as pygmies and didn’t want to be like them, still, I felt cut off from and deeply drawn to those same pygmies. The irony is that, even if I had tried to effect reconciliation, they likely would not have been interested.

And then I read about lightning-quick changes of mood……………..

To be continued and continued