People Getting Divorced
Posted 07-22-2012 at 03:58 PM by davidals
I don't know the precise title of the poem, or the precise year in which it was written, but there's an old piece by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, which opens with the following words: People getting divorced / driving around with their things in their car...
My first encounter with Mr. Ferlinghetti was highly unanticipated - in my lowly high school, located in a suburb of Charlotte, the library included a handful of examples of beat writing: a general anthology, and two of Ferlinghetti's collections. This was quite the discovery - at the time, a nefarious 11th grade English teacher (anachronisms like schoolmarm and spinster lady would be perfectly approriate for this wiry and severe woman) was lobbing dreadful Victorians into an unenthused audience (myself included) of Breakfast Club contemporaries.
Roundabout what felt like the thousandth week of assorted Brontes and moors and cloaked ciphers named Heathcliff, the fundamental joy of reading was spiralling into its' death throes. I wandered through the library foremost because I was a nerd, and the library was quite the sanctuary, where my outré, green-haired friends and I could commiserate freely without suffering the unwanted intrusions of chain-smoking juveniles with disabling fixations on shop class and Molly Hatchet's Greatest Hits.
But after a certain point in time, Steven King's latest just wasn't managing to carry the same old expected appeal. In wandering about the library, I'd taken to reading record guides (a crash course in essential obscurities to search for after school, careening with the aforementioned green-haired no-gooders back and forth across sprawly Charlotte, pinging from one deeply strange, hole-in-the-wall record shop to another), and film guides as well. Then, after an assault of poetry - late-Victorian, of course - an angry reaction, response to the insinuation that poetry had presumably died a horrendous death at a point in some proximity to (a) the Harlem renaissance, or (b) the 1929 stock market crash - I set upon a silent, undeclared quest to find decent poetry which might be marginally closer to contemporary life than runes, glyphs and windswept moors. The discovery of Ferlinghetti came about very soon afterwards.
People getting divorced remains vividly in mind - more than perhaps any of Mr. Ferlighetti's many artful creations. Those opening lines - an absurd mix of freedom and dread, gloom and glory, liberation and lugubrious afternoons with lawyers - contain infinite contradictions, ironies - these are words with adamantine detail and precision, and I was keenly interested in their suggestiveness. There is a cinematic image, a certain great departure from Mr. Ferlighetti's probable intentions which immediately occurred to me, and I've never forgotten it: this image of exceptionally cool, affluent thirtysomethings - very hip, in the tackiest of possible ways: the kind of folks who seek out Eurotrash wives, blow 150 grand on chintzy decor, and then forget to turn off Wheel Of Fortune while doing the nsaty - in a mechanized fashion utterly undeserving of gentler, more euphemistic language.
And so - this paragon, this studio-tanned example of a great, groovy new class of cool - cooler than you, or I - is suddenly freed; flying down the 8-lane 101 southbound through Silicon Valley in a convertible European sports car, motorik autobahn fantasies freely and perhaps sensually indulged, a recently discovered, youngish lover - the kind of potentially expensive ladyfriend once referred to in a hit Randy Newman song as a "big nasty redhead" at his side, a stray wet kiss after a sly joke and shifted gears. And he is gliding, all speed and style, swiftly away from a cabernet Calistoga weekend (chatty, cokey, cosmopolitan as the slow fingertip caresses of languid, transluscent summer sunsets give way to the chill of a California night's suggestive multiplicity of options), tires' sigh soft harmonics on flat, anthracite-dark asphalt - the fault-cleaved Santa Cruz range a low and fading silhouette to the right - past million dollar split-levels and nubby ranchettes nestled in tinderbox eucalyptus groves, the white-on-emerald sign for the matter-of-fact (yet vaguely triumphant-sounding) Semiconductor Boulevard hovering above industrial park rooftops on the left. Onward and farther south still, towards the grand duchy of Mountain View, the brain trust of Menlo Park, the principality of Palo Alto, with the valley-filling sprawl of Sunnyvale and San Jose spreading beyond them beneath onyx skies, a glorious August eve in the Golden State, illuminated by the pink-white eclipse light of buzzing iodine street lamps, the fading heat of sunshine radiating from pavements and freeways into the evening's languid tectonics. Those constraints of marriage - a God-given legalism, now besmirched by popular culture and the unshackling of bra-burners and c**ksuckers and miscellaneous other shacker-uppers - have eroded and slowly morphed into calibrated arrangements, subsidiary clauses, negotiated rights of first refusal. But no bother - our golden protagonist is free, fabulous and flying towards forty: wind in the hair, jingle-jangly pocket change (plus a fat little brown-tipped roach) in the ashtray, ammonia-scented blueprints of Le Corbusier's worst nightmare still rolled and rubber banded like an afterthought in the back seat. The aftershave, the wallet, the shoes, the seamless and enveloping production job of The Long Run (all the debutantes in Houston, baby, couldn't hold a candle to the plastic surgery disaster that is you) rising from discreetly nestled speakers - all coalsece within this remarkable and handsome vehicle to form a definitive, absolute atmosphere. Aglow, and the great love of the world swoons, coasts and glides into the infinity of darkened skies speckled with a million worlds awaiting their conquest.
Within the temperate embrace of a West Coast dry season, we have arrived at what it's all about - we all know what it is (whatever we would like for it to be). This is ambient, in the extreme - an artificial atmosphere, zero-gravity, liberation, with our fundaments of oxygen and nitrogen transformed, oxidized into a phenomenal cumulus of dollars, simulacra become the almighty himself, rising and floating with you, upwards and free. Breathe deeply, comrades and co-conspirators. Make a wish, make two or three or eight - that sweet honey sunshine will never, ever end.
My first encounter with Mr. Ferlinghetti was highly unanticipated - in my lowly high school, located in a suburb of Charlotte, the library included a handful of examples of beat writing: a general anthology, and two of Ferlinghetti's collections. This was quite the discovery - at the time, a nefarious 11th grade English teacher (anachronisms like schoolmarm and spinster lady would be perfectly approriate for this wiry and severe woman) was lobbing dreadful Victorians into an unenthused audience (myself included) of Breakfast Club contemporaries.
Roundabout what felt like the thousandth week of assorted Brontes and moors and cloaked ciphers named Heathcliff, the fundamental joy of reading was spiralling into its' death throes. I wandered through the library foremost because I was a nerd, and the library was quite the sanctuary, where my outré, green-haired friends and I could commiserate freely without suffering the unwanted intrusions of chain-smoking juveniles with disabling fixations on shop class and Molly Hatchet's Greatest Hits.
But after a certain point in time, Steven King's latest just wasn't managing to carry the same old expected appeal. In wandering about the library, I'd taken to reading record guides (a crash course in essential obscurities to search for after school, careening with the aforementioned green-haired no-gooders back and forth across sprawly Charlotte, pinging from one deeply strange, hole-in-the-wall record shop to another), and film guides as well. Then, after an assault of poetry - late-Victorian, of course - an angry reaction, response to the insinuation that poetry had presumably died a horrendous death at a point in some proximity to (a) the Harlem renaissance, or (b) the 1929 stock market crash - I set upon a silent, undeclared quest to find decent poetry which might be marginally closer to contemporary life than runes, glyphs and windswept moors. The discovery of Ferlinghetti came about very soon afterwards.
People getting divorced remains vividly in mind - more than perhaps any of Mr. Ferlighetti's many artful creations. Those opening lines - an absurd mix of freedom and dread, gloom and glory, liberation and lugubrious afternoons with lawyers - contain infinite contradictions, ironies - these are words with adamantine detail and precision, and I was keenly interested in their suggestiveness. There is a cinematic image, a certain great departure from Mr. Ferlighetti's probable intentions which immediately occurred to me, and I've never forgotten it: this image of exceptionally cool, affluent thirtysomethings - very hip, in the tackiest of possible ways: the kind of folks who seek out Eurotrash wives, blow 150 grand on chintzy decor, and then forget to turn off Wheel Of Fortune while doing the nsaty - in a mechanized fashion utterly undeserving of gentler, more euphemistic language.
And so - this paragon, this studio-tanned example of a great, groovy new class of cool - cooler than you, or I - is suddenly freed; flying down the 8-lane 101 southbound through Silicon Valley in a convertible European sports car, motorik autobahn fantasies freely and perhaps sensually indulged, a recently discovered, youngish lover - the kind of potentially expensive ladyfriend once referred to in a hit Randy Newman song as a "big nasty redhead" at his side, a stray wet kiss after a sly joke and shifted gears. And he is gliding, all speed and style, swiftly away from a cabernet Calistoga weekend (chatty, cokey, cosmopolitan as the slow fingertip caresses of languid, transluscent summer sunsets give way to the chill of a California night's suggestive multiplicity of options), tires' sigh soft harmonics on flat, anthracite-dark asphalt - the fault-cleaved Santa Cruz range a low and fading silhouette to the right - past million dollar split-levels and nubby ranchettes nestled in tinderbox eucalyptus groves, the white-on-emerald sign for the matter-of-fact (yet vaguely triumphant-sounding) Semiconductor Boulevard hovering above industrial park rooftops on the left. Onward and farther south still, towards the grand duchy of Mountain View, the brain trust of Menlo Park, the principality of Palo Alto, with the valley-filling sprawl of Sunnyvale and San Jose spreading beyond them beneath onyx skies, a glorious August eve in the Golden State, illuminated by the pink-white eclipse light of buzzing iodine street lamps, the fading heat of sunshine radiating from pavements and freeways into the evening's languid tectonics. Those constraints of marriage - a God-given legalism, now besmirched by popular culture and the unshackling of bra-burners and c**ksuckers and miscellaneous other shacker-uppers - have eroded and slowly morphed into calibrated arrangements, subsidiary clauses, negotiated rights of first refusal. But no bother - our golden protagonist is free, fabulous and flying towards forty: wind in the hair, jingle-jangly pocket change (plus a fat little brown-tipped roach) in the ashtray, ammonia-scented blueprints of Le Corbusier's worst nightmare still rolled and rubber banded like an afterthought in the back seat. The aftershave, the wallet, the shoes, the seamless and enveloping production job of The Long Run (all the debutantes in Houston, baby, couldn't hold a candle to the plastic surgery disaster that is you) rising from discreetly nestled speakers - all coalsece within this remarkable and handsome vehicle to form a definitive, absolute atmosphere. Aglow, and the great love of the world swoons, coasts and glides into the infinity of darkened skies speckled with a million worlds awaiting their conquest.
Within the temperate embrace of a West Coast dry season, we have arrived at what it's all about - we all know what it is (whatever we would like for it to be). This is ambient, in the extreme - an artificial atmosphere, zero-gravity, liberation, with our fundaments of oxygen and nitrogen transformed, oxidized into a phenomenal cumulus of dollars, simulacra become the almighty himself, rising and floating with you, upwards and free. Breathe deeply, comrades and co-conspirators. Make a wish, make two or three or eight - that sweet honey sunshine will never, ever end.
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