by Fitz | Mar 28, 2017 | Journal, Songs, Teaching, The American Folk Experience
In fifth grade my mother finally let me go to the Concord Music store and buy a “45” single. I bought Johnny Cash’s version of “Ring of Fire” written by his future wife June Carter and Merle Kilgore, a noted country songwriter of his day. There was no doubt in my mind back in 1966 what was the best song ever written. I pretty much feel the same way now.
“Ring of Fire” is about as simple and perfect as a song gets. It uses three simple chords, two verses, and two choruses, yet it is a profoundly moving and enduring testament to the power, mystery, and allure of falling, failing, and floundering in love. Only an absolute misanthrope would fail to sense the power of this song.
As you try to write your own songs, it is worth looking at and listening to and reflecting upon:
[Verse 1]
Love is a burning thing
And it makes a fiery ring
Bound by wild desire
I fell in to a ring of fire
[Chorus]
I fell in to a burning ring of fire
I went down,down,down
And the flames went higher
And it burns, burns, burns
The ring of fire\
The ring of fire
[Verse 2]
The taste of love is sweet
When hearts like our’s meet
I fell for you like a child
Oh, but the fire went wild
[Chorus][x2]
The verses are two rhymed couplets of between 6-8 syllables per line. The song starts with a statement: “Love is a burning thing” and likens that love to a physical ring into which the author, “bound by wild desire” is drawn towards—come what may. I often wondered why the unknown character did not leap or jump, but rather “fell” into the burning ring. Perhaps it symbolizes the inescapable nature of wild, untamed and unthinking love, or perhaps it is just a play on the phrase falling in love. However you take it, it works.
The chorus musically rises in a crescendo—much like the flames that grow “higher and higher” as the protagonist falls deeper and deeper in love. It employs the time-honored technique of parallelism and tri-colon usage with its repetition of “down, down, down” with “burns, burns, burns” and employs only a single rhyme scheme with “fire” and “higher.” This love affair totally consumes the main character as it drags him or her inexorably deeper into the burning pain and complexity of love. I don’t always know whether to sing the couplet phrases of “ring of fire” as a warning, a lament, or an ecstatic vision.
The second and final verse totally shifts the tone of the song into something more akin to a narrative reflection—a reflection wizened by experience telling us only that the “The taste of love is sweet/ when hearts like ours meet.” The final couplet of the song describes the predicament of love as laconically spoken as any phrase in literature: “I fell for you like a child” followed by the problem of love: “Oh, but the love went wild.”
Did it grow wild and kill the love or is love a wild part of our nature that cannot be tamed or controlled? Is that love lost when the fire runs its course? “Ring of Fire’ does not tell us much more. We fill the gaps with our own tanglings with love. Is that enough?
I’ve been singing this song for over forty years, and I still don’t know the answer, but I can agree and know from experience how easy it is for the love to go wild.
by Fitz | Mar 27, 2017 | Essays, Journal, Teaching
I am constantly asking my students (and myself) to reflect on the literature they, and I, read. As I have grown older—and not necessarily wiser—I find myself only reading literature that I am sure will prod me out of my intellectual and emotional torpor, like a lizard basking in the newfound warmth of spring. Right now it happens to be The Brothers Karamazov, a book I first read as an eighteen-year-old literary newbie. It might have been the first time I didn’t turn away from a book because of the daunting length of the text and the panoramic sweep of life it covers. It is now a completely new experience, though it still resonates with the young and restless soul that even now permeates the fibers and sinews of my aging and ageless self. That book made me think.—and forced me to think beyond and into my myopic experience of life thus far.
In short, I could not read without responding. The reflections of my mind needed an outlet, so I found myself arguing and assenting in long rambles in notebook journals or with anyone who would listen to me, argue with me and/or explore with me. In that way the novel became—and still is— a part of me. The more I wrote about what I read the more I knew the book. By knowing what I knew (and did not know). I realized that only by exploring through reflection could I answer through an essay.
Most of us have to write essays about subjects we know precious little about; hence, our essays have the taint of soured milk—still milk, but hardly worth drinking…
Our teachers mark us down for inserting the “I” voice into our writing as if “we” don’t really exist—as if there must always be proof beyond ourselves that “knows” more than we know—as if that is something we don’t already intrinsically know. To me, a good essay reeks of what we know, what we have explored and what we are seeking to know, and it is a damn pity when a teacher robs us any part of that triad.
You are only wrong when your facts are wrong, distorted by prejudice or bigotry, or so steeped in self-indulgent arrogance that your words fail to resonate with any kind of lasting ring—like a drum without a skin or a harp without a string.
You are equally wrong when you simply spin words into a song without music, or you pen words without meaning and foundation in your own heart—without the essence of the real and palpable you to speak with a clarity that helps others to see and feel and experience “your” experience.
A reflection is simply your recreation of your inner experience of experience. In reflecting we see our warts and blemishes clearly until those imperfections are diminished by the truth and sincerity of our search for meaning and substance to give voice to that search—and that search should extend beyond yourself. No doubt, if you wondered something, someone else wondered the same thing—and maybe even wrote about it.
Keep exploring until your inkwell is dry and your head is emptied.
And only then should you write your essay…
There is not a rubric for reflective thinking and writing. All I can ask is that you be aware of what you are thinking and feeling and to ask yourself why you are thinking and feeling that way. After almost any good meal, none of us really struggles to find words to express our satisfaction with the meal; likewise, if what we eat is pretty horrible, we can also readily find the words to express our dissatisfaction.
But it is never as easy with intellectual satisfaction or dissatisfaction because we are seldom as clear as to why we like or don’t like a piece of literature. Maybe it is because it is our intelligence on the line. Food is pretty straightforward. If you hate peppers, anything made with peppers is distasteful—and few people will judge you harshly; however, if you don’t like poetry…well, you are either ignorant, bigoted or stupid—or at least other more well-read people will smugly feel that way about you, even as they feign politeness.
by Fitz | Feb 21, 2017 | Journal
Time for a change. Feeling it in a lot of ways. After months of steady workouts, I’ve been finding too many convenient ways to let the day slip by. Still feel better than I have in years, but the days seem to have got the best of me. Excuses, procrastination and sometimes sheer lethargy and exhaustion got a foothold.
The next few days will be busy as hell, too. Got to get to school early and pay the piper and keep paying…
That means getting to bed here before 1:00 a.m. And that means this writing—which I have been avoiding too—has to put to bed before any real thoughts flow. Tomorrow is a new day.
by Fitz | Jul 27, 2016 | Essays, Journal
Like birds of a feather, we gather together,
‘Cuz they’re feeling exactly like you…
~John Prine
I am not afraid of being a white minority.
I had lunch today with a Jamaican drummer, a Ugandan farmer, and a Senagalese potter. I don’t say this out of pride, for we gathered together simply because we are the old guys working in a young persons’ place. Our conversation was far from noble (unless unpretentiousness is noble) but simply eating together was an experience of nobility–a subtle reminder of what is possible. I have lived long enough and broadly enough to recognize the essential principles of goodness–‘and that has been my continuing consolation. Sappy as it sounds: we are all practically the same. But, this fear of being a minority is the core of what is powering the republican campaign. It is a profound irony for a platform that cherishes individual freedom, but it is still a stunning reality. Our 350 years or so of democratic experience has revealed both the sublimity and baseness of majority rule, so much so that I am equally fearful if either party gains the upper hand, but it does not appear that any true and noble warrior will arrive on the battlefield to save us.
So we are left to ourselves and whatever core of nobility that is within us.
As a white American, I am not immune to the angst of possibility. White America has distorted and abused the inalienable rights of minority Peoples time and time again, and if life teaches us anything, it is that the day of reckoning will always come. I remember reading one day the words of some European philosopher who wrote, “that which is not sustainable cannot continue.” These words have lingered in my consciousness for many years. Ever the optimist, I used this sentence to deny and belittle the fatalists among us: the seas will not rise; the next apocalyptic war till not happen; famines will not engulf us, and change will not destroy us because I believed in the power of collective wisdom to act before the tipping point of inevitability.
I don’t believe that anymore.
As a teacher at a pricey independent school struggling to be inclusive, I have been forced to sit through dreary and pedantic seminars about our white privilege. At the time, I despised being lectured to and admonished by pathetic apologists for my race. In my mind (or at least my previous mind) the sins of our fathers and mothers is not passed on to the sons and daughters, most of whom are belly-full of optimism and are freshly bound by enlightenment to a new paradigm of equality and justice. My whiteness is not a blemish any more than a deformed branch is a tree. It is, however, a dark and menacing shade to any non-white who lives “beneath” it. To not see this, recognize this, and not be appalled by this is to be a sub-human dirt-bag.
It is the tribalism of race that makes us racist. To ignore this is fantasy and hyperbole. Moving beyond that tribalism is a monumental task, but also a necessary journey—an odyssey—that we must make to create a pure democracy in line with the original nobility of our Constitution. For the most part, the word “racist” is obsolete. No one really knows what it means, and we throw the word around with reckless and dangerous volleys of stinging venom. Racist has become more of a root word, a prefix we attach with casual abandon for the purposes of expediency to whatever suits our point of view and whatever belittles those who oppose us. Here and now, the loose and reckless “racist” word is being thrown about with righteous smugness by the left and attached to any person who expresses an inkling of solidarity with the republican platform. Incessant derision only widens the gaping maw between people and parties, and friends and communities until the very notion of free speech becomes a pathetic and gratuitous mockery of itself. Your life–and the way in which you live your life–needs to be your first, last, greatest and most memorable statement.
There is no race that can or should be proud of their history if that history is to be looked at in its totality. We are evolving creatures at odds with our instincts. We stubbornly preserve our own in the cycle of creation and we will try to overpower anything that stops that cycle. This instinct to survive and perpetuate our own is deeply embedded through the millennia of generations and is not easily undone. It seems to be our incessant folly to deny this, so we are now entwined and paralyzed in a sluggy mud of our own making. T.S. Eliot once wrote in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:”: “Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,/ have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?”
If you’re not blind, you will see we are at the tipping point of our crisis. We cannot have our tea and cakes and blithely go about eradicating the narrowness of our tribalist thinking. What is real is not hard to see. We are now an enmeshed world of races that needs to act–for the sake of ourselves–as a single tribe of humans–a tribe that can still remember and sing the many songs of our many races that does not mistake and reword prejudice for pride. It is not an artificial globalism; it is a reality we have to embrace and breathe into the actions of our lives. Our melodies may start out discordant, but maybe, somehow, we will at least find a common rhythm to which we can march together. It will never happen if we sing in the narrow halls and conventions of our own minds or huddled within gossiping flocks of sameness, consoled by a common and dull conformity. It will only happen if everybody is in the bigger hall together, searching and floundering for a common key in which to start singing.
And if you don’t, fate has the upper hand, and you will get what you get, and, sadly, you will be left out of the right side of the inevitable.
”
by Fitz | Jul 12, 2016 | Journal
I have been following a Facebook thread about the movement in my beloved hometown of Concord to ban plastic water bottles, plastic bags and styrofoam cups. I am trying to discern whether or not my initial responses are pure and true and not simply reactionary and cynical, for I’ve often wondered where I stand on things like this. I am blessed and befuddled by my ornery nature. who can argue with arguments that are intrinsically true, but practically misplaced and reek of privilege and righteousness.
I applaud anything that is forward thinking, but I always have a visceral response to anyone who tells me what to do and how to live my life. Some of my initial responses are pretty narrow-minded, but maybe the new revolution is much more subtle and needs bold models to frame a new paradigm of thinking, but it is just very hard for me to see the economic excesses of the “new” Concord and to try to reconcile it with a greater sense of a world that is by and large just struggling to survive.
Perhaps, it is simple jealousy. I don’t want to call it hypocrisy because it is not: these are people who are sincerely arguing for a better approach to living in a sustainable way. Who can argue with that? The greater irony, however, is that economic privilege almost invariably distorts our views of what is truly essential and important. To live in a million home and lament plastic water bottles and styrofoam cups seems a bit disingenuous to any family that is simply trying to make ends meet and raise a family in a dignified–and sustainable–way.
This said, I do agree with what they are trying to do. We do need a sustainable planet and we certainly have to start somewhere, but that will only happen with a “sustainable” economy that floats the boats of the poor and lessens the excesses of the rich. Otherwise, this change is only gesture and not progress. Sell your second and third cars; sell your summer home; forgo your trips to exotic places; open your door and not merely your hearts, and then maybe your arguments will have a resonance that is pure and real and, most importantly, convincing because it may be it is you who is not living in an ecumenical and sustainable way.
