A LION ON THE DECK
New Year’s Eve.
In which we raise glasses to ourselves and our friends, cheering the arrival of a new year, which we are sure will be better than the last, laughing heartily at the jokes we make at our own expense while eating toast points and caviar, and the municipality sets the river on fire at midnight.
Now, two things involving lions:
In 1999 I walked into a bookstore in Austin at around 10 o’clock at night and bought a copy of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. I paid 6.99, plus .58 cents tax, and paid with a Visa ending in 4136. Employee 00244 rang me up.
I found this receipt in my copy of Donald Barthelme’s 40 Stories, one of my most favorite collections of short short fiction. The receipt was laid in-between pages 14 and 15, marking the three page surrealist vignette entitled “On The Deck,” which is also dog-eared. The story’s arrangement of images, all assembled on the deck of a ship, includes the following: a lion, a Christian biker gang, a crippled little girl, a Camry, burlap sacks, a man named Mitch, a man with a nosebleed, a western fir, a basketball, a yellow fifty-five gallon drum, a coiled hose, a young woman with black hair in a yellow dress, hams, the captain, the captain’s dog, an Oriental rug, a high chair with a peacock sitting in it, a Harley (HONK IF YOU LOVE JESUS), the boat’s owner, hot dogs on a hibachi, hot dog buns, a boyfriend, a man with a bucket of raw liver between his knees, a shuffleboard, two men with M-1 rifles, a marble bust of Hadrian, a woman with a pushcart delivering mail, many copies of Smithsonian, a man in a red wicker chair who is Donald Bartheleme, and upon whom an unidentified person sits lightly, which Bartheleme appreciates. It’s possible I’ve missed something, but I don’t think so. “We’d never touched before” is the last line of the last paragraph of this story.
Then, Allen Ginsberg’s Kaddish, a very slim volume which includes the poem “The Lion For Real.” My copy of Kaddish is one of three copies that have been in my possession, coming and going in these three ways: (1) an ex-girlfriend’s girlfriend gave her a copy, she gave it to me; (2) I gave her a new copy back as a gift, but she forgot to take it with her when she left, and so I sent it in the mail; (3) I bought another copy after I sent her the book, because I couldn’t find the original ratty one I’d been given — ratty because it’d traveled in a 20-year-old’s backpack for many weeks, along with pieces of a chocolate bar and a lot of loose change. She said “The Lion For Real” reminded her of me. She said “Poem Rocket” reminded her of herself. I reminded myself that she was very young; that might have been arrogant of me.
Anyway.
Reading these two pieces now, side-by-side, it is like reading Barthelme’s story in poem form, or Ginsberg’s poem as a vignette. Sort of.* There are lions, abstraction, absurdity, fear, hunger, many fragments of conversation out of context. The captain in Barthelme’s story says, “I would have done better work if I’d had some kind of encouragement. I’ve met a lot of people in my life. I let my feelings carry me along.” The Reichian analyst in Ginsberg’s poem says, “I’m afraid any discussion would have no value.” This makes me chuckle. And is, I believe, something to keep in mind as we go into this new year, although I’m not sure yet how to tell you how to interpret that.
Happy 2010.
* a clever graduate student who still cares should write a paper paralleling these two works
No Comments Yet