Technology Ruins Another Fine Mind
God forgive me, I belong to--at least subscribe to
--receive screeds from--an e-mail list devoted to
abject devotion to and sometimes lubricity about
a particular British actor who shall be nameless
as long as possible. Once every hundred messages
comes something useful. And once a day I lose control
and set out to set the maidens straight. (They come in
all ages, each with her own intense, appalling
girlishness. And inability to spell, think,
reason, look at evidence or answer a direct
question. The seventh circle
of hell I'm locked in
for my sins.)
Momentarily mad, I suggested I'd like to see him play Sirius
in Harry Potter. The reply, edited to make some sense, read
as follows:
I don't think he could do the role of being half-starved
to death in Azkaban. [Azkaban is a prison.] Maybe I
just think that he's not cut out for it....
The guy has played Hamlet, "fat and scant of breath," perhaps,
but suffering unequivocally. Keyboard clenched, I inquired:
Do you mean he couldn't get that thin or that he couldn't suffer
that much? Or, perhaps, that it would hurt to watch him
suffer that much?
The picture I've sent should answer the "thin" question.
And we've all seen him suffer intensely: Sense and Sensibility;
Mesmer, for God's sake; Michael Collins; Blow Dry.
So much for anonymity. Privacy never had a chance.
I am doubtless biased, I said, sheep as well as lamb,
but I think he could play anything he wanted this side of
Romeo (too old), King Lear (too young), and Tinkerbell.
To which the maiden answered (I'm not kidding): Yes,
that's what I meant.
I asked her A or B or C? And she said Yes.
Another voice joined in: What do you mean, he couldn't play tink????
No cap. Four question marks.
Now the man himself thinks an actor can play any role,
and he has a point, though actors come in bodies which
modify but just so far.
Of course he could play Tink, I said. But I don't think
it would be one of his most stellar performances (he is,
after all, about six feet tall).
And she agreed: Alan as Tink would be quite a stretch.
Actors who stretch are a passion of mine, but I had a problem
with this one: Actually, wouldn't Rickman as Tink, a six-inch spot
of light, be quite a shrink?
Last Sunday was Father's Day, and
Willie's puppies did him proud.
They came to pay their respects,
lined up all day in the driveway,
437 of them (assorted--twelve years
of running erotically loose),
each with an offering held in a paw,
the patriarch's tribute
--flowers, food (they made no
bones about it), family snapshots
framed and un-, the ties that bind,
for Willie The Dog a whole new
leash on life.
Willie is twelve and thinks it's time
we got started on his bar mitzvah.
Stan isn't thrilled. (Some parents resist
admitting the boy is becoming a man.)
How Reform, he asks, must a temple be
to bar mitzvah a dog?
Willie suspects it's because he's black.
Nu, is he not a son of the commandment, living
the law of his people? Let grown-up
reason and duty commence! He sees
no problem with Hebrew; give him
a tallis and tefillin and he'll daven
as well as the next bar mitzvah kid. Oy
vey ist mir! He wants to be counted, an adult
male. (One can't go around excluding a person
just because he's a dog.)
He has also thought about fountain pens,
desk lamps, cuff links, shirts, and
wonders if some of the guests would
like to go in together and
get him a moped.
Stan (who wants a motorcycle
but can't trust Willie to ride
on the back) suggested a lawn mower.
Willie suggests that Stan is anti-
Semitic.
The Jewish question. The half-
Jewish question. One Passover
my brother said he wasn't Jewish.
I said Hitler would have killed me,
so I was. Who is a Jew? Never gentile
or Jewish enough, boring you with this
before. I once went out with the son of
an Orthodox rabbi who really believed
that since my mother was Jewish
so was I.
Reading up on the Warsaw ghetto, another dead-
to-the-last-soul lost good cause, and crying.
These are my people. Inside the semi-visible
wall we wait for the scrape of trowel against
mortar, the last bricks pushed into place,
the selection, spent waiting to hear
steel wheels turn against steel rails,
ever again the train to Treblinka.
Why not line them up and shoot them? I asked
on page 400 and something, deep in typhus,
slow starvation, ever-tightening circle
of the wall. Stan said I'd forgotten:
efficiency wasn't the point.
A convent at Auschwitz, esteemed Jews.
Catholic prayers, a 23-foot cross, a fence.
Carmelite nuns in a warehouse of Zyklon-B.
Do not place yourself above others. The living
Poles forget the Jews were Poles, mostly.
Do not place yourself above others; you cannot
be counted twice, alive or dead. A cross
you carry.
Reading up on the Warsaw ghetto: Who is a Jew?
The Nazi definition of phylum: a Jew
has three Jewish grandparents or two Jewish
grandparents and a Jewish spouse. (Certain
complexities.)
Know what? I said to Stan. Until I
married you I wasn't even Jewish.
You letting, Stan wanted to know, you
letting those goons define you?
How It Works, When It Works, If
John Updike said, "A writer's time is
hard to waste." (He's wasted
a lot of his fictional life being
mean about women, but no matter.)
Not time with a pencil, writing
or revising. Re-revising.
I think he meant all
of a writer's time--you know,
you vacuum for years and then
out pours the definitive poem about
vacuuming or vacuum or black holes,
the Black Hole of Calcutta or
Cutty Sark, Hunting of the Snark,
or dust and how we
come to it.
--by Susan Rawlins
Note: In the world outside "Pater(canine) Familias," of course, we strongly support the sterilizing of household pets. --SR and AH (poetry ed.)