FLOWERS IN THE FLAMES

Charles Deemer

 

1/

 

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

 

Does anyone read Wordsworth any more? The world is too much with us, late and soon ….

I was 57 before I realized the truth of this, and I promptly acted to release myself from the world's oppressive grip. Hostilities in the Middle East and Northern Ireland, in Africa and South America, and the news from right here at home -- the falling stock market, the growing ranks of the working poor, corporate corruption and downsizing – these and more conspired to depress me. I was glad I didn't belong to a younger generation, all the longer to be exposed to the world's accelerating folly. It was time to say, Enough, already!  It was time to change my life.

I sold my television set and stopped the subscription to the newspaper. When the news came on the classical station I listened to, I switched off the radio or turned down the volume. I avoided the media like the plague, proving the cliché that no news was good news. I strived to rid my consciousness of all concern about what was going on in the world.

The world I lived in was no longer the world at large, out there, but the world I created, in here. This was not easy, especially at the corporation where I worked in middle management. Soon enough I realized I must make a choice, the corporation or my new tranquility. I took an early retirement, cashing in all my stock as well. Everyone thought I was crazy. A year later, after the company was swallowed by a corporate raider and the new owners joined the American business exodus to foreign lands, transferring all production facilities there, laying off thousands here. I looked like a financial guru. Other corporations wanted to hire me as a consultant, which of course was just another intrusion by the world-at-large that I dismissed with scorn and silence.

I reduced my lifestyle to bare essentials. I lived like a monk. No, like a poet. My day was spent with long walks, hours of day-dreaming and meditation. I began to tape record notes for a novel, which became a memoir, which became ramblings leading nowhere but justified nonetheless, not as the foundation of some future project but as an amusing way to spend a little time in the here-and-now. In fact, I began to lose track of time entirely. Time had little to do with my new life. I ate when I was hungry, and I napped when I was tired. Soon I had no idea what day it was. Every day was today.

Occasionally, of course, the world-at-large invaded my private world, no matter what barriers I erected against it. This usually happened from brief fragments of over-heard conversation. I learned to regard these intrusions as harmless, even amusing, the way one might regard meeting an ex-wife on the street and discovering that she’d dyed her hair purple or added a nose ring or tattoo or otherwise become a total stranger to you. Once, in the supermarket, I heard two men talking about President Bush. I smiled to myself. I had no idea he’d made a comeback.

 

 

 

 

 

 

2/

 

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not.

 

            The most difficult adjustment was in my relationship with Joyce. As a testimony to her devotion, it took her three months to leave me. Joyce was a political science professor at our local college, and we’d been living together almost a decade, which made us common-law spouses. But she was a woman whose every breath depended on being connected to the world. When I changed, she made no effort to change with me. On the contrary, she refused to accept the fact that my distance from the world-at-large was a conscious choice. Instead she regarded my behavior as symptomatic of a growing mental imbalance, finally offering the ultimatum that I see a shrink or she would move out. She moved out.

            Then a funny thing happened. She missed me. She missed me more than I missed her, in fact, and eventually agreed to see me for those brief moments when her beloved “real world” could be held at bay – all those professional and social demands that swirled around her daily life like an invasion of locusts. She saw me for sex mostly, but also for long walks and shared silences, mine in meditation, hers perhaps in longing for the way it used to be between us. She did not move back in but she came over regularly; we dated.

            But we dated with decreasing frequency. One weekend, on a private trip to the coast, where I longed for a Wordsworthian vision of Proteus rising from the sea, I saw Joyce walking hand-in-hand with a man who looked years younger than she. So she was seeing someone else. I didn’t blame her. Jealousy was too worldly an emotion to remain a possibility with me.

 

 

3/

 

--Great God! I'd rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

 

                But we kept dating. One day near the end of summer, Joyce and I were working in the garden together, getting the shrubs and flowers ready for fall. She was listening to her walkman, as she had come to do when she wanted both to share my company but remain in her own world. Never once had the young man at the beach been mentioned, though it had not escaped me that we no longer were sleeping together.

            Suddenly Joyce bounded up from the crouch in which she’d been working. An expression between fear and grief flashed across her face. I thought she might be having a heart attack until she turned and sprinted toward the house.

            I found her delirious in the living room, screaming at me that it was insane I no longer owned a television set. She ran out of the house, and I followed her next door, where my neighbor Jim was mowing his lawn. After exchanging a few words, they rushed into his house together. The door was left open in their haste, and I entered behind them.

            Here, of course, there was a television set. On it a movie seemed to be playing, some apocalyptic adventure about the end of the world, or at least the end of New York City. In the movie, a TV station kept replaying the scene of a great jet airliner crashing into one of the towering skyscrapers at the World Trade Center. Joyce and Jim stared at the screen in horror, mesmerized like two victims of the world, which of course they were.

            I retreated. The garden party was over, and the last thing I needed was Joyce returning with an explanation of what was going on. I didn’t need to know what was going on.

            I got in my car and started driving. I ended up at Washington Park, a massive public park spread across rolling hills above the city. I parked at the Rose Gardens and got out.

            For a long time I walked among the roses, hundreds of bushes near the end of their season, their delicate petals already beginning to cover the ground, ready to rot and feed new growth. Later I strolled down to a grassy area where the view of the city below was particularly lovely.

            Beyond the skyline, to the east, an inactive volcano named Mt. Hood floated above the horizon like a symbol in a Japanese watercolor. I stood for a long time, taking in the scene below, longing again for a Wordsworthian vision, a glimpse of the goddess Diana strolling through the forest or old Triton blowing on his wreathed horn or even Zeus slumbering on the mountain, eventually to awaken and stretch with a deafening roar.

But all I saw was mighty Achilles, hovering over the city, his sword raised, his magical shield sparkling in the sun.

 

Charles Deemer

cdeemer@yahoo.com