Life on Mars
Your brain can only jiggle around in your skull so many times before you start spouting gibberish, twaddle, hocus-pocus, fustian, and flapdoodle, a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, which is why, whenever I meet someone whose job is different from mine, which is everybody, I ask them to tell me a story, like the one the detective told me
the other day about the time he was called to a brothel where a man was covering himself and howling in pain as a naked woman screamed hysterically in the corner of a blood-soaked room. When you were younger, were you like me—did you wonder what sex was and why it was such a big deal? And then you found a novel lying around that looked
as though it might have something to do with sex, possibly because there was a picture on the cover of a woman looking at a man, and you could tell she wanted him to do something besides open a jar of pickles, or else the novel had a title like The Winds of Desire or Harriet and the Barbarians, or maybe there was something about the author’s name
that suggested sex if the book were by Theodosia Montague, say, or Dirk Knightly, people who were older than you, which was everybody, and wiser, more experienced— European, probably, or at least from a city where things happened that you had no idea of, a city where people had first names like Theodosia and Dirk. And so you went through that novel and others like it
as though you were an archeologist cursing under his breath as he parts the vines that cover a cliff wall and wonders if the script he’s peering at is Tamil or Kawi or Sanskrit or a language that hasn’t been named yet, and what surprised you was that there wasn’t very much sex in those novels, and if there was, it happened early: if there was
any sex at all, it occurred once, before the book’s middle, and never again. Which is another thing that made no sense: had I been written a novel when I was twelve, I’d have had my characters going at it in every chapter and heading out to dinner at the end but deciding they’d take one last shot at it in the restaurant parking lot as the time for their reservation came and went
and the maitre d’ called out Montague? Montague? Table for two. For all I understood about anything, I might as well have lived on Mars. No, wait— on a planet with a name like Pluthor in one of those fifties movies, a place where the Pluthorians wear curved and pointed helmets and have advanced technology in the form of machines with lots of dials
and switches but are deeply unhappy and are set straight by a bunch of blond earthlings in jump suits who are somehow able to breathe on Pluthor even though the oxygen content of the air is zero. Nothing made sense. Everything was scary. Math was scary. I got this one math quiz back on which I’d scored a total of seven points out of fifty-five, and as I waited for my dad to to pick
me up after school, I was certain the parking lot beneath my feet would open and I would fall screaming into hell. I couldn’t do math. How was I supposed to make sense of sex? Today I am a homeowner, though, recipient of a biweekly pay check, husband to a woman who is beautiful in every way, father and grandfather to excellent people, able to make my way in a couple
of languages other than my own, possessor of a two-year old automobile in good working order, indentured servant to a cat who does pretty much what she pleases, and so on. I didn’t fall screaming into that fiery pit. As for the detective, at first he thought the naked woman had castrated the man with the bloody crotch, but it turned out that this gentleman’s
particular pleasure was to disrobe, stand on a table, tie one end of a string to a ceiling fixture and the other to his sex organ, and verbally abuse a naked woman. As it turns out, the furniture in this brothel was not of the best construction, or at least that table wasn’t. This was not something I would have wanted to do when I was younger, even with a sturdier table.
Nor is it a practice that makes sense to me today, though it’s not a matter of understanding more than I did when I was young but one of feeling comfortable with my total lack of understanding as I pilot my little ship through the clouds and flit from this world to that, looking down at the people as they scurry from one place to another, wondering who are they and what do they want.
Lines Composed in Defense of American Womanhood While Waiting in Line at Popeye’s
Surely the French love lobsters more than we do, or at least they think of them as something other than a source of meat that is admittedly delicious when boiled, broiled, steamed, grilled, or poached in butter and then consumed as is or made into a risotto or a lobster salad which, when stuffed into a hot dog bun and served alongside the potato chips whose crispness nicely
complements the velvety texture of the salad itself, makes a mere roll into a lobster roll. French Romantic poet Gérard de Nerval had a pet lobster which he walked at the end of a blue silk ribbon in the courtyard of the Palais-Royal in Paris, saying, when others expressed wonderment, Why should a lobster be any more ridiculous than a dog? I have a liking
for lobsters. They are peaceful, serious creatures. They know the secrets of the sea, they don’t bark, and they don’t gnaw upon one’s privacy as dogs do. The secrets of the sea: what are those? That all is change, perhaps, that the tide comes in and goes out as well, and that several times a day. I was in Paris myself two weeks ago, not at the Palais-Royal but the Grand Palais,
and found myself before Abraham Janssens’ painting “Inconstancy, or The Fickleness of Love, ” which depicts a bosomy woman holding the moon in one hand as she caresses, that’s right, a lobster with the other, the idea being that, as the little text next to the painting explains, because women are juicier than men, they are more susceptible to the tidal pull of the moon
and therefore more unstable and prone to infidelity, an idea reinforced by the lobster, whose movement from side to side also suggests inconstancy. Okay, sounds nutty to me, too. However, seeing an opportunity for a lively discussion, I stationed myself next to the painting for fifteen minutes or so and waited for people to approach and look at it and read the little text
or, if they didn’t, directed them to the little text and waited for them to read it and then asked them what they thought. Every man agreed, usually with a smile and a what-else-do-you-expect shrug. To my surprise, though, most of the women felt the same way. Remember, this is France. When it comes to matters of the heart, surely
the women of my own country are more focused and resolute, more committed to the sanctity of their relationships than their French sisters. I was waiting in line at Popeye’s last week, and my order was taking forever, and when I say as much under my breath, or at least I thought it was under my breath, the man in front of me says,
I’ve been here twenty minutes, and I say, You must be starving, and he says, It ain’t that. My wife’s getting off work, and she’s gonna drive by here any minute, and I say, Yeah? and he says, If she sees my car in the parking lot, she’s gonna kill my ass, and I say, Oh, dear—I hope not! and he says, Kill it good. Sounds like true love, doesn’t it?
All But Unknown Genius
Whenever I read that some star of stage, screen, and television not only studied with an acting coach I never heard of but also attributes every Oscar, Emmy, and Tony they’ve ever won to that all but unknown genius, I ask myself why that all but unknown genius didn’t just apply his or her lessons to his or her own career
and reap the fame and riches that went instead to the star, and if that’s true for acting, then isn’t it just as true for writing, painting, sculpture, music (both composition and performance) and film? That’s one question I ask myself, and the other is why do we like what we like, the answer to which might lie
in this mental picture I have of a waitress—pink uniform, white apron—putting a Coca Cola in front of a man who is about to eat a tuna salad sandwich, chips, and pickle spear even as he does his best not to pull out his hair by the handful: it’s 1950, and this is Omaha, Nebraska, and the man is Todd Storz,
station manager of KOWH radio, one of the city’s nine stations and the one currently rated, you guessed it, ninth in listenership. What the darn heck, says Todd Storz to himself as he stares at KOWH’s daily schedule featuring “Storytime at the Library,” “Great Moments in Medicine,” call-in shows about meatloaf recipes
and stain-removal tips, classics and country tunes that appeal only to small clusters of fans, and the occasional fifteen-minute remote from New York highlighting a band playing old-timey songs led by a grandpa telling corny jokes. Ha, ha. Speaking of music, it dawns slowly on Todd Storz that the diner’s jukebox
has been playing the same song over and over again for the last fifteen minutes, and the waitress in the pink uniform and white apron tops up his Coke, and more people come in, and one or two play different songs on that jukebox, but most of them play the same song over and over, though the lightbulb
doesn’t come on for Todd Storz until the diner is about to close and the waitress sits down in the booth one over from his and spreads out her tip money and counts it and picks up a nickel and walks over to the jukebox. What song do you think she plays? You guessed it again! No one has ever been
able to put a finger on that song’s artist or title, but it’s certain that a hit song has to have two qualities: one, it has to be a showstopper, and two, it has to work its way into our lives so subtly that we don’t notice until later. Repetition helps. The more we hear something, the stickier it becomes:
as cheerleaders and demagogues know, repetition trains the neural networks so that some things become more memorable than others, which is how Top 40 radio was invented, even if some DJs cut the number to 30 songs or even 25: the people say they want variety, Todd Storz
realized, but they don’t. Problem is, after a while, we get pummeled by repetition. How do you feel about the “Mona Lisa”? Or the Eiffel Tower? When you see the Eiffel Tower, do you say, Awesome! like an airhead or are you more like popular French writer Guy de Maupassant, who reportedly
ate lunch in the Eiffel Tower’s restaurant every day for years, not because he loved the great iron monument but because, as they say, it was the only place in Paris where he could not see the tower itself. What would you give to watch your favorite movie, read your favorite book,
see your favorite painting by popular Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh again for the first time? Still, nothing succeeds like repetition. As they say, about the time a disc jockey doesn’t like a record, Mama’s beginning to hum it, and about the time he can’t stand it, Mama’s starting
to learn the words, and about the time he’s ready to shoot himself if he hears it one more time, that song’s in the Top Ten, meaning that Mama’s dancing to it in the kitchen with Pawpaw, that being the whole idea, at least from the point of view of those of you who’d like the world
to be a gentler, kinder place instead of a harsher, crueller one: studies show that when one group of subjects dances together and another doesn’t, the first is more like to perform acts of kindness for their partners than the second, also that toddlers are more likely to pick up and return an object to an adult
who has dropped it if they’ve danced with that person first. Kind of makes art something akin to a public service, doesn’t it? Kind of raises the bar, raises the stakes, ups the ante. No pressure! All you have to do is paint the next “Mona Lisa,” build the next Eiffel Tower, shoot the next Martin Scorsese film
even though you’re not Martin Scorsese, write the—kidding. Just kidding! Only do your best. Or, wait: only do something. Do anything. Keep the ball rolling, the wheel turning, the fur flying. Write a line. Splatter a canvas. Play two chords and then a third. Hell, play them all: there are only seven
main musical notes. As they say, even John Coltrane never discovered the key of H. Don’t worry about what the people like or don’t like. Imagine you’re an all but unknown genius. Or just an unknown genius, really, because you might be. Or you will be if someone else
hears or sees what you’ve done and thinks about it a little bit and puts it together with two or three other things he or she has seen or heard and adds a few original touches of his or her own and comes up with something equal or possibly superior to “Starry Night,” the Taj Mahal, any Beatles hit
(of which there are too many to pick just one), The Godfather Part II. You do you! You paint or write or sculpt or compose whatever. Wait, let’s keep this simple. Let’s go back to you playing your guitar, playing two chords and then a third and then, well, you won’t know till you’ve done it, will you?
As they say, it’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note, it’s the note you play after it that makes it that note right or wrong. Now imagine that you’re around this really big campfire, and to your left are all the musicians who came before you, and to your right are all the musicians
to come, and a lot of people around that fire are really digging what you’re doing, though of course there are a few grumblers, not to mention the fact that some in the crowd seem plain baffled by your performance, and somebody says, “Who the hell is that?” and someone
else says, “Beats me,” and a third says, “Does anybody have any more marshmallows?” But by that point you’ve played just about everything you know anyway, so you hand your guitar to the person on your right, and she begins to play sort of the way you were playing
but then differently, and just then someone tosses a stick on the fire in a way that makes the other sticks collapse and scatter, but then the tossed stick catches fire, and so do some others that weren’t really burning before, and now you can see the people on the other side of the fire, waiting.
David Kirby teaches at Florida State University. His collection The House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems was a finalist for both the National Book Award and Canada’s Griffin Poetry Prize. He is the author of Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll, which the Times Literary Supplement of London called “a hymn of praise to the emancipatory power of nonsense” and was named one of Booklist’s Top 10 Black History Non-Fiction Books of 2010. His latest books are a poetry collection, Help Me, Information, and a textbook modestly entitled The Knowledge: Where Poems Come From and How to Write Them.