De musicâ; de gloriâ (Continuat)

[a continuation of this]

Not that everything was lavendar and roses, not even back then.  Here -- from Nashville, 1957 -- is a heart-rending tale of lost love, love lost:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jkulLE9Bgg&feature=related

(Everly Brothers, “Bye Bye Love”)

Now, in 1957, I was all of seven.  But I had already experienced lost love!  -- No no, do not make fun of this, or imagine that it’s cute; Kids Do the Darndest Things and such shallowness as that.   So deeply does God’s mighty and mysterious law of Male and Female (man and woman, created He them) reach down into the very heart of things:  that no child -- no toad -- no flower, no, no very blade of grass, but doth proclaim and show forth   the incredible impossible insoluble paradoxical   decision -- or whim --  of Him,

to split Nature

                      --> SMACK! <--

                                                    down the middle,

with either half   yearning,

eternally,

for the other…

It happened in this way.  1956 -- I was six, in the first grade.   It was the first real shock of schooling -- we didn’t have preschool back then, anyhow not in our neck of the woods, so that kindergarten was simply the introduction to the horrible unreasonable inexplicable prospect of being taken away from mommy for a couple of hours, for no reason anyone could imagine  (in fact, I still haven’t figured that one out).  In kindergarten,  they didn’t actually try to teach us anything, not even the alphabet;  we just scribbled away with crayons, and half-learned a couple of songs.   (One is given to understand that, in later decades, the academical curriculum became rather more rigorous. -- But I digress.) 

But in the first grade, for reasons best known to the Lord, things became suddenly very intense.  It was like all at once being at an Ivy League college (and I’ve been there; believe me: Harvard wasn’t as hard).   It was the year we were all supposed, and indeed expected,  to learn to read; so we knew that we had to learn the alphabet; and I mean, BLAM!  we knew the alphabet!  Just like that!  Like cramming in med school, or I don’t know what.  Or divine revelation,  perhaps from Apollo  (whom we salute,  albeit from our later, latterday,  sterner thrones as Christians -- some matters can never be explained).

Plus:  Arithmetic [< ! >]  put in its first appearance --:  the very first thing that we ever had met,  that seemed to have abso-lutely nothing what-so-ever to do, with anything in actual life as we knew it (and which yet held, curled within its bosom like the viper of the Tree of Knowledge, and somehow (troublingly) vaguely intuited by ourselves --  the very seeds of Fermat, and of the Riemann Hypothesis  -- But such blood-boiling heart-rending sagas must be postponed to a later time…)  We all learned so amazingly much that year (still almost nothing, but double what was before), we were downright giddy.

Now another thing, the strange thing about the first grade, is that there was now another factor, a new something, something new and untasted and wondrous and strange:    There were girls.

            Now, statistically, I suppose, there must have been girls way back in kindergarten, but I can’t remember any, never noticed ‘em.  Everybody just kind of toddled around; and I *suppose* we used different bathrooms, though we may not have; I really don’t remember.  Whereas, in later grades, each year, there was that very stern no-nonsense fieldtrip down the hall, on the first day of school, before almost anything else, where the whole class (double-file) marched down and then

halted:  before the mystery and the majesty of:
                                    <<  the  Two Rooms >>,
with their forbidden doors.     The boys go in here; and the girls go in there; and don’t you forget it.

            So.  I had no sister; and your mother isn’t really a girl, in any way that you can (or should) understand; but I  had - heard - tell of them, these curious and rather marvelous creatures:  with their mysterious way of -- standing there; and their inscrutable way of -- saying something; and their delicious way of sometimes, almost as-it-were …. mo-o-oving….  moving away… and maybe they might -- half-turn back, and over the slim small shoulder, grant you (yourself now gasping)   a  slim   slight   (was that a?)  (small)
                                                   smile …..........

            But I digress.   (And shall digress again; and shall digress until I die…)

            Within the class, there was a petite little slip of a six-something (six years, some months),  with almond-brown eyes  and with chestnut hair (or darker; nay, rather darker), named….

…

        …..

                            ……    Carol.

Carol.

For the very first time  I have named thee;  and this, by thine own name.

And this Carol -- well I knew nothing about her, we had never once exchanged so much as a word.  Boys didn’t really talk to girls at that point, and even boys talking to boys, or girls talking to girls, were just miniature autism-spectrum midgets talking past one  another,  talking and talking and giggling and pointing, making none of us  any sense  out of anything:   yet somehow, in the fulness of time, this whole craziness of clay  became shaped into something more social; more noble; something shouting and shining  in the image of God.

(Again I digress.   I cannot help it.)

And so:  Carol.  Definitely -- you can take it from me, b’gum, b’dad, -- take it from y’r Pappy, take it from Gramps, from all my long experience in after-years -- definitely a purty little imp of a girl.

But what to do?  How to approach her?

(No… no… We are not ready to confront that flash and tragedy, that primal scene, just yet.   Some further preparation  is in order.)

So what was she like, this lass, who so had snatched my little candy heart?   Well -- a pert, impish slip of a thing,  with a ready smile.  Beyond that?  Hard to say…  But lest ye imagine, I jumped the gun,  be aware that, of my then self, I can discover even less.  I was a…kid…and…ready and eager to like kid things:  only I had as yet been insufficiently instructed in just which kid-things one was expected to enjoy, in one’s capacity as a 6-year-old in good standing, in that golden mid-decade prime of America  under Eisenhower.  So komme ich mir vor:  der Bube ohne Eigenschaften. 

            And it is not as though I have forgotten.  I remember, as were it but a moment ago.   I retain privileged access to the contents of my then mind.  And so I enter, and look around… and find it largely empty.  Unfurnished;  Space to Let.

           

            It was, therefore, no minor milestone -- no small deal at all --when the young and, though youthly-sprightly, yet still strangely sluggish spirit (like Adam in the painting, before the fingers touch),  still almost without form, and void, first dimly perceived   that astonishing cleavage and bifurcation in the very midst of Man -- comparable in its sweep and scope, to that parting of the waters  either side the firmament -- and to the refutation and rebirth of those lower waters:  when, like Eve from the rib of Adam,   dry land was drawn forth from their midst.    For what had been but dim and misty tacit knowledge,  now stood starkly forth, in bright relief:

         Male and Female     created  He   them --

as the full majesty and mystery of the implications of this, are new-born in the fledgeling mind:

         Male and Female…   created….. He…. me…. and thee !!!!

O let the playground ring and echo with His praise!   For  not Atlas  bears the world upon his back, not turtles-all-the-way-down -- but John and Mary Miller,  of Littlewood Lane!

For in truth:   --  But for this sacred flame, to lighten and enliven this cold Cosmos,  the sky would wane   dull as lead;  the planets, grown listless in their orbits, spiral sadly into the sun.   All the constants of physics   would weaken and diminish,  the atoms collapse; and All would disappear, with one ultimate glum shrug,  into the Black Hole of its own sad solipsistic Selfhood.

So:   I insist that this event, when the still only half-conscious and un-self-aware mind, became aware of the Other -- and did love -- is as momentous  in its way  as any clash and crash of armies, bursting through the gates of Asia;  as the birth, or supernova-death, of any star.    We who were made in His image, do bear, within our frail and halting frames, the microcosm of all that is  or ever was  or is to come.

What then of the objection that, having barely met her, and never so much as exchanged a truly focussed interpersonal word (as opposed to the laughter and chat  that buzzed perpetually about the schoolroom  like a swarm of gnats -- emitted from no-one in particular, and directed To Whom It May Concern), I was in no position to pine for one girl  any more than for any other;  that the position was shallow, unworthy of detaining our attention.

Well…. things have to start somewhere.  Things… evolve.  Thus consider:

When a gentleman squirrel  finally sets his cap  and, forsaking all others, plights his troth to his ladysquirrel --  it may be doubted whether, in sober fact, his choice were informed by long acquaintance -- those heart-to-hearts by the fireside, those long walks together in the woods -- whereby the merits of this particular individual -- brightness of eye, bushiness of tail (saving your presence),  and   above all  the ability to find, to bury, and to relocate nuts,  so essential to a well-run nest-hold,  and the survival of the offspring (really, a squirrel can’t be too careful) -- such that these merits had truly been set upon the balance, and weighed against the competing excellencies of yet other long-lashed, coy, and sciurine beauties.   Indeed, in a few cases, I fear, the loving couple had not thitherto been properly introduced;  and that the maid’s first experience of her newfound swain, the father-to-be of her squirming furry brood of littles -- destined to spread  the length and breadth  of the forest, sowing terror among the acorns, and joy among the peoplechildren who really get it, who really truly get where those scampering rascals are coming from -- that this sudden introduction, dispensing with the niceties,  was when she first detected, perhaps with something resembling alarm, the busy attentions of the impatient young gentlemansquirrel, somewhere in the area of the aforementioned bushy tail.

Zoologists early noted, how the young of related genera  resemble one another  more than do those specimens which  have attained to the full, specific idiosyncrasy of adulthood.   And so here.  We did not ourselves much resemble squirrels, back in the first grade; but we did resemble baby squirrels -- tumbling bustling clueless furballs, forever dropping our acorns  or tumbling out of the nest -- to land softly in the outspread aprons of our moms.

[Finished here]