Curbside
Passings
By R. D. Flavin
Sunrise doesn't last all morning
A cloudburst doesn't last all
day
Seems my love is up and has
left you with no warning
It's not always going to be
this grey
The day
after the December 26-27, 2010
North American Blizzard, I was trudging through Beantown's foot and a
half of snow, began to cross from a sidewalk onto the street, and
...way ingloriously slipped and fell down. Upon rising, my right
ankle was complaining mightily and I was convinced to make an urban
weather decision, in other words, decide between taking public
transportation or hailing a taxi. After a long half-second of
monetary consideration, that is, remembering how much money I had in
my wallet, I stood and carefully (read: in pain) stepped back and
readied myself to flag down a cab. Several sped by with
passengers
and I went pro-active in my genuflection to better my hand-signaling
technique. After more than a few taxis with no apparent fares
went
by, combined with more ankle complaints, a tired elbow from
over-extension in cold conditions, and a general and temporarily
overwhelming lack of patience, I watched an empty cab approach and
began to yell and wave my hand and arm urgently seeking a carpe diem
(noctem, actually) recognition
of requested service. The taxi drove
by without slowing down and I stared after it heartbroken. Then,
as
things go, the cab swerved in the snowy street and rear-ended a car
with lots of noise and damage. Curbside passings occur and for
2011
I have to go with a middling, non-committal “it is what it is”
and attempt to appreciate what was, what is, and what might be.
All things must pass
All things must pass away
Many communities recycle curbside on the same day as trash pick-up. Most are casual about recycling, some have strict rules and requirements, and an intrusive few have empowered garbage collectors to issue citations if potential recyclables are combined with (as opposed to not separated from) the trash. In our querulous and litigious paranoid society (read: snitch or be snitched on), we encourage accusing our neighbors of this, that, and the other wrong thing, before we get accused in our turn. When I lived in New York City and would visit folks in lower Midtown and the upper Village, I was considerably creeped out that, when visiting, I'd often meet their garbage before I met them. It was too intimate (with more Chinese take-out containers than pizza boxes, unlike Boston and Chicago), though I sort of understand that city-planning didn't include many alleys, and sidewalk and curbside space is “watcha git.” There seemed to be a lot of uneaten Chinese food in those curbside cans and I'm thinking it doesn't speak well of the quality of the “local” NYC Chinese restaurants.
We throw
and toss much to the curb
nowadays. It wasn't always so, of course, though primarily
because
the American English 'curb' is relatively recent. My gut
instantly
wrenches and seizes upon the turn-of-the-19th-&-20th
centuries practice of New Hampshire and Massachusetts towns with fair
and growing budgets raiding the more-or-less abandoned Jonathan
Pattee's farm-site in North Salem, New Hampshire (later, post-Pearson
& Goodwin aka “Mystery Hill” and “America's Stonehenge”)
to cart away previously hewn chunks of granite to install as
curb-stones in such newly prosperous towns as Nashua, NH and Lowell
and Haverhill, MA. While I'm all for city improvements, doing
public
service by robbing another town's resources, especially when the town
is in another state, seems wrong in every scenario except any that
involve Zombie Virus Plague Stuff (ZVPS). Then, in desperation
and
humility, and to “form a more perfect union,” we go forth by
doing “it is what it is.” Still, town-managers or whoever could
have coughed up some coin to either pay for newly hewn granite or
handed-over some alms to the North Salem coffers. Just sayin'...
People
get tossed to the curb all the
time. In personal relationships, in layoffs and corporate
downsizing, and, most heinously immature, people fall as prey to the
Media and so-called “Public Opinion” and are destroyed through
social excarnation. We treat some
as trash, though there have been
a few recent examples of recycling and reclamation, to wit, the
careers of Hugh Grant, Paul Reubens (aka Pee-wee Herman), and Glenn
Beck (who apparently
got away with raping and murdering a young girl
in 1990). With my geek sympathies extended, I'm reminded of the
case
of Moses Wilhelm Shapira (1830-1884), a respected antiquities dealer
who acquired very old biblical manuscripts, too old for acceptance
(this was several decades before the discovery of the Dead Sea
Scrolls in 1947), and was publicly vilified, named a forger and
disgraced, and soon committed suicide from shame (Allegro 1965).
Going curbside happens a lot, and not just to people, but to
gods as well.
Sunset doesn't last all evening
A mind can blow these clouds
away
After all this, my love is up
and must be leaving
It's not always going to be
this grey
Invoking
old, 'old school', that is,
eighth grade, I recall being curiously confused upon learning that
“Freddie's Dead.” It was everywhere, yet nowhere, as I was a kid
and the song was from the R-rated Superfly
movie I wouldn't see until
a few years later. Kids will be kids, no excuses and only partial
reasons, and “Freddie's Dead” was whispered, coughed, spoken
about and yelled at odd moments as some secret, yet (extemporaneously)
necessary,
password to pubescent functionality. Often, skeptics ever, folks
would reply (myself included) with “Who cares?” upon learning of
the death of Fred. Curtis Mayfield knew the groove (perhaps the
grove, as well), but was far from
the first.
Gods,
much like comic-book superheroes,
seldom die and remain dead. One intriguing exception is the Greek
god of shepherds and the pasture, Pan (Latin “Faunus”), who is
thought to have mysteriously died sometime during the reign of the
Roman Emperor Tiberius Caesar (14-37 CE). According to Plutarch (Moralia, de Defectu Oraculorum, "The
Disappearance of Oracles," 17), an Egyptian pilot, Thamus, was
sailing between Greece and Italy when a voice rose up and over the
water
commanding him, “When you come opposite to Palodes, announce that
Great Pan is dead,” which he did. As the story spread, so
Plutarch
informs us, Tiberius summoned Thamus for conformation. Accepted
as
factual history in late ancient and medieval times, the poet and
mythographer, Robert Graves, supported a modern interpretation (Van
Teslaar 1921) which
suggested that Plutarch's source for the story confused “Thamus”
with Tammuz, the Sumerian/Akkadian god of vegetation and
regeneration. While not impossible, a better
guess would be a Tiberian reaction and response to the prior Augustan
decree (Dio Cassius Roman History,
LVI, 1-10) that Romans should cease debauchery and concentrate on
making
more little Romans. It would seem fitting for a scape-goat to be
part goat, as Pan was envisioned to be. Elsewhere, again during
the
reign of Tiberius, another Eastern Mediterranean shepherd (of sorts)
would also die, but this one purportedly came back...
All things must pass
All things must pass away
All things must pass
None of life's strings can last
So, I must be on my way
And face another day
When the
Greek author commonly referred
to as 'Mark' wrote his euangelion
tragedy set in first century
Palestine featuring a Cynic philosopher, Jesus of Nazareth, unjustly
condemned to crucifixion, he established verisimilitude through
research of ethno-religious Jewish traditions and a few choice bits of
Aramaic and Hebrew dialogue (e.g. 5:41, 7:34, 14:36, 15:34).
Mark's
“risen” Jesus is likely a 'shade' (ẓlm;
Isa.
14:9,
26:14,
19),
a
healing
Rephaim
(rp'm or rěpāʿîm; Isa. 53:5) or
quasi-deified
mediator in a Judahite
mortuary cult (Bloch-Smith 1992). The shared meal between the
“risen” Jesus and his disciples (elaborated in Luke 24:41-43 and
John 21:12-14) may be regarded as a banquet marzēaḥ (Jer. 16:5-9; passim
L'Heureux 1974; Ackerman 1989). The
dénouement
to a celestial installation at the “right hand of God,” according
to the Marcan Jesus narrative, is controversial as Mark 16:9-20 doesn't
exist
in
many early manuscripts and is probably a second century addition.
Mark's tragedy (tragōidia or “goat song”) followed required themes, necessary to both Greek and Roman stage productions, foremost of which was an apparent conflict between a hero's explicit criminal guilt or social error and implicit innocence (e.g. Sabbath regulations and conduct, Second Temple destruction as allegory, and blatant mixed metaphorical usages of “Son,” “Lord,” and “King” of a “God” and “Kingdom of God” which has brilliantly confounded audiences then and now). That Mark presented his Jesus as being kicked curbside may not be far from some unknowable actuality, as Cynic philosophers, teachers, and many who offered a choice to the standard corruptions of the time were offed most expeditiously by the conquering Romans and the local governments who supported them. Jesus of Nazareth, thanks to Mark's tragedy (and, scantily, Paul's pseudo-gnostic letters before and those euangelion “gospels” that came after) has become the Peanuts' character, Charlie Brown (or vice versa). Try as hard as He would/could, they kept yanking the football away, and good ol' Charlie (Jesus) never succeeded. Well, there's been talk of a sequel...
Suggesting that Jesus was kicked, at
some point(s) before and near his crucifixion, to the curb shouldn't
be improper, though it does (re)state the obvious. Roman roads
had
curbs, with their umbones
(“edge-stones”) and gomphi
(larger,
accented edge-stones), Bronze and Iron Age Hebrews differentiated
between what was and wasn't a 'road' (derek)
or
a
'highway' (mĕsilâ)
if it was built through united or gracious purpose and had curbs or
...a proscribed divisional, constructed border (Isa. 62:10; Har-El
1981, p. 11), and a theoretical 'historical' Jesus, as well as
Mark's narrative (re)invention, likely encountered a curb with less
than
cosmic satisfaction. Curbside passings are inevitable when roads
and
recycling come together.
Now the darkness only stays the night-time
In the morning it will fade away
Daylight is good at arriving at
the right time
It's not always going to be
this grey
Good and bad, more and less, and dear and despised, all and everyone experience curbside passings as the old makes way for the new. As difficult as it seems, we recognize eventuality (var. "it is what it is") and let go... Now, exactly what we do with the trash and recyclables, the dead, and the socially excarnated, depends on how much curbside space we have. What happens after the curb? I'm thinking New Jersey or Iceland.
Bibliography:
Ackerman, Susan. 1989. "A Marzēah in
Ezekiel?" The
Harvard
Theological
Review. 82, 3: 267-281.
Allegro, John Marco. 1965. The
Shapira Affair. New York: Doubleday. Despite
comparisons to the
survival of the Dead Sea Scrolls,
accusations of forgery persist;
see: Rabinowiez, Oskar K. 1965. “The Shapira Scroll: A
Nineteenth-Century Forgery.” The Jewish
Quarterly Review. 56, 1:
1-21.
Bloch-Smith, Elizabeth M. 1992. "The Cult of the Dead in
Judah: Interpreting the Material Remains." Journal of Biblical
Literature. 111,
2: 213-224.
Har-El, Menashe. 1981. “Jerusalem &
Judea: Roads and Fortifications.” The Biblical
Archaeologist. 44,
1: 8-19.
L'Heureux, Conrad. 1974. "The Ugaritic and
Biblical
Rephaim." The
Harvard
Theological
Review. 67, 3: 265-274.
Van Teslaar, James S. 1921. "The Death of Pan:
A Classical Instance of Verbal Misinterpretation." The Psychoanalytic
Review. 8:
180-183. For discussions, see: Irwin, W.
R. 1961. "The Survival of Pan." PMLA (Publications of
The-Modern-Language-
Association-Of America). 76, 3: 159-167; and
Borgeaud, Philippe. 1983. "The Death of Pan: The Problem of
Interpretation." History of
Religions. 22, 3: 254-283.
All things must pass
All things must pass away
All things must pass
All things must pass away
George Harrison, 1970.
looking
both
ways before
crossing,
Rick
