Crumbs Cast Upon the Current: Some Stories, Poems, Essays

By Allan Wooley

This book is a series of stories, poems, and essays that attempt to reveal a self-examined life lived in different places and at different times.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Dec 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781491783160

Allan Wooley

After growing up in Maine and attending Bowdoin, the author earned a PhD in Classics at Princeton. He taught at Duke, before returning to Phillips Exeter Academy, where he taught for 36 years and was department chair and coordinator of academic computing. In the New England Classical Association he served as president and executive secretary.

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Copyright © 2015 Allan Wooley.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-4917-8317-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-8316-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015918740

iUniverse rev. date: 11/24/2015

Contents

Introduction

Stories

Entryway Story

On Becoming A Grandfather

The Old Man’s Recipe

Patience Is Its Own Reward

Weed Soup

Some Fon Walker Stories

The Hay Rick

Clem’s Downfall And Fon’s Endgame

My Time As An Iceman

The Day The Fender Fell Off

My Youth As A Hunter

Scientific Hunting

Protecting The Garden

The Violin Hanging On The Wall

The Road To Success (Or The Taming Of The Kitty)

The Joy Of Discovery

Anabasis To The Kingdom

Poems

Occasional

The Northern Verge

I Have A Dream

Morante

Elegy

Canto Della Terza Rima

La Fiume Della Vita

Ode To The (Plotinian) Trinity

Disorientation

Downsizing

For Jim Warman

Raising The Roof

The Hay Haulers

The Sermon

Gravi Aegra Morbo

Rapture?

Birthday Sonnet

For Ilene On Her Birthday

Janus’ Day In February

Redemption

Retiring?

Retired?

The Pastures Of Our Past

Veni, Vidi, Vixi

Retirement

The Mountain Top Peripeteia

Avis .. In Cavea Arta

Solon’s Retirement

Epigrams

Dedication

Definition

A Paradox

Are Dogs Cynics?

Schizo

Schizo Bis

Unde Malum?

What Is Evil?

Cum Studiis Tum Moribus

To An Unrepentant Reprobate

Something’s Missing

To Take A Stand

Conundrum In The Laches

Social Media

Closeness

Evolution

Progress

Half Broke

Nature

Accidental Insight

Man And Computer

Prisons

October 15

You’re Important!

Suckers

A Strange Paradox

The Greeks

End Of An Epoch

Way To Go

Proof Of Life

Pursuit Of Happiness

Success

Failure

Agenda

Out Of Synch

Martial 2.3

Freedom And The Good Life

Programmatic Poems

The Seasons

Moods

Greensleaves

Yearning

Ode To Joy

Despair

Stubborn

Wrath

Peace

Wonder

Gnomes

Vive La Difference

Il Faut Cultiver Notre Jardin

Triple Triads

Sumus Quisque Orbis Ingenii

Ennead I

Cuncta Fluunt (Ov. Met. 15.177)

Certa Stant Omnia Lege (Manil.4 .14)

Simulacra Rerum (Lucr. 4.30)

Dux Vitae Dia Voluptas (Lucr. 2.171)

Labor Vincit Omnia (Verg. Geog. 1.145)

Disce, Puer, Virtutem Ex Me Verumque Laborem, Fortunam Ex Aliis. (Verg. Aen. 12.435)

Omnium Magister Usus (Caes. B.g. 2.8.3)

Naturae Sequitur Semina Suae Quisque

Bene Facere Iam Ex Consuetudine In Naturam Venit.

The American Odes

Sibi Fisus Et Tenax Propositi

Iustitia

Consilium

Aurea Mediocritas

The Mirrored Muse

The Elements Of A Poem

The Weaver Of Words

Turnings

Molimenta Digna

Worthy Effort

Hoof Beats

Final Echoes

Musical Thought

Lucidus Ordo

Tradition

Mending Wall

What’s A Poem?

Ars Poetica

Harmony Of The Epochs

Other Metapoems

Bygone Words

What’s A Poet?

Bis Absurdum

Fraud

Non Sine Forma Ars

Gener’s Complaint To Socer

The Skidder Yard

Transition

Troglodyte

Essays: Scholarly And Philosophical

Plato On Doxography And The State Of Philosophy Part 1

Part 2 Plato On Philosophy’s Future

The Ancient Dispute Between Philosophy And Poetry

Part 3 Continuum Of Worldviews

Appendix To Continuum

Projects

Evolution Of Metacognition

A Miscellany Of Topics

Transparent And Opaque Languages

Why Save The Humanities?

Conceptual Language

Uxori meae

I dedicate the book to my wife, Ilene Douglas,

without whose encouragement it would not exist.

Crumbs Cast upon the Current

Ecclesiastes 11:1 (KJV)

Stories, Poems, and Essays

dix/ a d' a )/llwn mono/frwn eim) i /

(I think for myself apart from others.)

Aischylos Agamemnon 757

Commentary from the Kingdom

Introduction

I retired to the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont more than eleven years ago at the age of sixty-eight; I did not actually become a resident of Vermont until almost a year later. I had spent the intervening time packing up my house and settling my affairs in Exeter, New Hampshire, deciding what was important enough at the time to take with me to the Kingdom. Since then, I have been pruning more away and sifting out what was essential to me.

It took me a while to settle down. It took me a few more years to stop trying to be a teacher—and a few more years to get civic service of one sort or another out of my system. Before I retired, I had written some poetry, mostly in Latin (in line with my teaching at the academy). I had taught a course on ancient philosophy for years. At the birth of my first grandchild, I had started writing down some stories from my youth.

As I got further into my retirement, I realized that these three forms of commentary on life were part of my legacy to my family and others. I realized early on that as far as the philosophy was concerned, I needed to come to some integrated conclusions. As far as the poetry was concerned, I needed to expand my field of vision and my efforts at the art. As far as the stories went, I needed to write down all the good tales before my memory faded.

Recently I realized that I needed to finish the task, close the book, and give a full accounting before I leave this Kingdom for another one (and its fabled gates up or down). Our home in Vermont’s Kingdom overlooked Lake Seymour, and it was a delightful place to undertake these tasks. I believe that I really did see more. I hope that this accounting will bear out my belief.

This book is a selection from an overflowing larder. I start with memorializing moments and move to finalizing a point of view.

Note on the Cover

I chose the Putnam Amphora because it pictures the three Greek deities who represent the three genres of the three sections of this book: Athena who stands in the center represents the section of Essays as the goddess of wisdom; to her right (viewer’s left) stands Apollo who represents the section of Poems as the god of Music (which in Greece included poetry), and to her left stands Dionysus who represents the section of Stories as the god of drama. I wish to thank the Putnam Museum, Davenport, Iowa 52804, for permission to use an image of that amphora, and particularly Christina Kastell, the curator of that collection, for all her help.

Stories

Entryway Story

(a conversation between the two Roman guardian spirits of this

book, whose names in Latin mean "born a son of war and its

attendant confusion and born at dawn, a son of the light.")

Mark:   What is a story?

Luke:   In its origin in Greek it is an inquiry, and then it becomes the tale of a witness, a like a history.

Mark:   Do you mean inquiries and tales like the reverse of the first and last sections of this book, the prose sections?

Luke:   Yes, like the bookends that enclose the poetic section.

Mark:    Or like the trips of the old man that encase the tales of his youth that are placed in-between as an enthesis?

Luke:   Yes again, the structure of recess panels or of ring composition, content within form or informed.

On Becoming a Grandfather

It seems quite right to start this book with the story of the trip I took from Exeter, New Hampshire, to Lawrenceville, New Jersey, in anticipation of the birth of my first grandchild. This is a fitting place to start because becoming a grandfather was what led me to start collecting stories from my own childhood and later years to share with any grandchildren I might have.

I went to spend the Christmas holiday with my daughter and her husband on the eve of the epiphany of WeeWonk, as I called the grandchild-to-be. It was to be a sort of early birthday celebration. Somehow it all seemed to fit together. As I was preparing for my trip, the WeeWonk was also preparing for her epiphany and a greater trip. Aren’t sonograms a wonderful medical tool? Despite all her other work and cares, Helena had prepared an exquisitely and elaborately detailed map and trip guide—complete with the exit numbers and the length of the intervals in miles to facilitate my trip. She had planned out a special route from their trips north.

I referred to my grandchild-to-be as the WeeWonk because Helena and Chris did not want any interference with the naming of their child. This no-names policy was in place even before the sonogram determined gender, and the rest of the family was not given those results right away. I referred to my lists and got on the road with the same care as when my daughter visited the doctor. They measured the length of WeeWonk in centimeters.

Toward the end of my trip, I was referring to my directions with greater frequency. Helena was going the doctor more frequently, but the WeeWonk was not born until well into January. When the school term ended, I packed my truck a day ahead of schedule. I hoped to beat the approaching storm, and I was thinking in classroom-clouded literary images: my road trip was only an outer, visible version of a more important inner trip to the state of grandfatherhood. Helena’s trips to the doctor were another outward sign.

The WeeWonk’s trip was quite different from my road trip and Helena’s visits to the doctor. These very different sorts of trips were moving simultaneously toward a conclusion that would be a new beginning. This story was the first of another kind of trip: writing down and collecting stories from my childhood.

I was excited when my road trip finally began. Just as each passing mile brought me closer to Lawrenceville, the WeeWonk was getting more active with each passing day. In fact, s/he was becoming increasingly automotive in preparation for the great epiphany when s/he would become a completely independent self-contained entity.

In my truck, I was thinking in terms of automobiles and other automotive entities. First I thought of the word automobile. It comes partly from a Greek word meaning self and partly from a Latin word meaning moving. The word is the product of two parent cultures, both of which are particularly dear to me. The phrase self-moving caught my attention. This is Plato’s definition for soul: the self-moving cause of all other motion. This also seemed just right.

The WeeWonk was at the nub and navel of all the activity. It was going to be a long trip, and there was time to think about things like soul, first causes, and the psychology of grandfatherhood. This was just the beginning of the ride; I was leaving Route 107 and getting on Interstate 495. I wondered whether automobiles did better on interstates or local roads. It seemed natural and proper that trips started out on local roads and graduated gradually to limited-access highways.

Before I left New Hampshire, I had to come to some basic orientation on the meaning of self-moving, the site of the first cause. Where was the real starting point? Was it to the north, my old home in Maine? Was it in the Deep South, in North Carolina, where Helena was born? Was it to the far west, where Chris’s home had been? Or was it far to the east, in Angouleme, France, where the WeeWonk had started its journey? Or was it where I was headed on my carefully prepared trip? There was some urgency to this question and to this whole trip; a major storm was coming, and I was trying to get to Lawrenceville before it. I had not had time to get fully prepared before getting on the road, because the storm was coming up sooner than I had expected. I had not had time to work carefully through all the implications. Although I had elaborate directions, I had not had the time to study them thoroughly. To some extent, I was winging it, flying on faith.

There was another level to this predicament beyond physical direction: I needed a different kind of orientation. It is not every day that one becomes a grandfather for the first time, and when it happens, it is like a weather change. I was urgently trying to get somewhere before the storm of a new generation of life hit. It is something that you need to prepare for. It comes with many unexpected squalls and accidents, but you know that a lot of stuff is going to be falling out of the blue—and you’d better have shovels or umbrellas or whatever. You also need a general plan of action and to know more or less where you are headed.

As I drove down Route 495 toward Worcester, I was trying to sort out my soon-to-be status of grandfather. The term carried a pallor of elderliness that I did not relish and a well-worn patina of elder-statesmanlike sageness that I did not feel in myself. But such sageness was urgently needed. How would I be able to make all those profoundly laconic pronouncements that grandfathers are supposed to make? I needed to have some rudimentary map of the route, a working sense of direction. If I was going to act grandfatherly in the presence of the parents and then to grandfather a self-moving entity, I had better figure out more about direction.

As I drove from 495 to the Massachusetts Turnpike, it slowly dawned on me that the WeeWonk would not really be a self-moving entity when s/he was born—no more than my truck was really an automobile. Just as my truck needed me to guide it along the road, so the WeeWonk would need to have some guidance for a while, someone steering it down the road of life. This caused me a sort of detour. I took Route 290 to go from 495 to the Mass Pike; obviously, the self of self-moving needed some redefinition, just like the moving. We (I and that alter ego that I talk to in my head) were not talking just about physical locomotion; we were really talking about spiritual driving. And so it became clearer to me that we all have multiple telescoping selves in ourselves, sort of onions of peel-away onion-skin selves—well, maybe not big onions, but perhaps more like small leeks.

A memory of my first attempt to drive gave me a picture of how these onion-skin selves evolved and worked. I was sitting in my father’s lap and holding the steering wheel as we drove by the dump on Worthley Pond Road. My father had taken his hands completely off the wheel, and I was steering all by myself. That was in the days long before power steering, but the philosophical point is even truer and much more urgent with power steering. Like all new steerers, I was steering very vigorously, overcompensating for every swerve, as we tacked down the road past the dump. The moment is cut stone-chisel-clear in my memory, but I did not realize the layering of self that I was getting in that moment. It has taken me years of reflection to realize and bring to conscious reality the full meaning of that moment—the depth of paternal wisdom that was being transmitted at that moment.

The first part of the transmission was passed without words. I had, like all children, observed my parents very carefully and was ready to imitate them in great detail; naturally, my unpracticed imitation resulted in our lurching crabwise down the road. It was a father’s wisdom that first picked the time and place and then secondly kept hands off the wheel and let me improve my efforts by trial and error. The second part of the meaning of the moment was verbal; as I was doing the trial-and-error bit, he said, Driving is like life; most people oversteer. Once you get the thing pointed in the right direction, steer as little as possible.

I have pondered this for many years, and every time, the profundity of that situation and those simple words strikes deeper into me. Now I see that he was building a foundation layer to my self to which my later reflection added outer layers. I also see that, just like the grandfather project has developed and changed and will continue to change and grow, so the WeeWonk will not come out a finished self with a completed identity. Perhaps in our species, grandparents are the closest things we have to completed selves. They almost never seem to be self-movers and shakers; they are stagnant, bound to, and dependent on the old-fashioned sameness of things.

I was cruising down Route 84 in Connecticut, feeling a little perplexed but generally somewhat calmer and closer to the state of grandfatherhood. The general direction seemed to be in the process of becoming clearer in my mind, even if the details were still murky. I was calmer, and being calm was a grandfatherly thing. Moreover, the weather report on the radio indicated that although the storm was still approaching, I was far enough along to beat it.

For a while, the sun even broke through; it all seemed bright and beautiful, but then it clouded over with heavy weather. I read in my trip guide that I was supposed to get off at exit 20 and take Route 684. I was at exit 21, and the next one was exit 20, but there had been no signs for Route 684. Anxiety began to build again. That’s the trouble with superhighways: if you miss the right exit, you have to go a great distance to correct it. There is just no easy way to stop, turn around, and correct such a mistake. You had better know when you get on just where