Kaleidoscope Minds

Snow-envy is easy when you’re not the one shoveling a path through five-foot drifts or having to thaw door locks on a car.

Even so, when the photos arrive, sent along by friends determined to gloat or complain about their shimmering worlds, I’m surprised by how quickly I become transfixed. Glinting in the sunlight, piled high along fenceposts and streets, whorled into intricate, complex patterns against window and shed, the still-pristine drifts of freshly-fallen snow dazzle my eyes and my imagination. Always, they make me envious.

My envy is partly nostalgia, the remembered pleasure of snow angels and sledding. But snow also stirs to life a favorite fantasy – the possibility that life might be willing to grant us, if only occasionally, a perfectly clean slate. By reducing the physical world to the twin realities of sunlight and shadow, snow creates an illusion of  purity and simplicity, tempting us to imagine a human world equally free of complication and regrets. Watching snow cover the remains of dessicated autumn with a blanket of perfection, it’s easy to imagine life’s disappointment, pain, conflict and loss blanketed with similar layers of beauty and peace.

Liberating Language

I’ve nothing against baseball, though I confess I’ve never watched a complete World Series. I enjoyed following our football and basketball teams in high school and college, but I’ve never attended a professional game in either sport. Years ago I could score a tennis match or round of golf, but those days are gone and I don’t regret them. In short, I’m a terrible sports fan.

On the other hand, I adore Super Bowl parties.  The food’s great, the crowd’s congenial and the atmosphere’s relaxed. In 2009, a friend with Pittsburgh connections sent me a Terrible Towel and I went to the party as a temporary Steelers fan. As it turned out, team allegiance mattered not a whit when it came to enjoying the highlights of the day – including the broadcasters in the booth. Everyone watching agreed Al Michaels and John Madden were a winning combination. Always humorous, their commentary was sharp and insightful, though no one paid them much attention unless there was a disputed call or an especially noteworthy play.

All that changed in the game’s second half, when a player took off on a medium-sized run of perhaps fifteen or twenty yards. At the end, Michaels said, “Well, he ran that one with alacrity”.  Silence enveloped the room as everyone turned to look at the screen and three people demanded in unison, “Alacrity?”

It was an appropriate word, properly used and perfectly in context. Still, alacrity seemed to be doing its own version of broken-field running as it forged its way through clusters of declarative sentences and monosyllabic comments, four unexpected syllables that stopped an entire party in its tracks.

Willie & Wittgenstein Play Luckenbach

Whether it’s good beer, great music or a sense of history you’re wanting, Luckenbach, Texas is a fine place to find it.  Established as a trading post c. 1849, it rose, sort-of-flourished and then declined, nearly passing away before its retired postmaster, a descendent of the town founders named Benno Engel, put it up for sale in 1970.

When I waltzed into Texas in 1973, Luckenbach – a post office, a general store, a dancehall  and a collection of really fine shade trees – already had sold to a remarkable collection of people.  Certain Houstonians turned up their noses at buyer Hondo Crouch and his pals, calling them a collection of “eccentrics, oddballs and kooks”. The description was fair, but out in the country their eccentricity was a selling point, and Hondo’s town took a turn for the better.

Supplementing dominos and beer with a Mud Dauber Festival provided a certain je ne sais quoi, but when Jerry Jeff Walker waltzed into Luckenbach in 1974 to record Viva Terlingua, the Luckenbach nation was born. By the time Bobby Emmons and Chips Moman wrote their song about Luckenbach in 1977 Hondo Crouch had passed away, but Luckenbach was established, and Waylon and Willie and the Boys brought tears to the eyes of expat Luckenbachians around the world.

A Trip To the Land of the Great Serendip

As Thomas Cristensen puts it in his introduction to Horace Walpole’s Hieroglyphic Tales, the British art historian and man of letters was “about as odd as you would expect”, an exemplar of what Christensen calls a long-lived and somewhat peculiar strain of British tradition distinguished by “absurdity, ridicule, wordplay, wit, wickedness and plain madness”. Walpole’s most well-known work, The Castle of Otranto, is considered the first gothic novel, though at the time of its publication it was passed off by Walpole himself as a translation from the Italian.

Clearly, Walpole had plenty of energy and a taste for imaginative high-jinks.  When he wasn’t busy shepherding tourists through Strawberry Hill, his home outside London, he wrote  letters – volumes of letters, of all sorts.   One of the most famous was written in 1765, when Walpole faked a letter to Jean-Jacques Rousseau,who had fled persecution in Geneva and taken up residence in France.  Supposedly written by King Frederick of Prussia, the letter offered Rousseau refuge-with-a-twist. “I will cease to persecute you as soon as you cease to take pride in being persecuted,” it said.  Rousseau first attributed the letter to Voltaire. Later, in England, as his paranoia increased, he suspected even his friend David Hume, and the letter played a role in a spectacular falling out between Hume and Rousseau.