The Growlery (July 2003)
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Michael Gilleland
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The Growlery (July 2003)
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As a rabid anti-smoking zealot, I applaud this law, but I wonder if we should attack the problem closer to its root. Perhaps we need a revival of that worthy organization the Infant Bonds of Joy, described in this passage from Dicken's Bleak House (chapter VIII):
"These, young ladies," said Mrs. Pardiggle with great volubility after the first salutations, "are my five boys. You may have seen their names in a printed subscription list (perhaps more than one) in the possession of our esteemed friend Mr. Jarndyce. Egbert, my eldest (twelve), is the boy who sent out his pocket-money, to the amount of five and threepence, to the Tockahoopo Indians. Oswald, my second (ten and a half), is the child who contributed two and ninepence to the Great National Smithers Testimonial. Francis, my third (nine), one and sixpence halfpenny; Felix, my fourth (seven), eightpence to the Superannuated Widows; Alfred, my youngest (five), has voluntarily enrolled himself in the Infant Bonds of Joy, and is pledged never, through life, to use tobacco in any form."
My grandfather had his own version of the Infant Bonds of Joy. He promised $100 to each of his sons, if they abstained from alcohol and tobacco until their 21st birthday. Some still abstain to this day.
Of course, Florida's law will not stamp out smoking. It will just drive the smokers outside, away from air-conditioned interiors into the bright Florida sunshine. And, as birds of a feather flock together, we'll see clumps of smokers huddled together just outside the doors of their workplaces. Anyone entering or exiting will be forced to pass through what I call the "smokers' gauntlet." The smokers' gauntlet at bus stops where I live is so unpleasant that I finally stopped riding the bus to work.
I've often wondered why smokers seem to regard the great outdoors as their personal ashtray. They have no compunction whatsoever about throwing cigarette butts out of their car windows. A cast-off cigarette butt once flew into a car driven by a friend of mine, through the sun roof.
I must admit that smoking has given me one unexpected pleasure this summer. I'm singing in a madrigal group, and one of our pieces is a humorous paean to tobacco by the English composer Thomas Weelkes (1575-1623), which starts out
Come sirrah Jack ho,The song about tobacco is a minor musical genre in its own right. Some other examples are:
Fill some tobacco,
Bring a wire and some fire,
Haste haste away,
Quick I say,
Do not stay,
Shun delay,
For I drank none good today.
Dr. Peter Jeffrey drew my attention to a delightful
Ode to Tobacco by English poet Charles Stuart Calverley (1831-1884), published
in his Verses and Translations (1862), which I reproduce here with some
notes:
Thou who, when fears attack,
Bid'st them avaunt, and Black
Care, at the horseman's back
Perching, unseatest;
Sweet when the morn is grey;
Sweet, when they've cleared away
Lunch; and at close of day
Possibly sweetest:
I have a liking old
For thee, though manifold
Stories, I know, are told,
Not to thy credit;
How one (or two at most)
Drops make a cat a ghost -
Useless, except to roast -
Doctors have said it:
How they who use fusees
All grow by slow degrees
Brainless as chimpanzees,
Meagre as lizards;
Go mad, and beat their wives;
Plunge (after shocking lives)
Razors and carving knives
Into their gizzards.
Confound such knavish tricks!
Yet know I five or six
Smokers who freely mix
Still with their neighbours;
Jones--(who, I'm glad to say,
Asked leave of Mrs. J.) -
Daily absorbs a clay
After his labours.
Cats may have had their goose
Cooked by tobacco-juice;
Still why deny its use
Thoughtfully taken?
We're not as tabbies are:
Smith, take a fresh cigar!
Jones, the tobacco-jar!
Here's to thee, Bacon!
The syntax of the first stanza is contorted. Here's a prose summary: You who drive away fears and care, you who are sweet at morning, noon, and night...
"Black Care" is an echo of the Latin poet Horace, Odes 3.1.41: post equitem sedet atra Cura (Black Care sits behind the horseman).
Tobacco juice is a popular remedy against deer invading your garden, and a pleasant side effect (for some) is that it repels cats as well. You make it by soaking a plug of chewing tobacco in water.
A "fusee" is a match that stays alight even in a strong wind.
A "clay" is of course a clay pipe.
I'm not sure who Bacon is in the final verse. None of the possibilities convinces me.
Thanks to Peter Bradshaw (Thomas V. Jones Professor of Engineering, Emeritus, Stanford University), who contributes this convincing clue about Bacon (personal communication, March 2004):
I wondered whether anybody had offered you the most weighty evidence about the identity of "Bacon": perhaps they have but I couldn't see any mention in later issues of "The Growlery". What I mean by "weighty evidence" is a stone or concrete slab set into the wall of Bacon the tobacconist in Cambridge, England, quoting the last line of the Ode, the author and the date, with the parenthesis "(a tribute to this firm)". Dr Johnson said that "in lapidary inscriptions a man is not upon oath" but perhaps a SHOP is.
Perhaps Flo Briggs is right to be worried about thieves making off with these relics. In his monograph Furta Sacra (Princeton University Press, 1978), Patrick J. Geary catalogued and analyzed approximately one hundred reports of thefts of relics between the age of Charlemagne and the Crusades, a period of about three hundred years.
Flo Briggs should have no trouble selling the relics in her possession. Last year some locks of Elvis' hair sold at auction for $115,000. His barber Homer Gilleland (no relation of mine, I hope) collected them over the years and stored them in Taystee bread bags. The bidder was anonymous -- I'd be ashamed to admit my identity, too, if I'd spent all that money for a plastic bag full of hair clippings.
If I were such a fool as to buy relics of Elvis on eBay, I'd at least demand some proof of their provenance. I wouldn't want to buy a fake, like the "pigges bones" pawned off as real relics by the Pardoner in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (Prologue, line 700).
Dr. Gary Vikan is director of the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore. One of his scholarly sidelines is writing papers and delivering lectures about Elvis. Some representative titles are "Off the Wall, From the Heart: Votive Graffiti at Graceland," "Graceland as Locus Sanctus," and "Pilgrimage to Graceland: The Cult of St. Elvis." I've never heard any of Dr. Vikan's lectures or read any of his papers. But it's a little-known fact that there really is a Saint Elvis. An alternate form of the name of sixth-century Irish Saint Ailbhe is Ailbhis. Anglicized, Ailbhis is Elvis.
We aren't likely to find the teeth or hair of Saint Ailbhis for sale on eBay. Canon 1237 of the Catholic Church's code of canon law prescribes that
| Antiqua traditio Martyrum aliorumve Sanctorum reliquias sub altari fixo condendi servetur, iuxta normas in libris liturgicis traditas. | The ancient tradition of placing relics of Martyrs or of other Saints within a fixed altar is to be retained, in accordance with the rites prescribed in the liturgical books. |
| Sacras reliquias vendere nefas est. Insignes reliquiae itemque aliae, quae magna populi veneratione honorantur, nequeunt quoquo modo valide alienari neque perpetuo transferri sine Apostolicae Sedis licentia. | It is absolutely wrong to sell sacred relics. Distinguished relics, and others which are held in great veneration by the people, may not validly be in any way alienated nor transferred on a permanent basis, without the permission of the Apostolic See. |
"Saint" Elvis Presley died of a heart attack on the toilet on August 16, 1977, after a meal of four scoops of ice cream and six chocolate-chip cookies. If you're looking for a genuine rather than a sham saint, you might consider Maximilian Kolbe, prisoner 16670 at Auschwitz, who died in a quite different way on August 14, 1941. After one prisoner at Auschwitz escaped, ten others were condemned to death by starvation. When one of the ten (Polish soldier Francis Gajowniczek) cried out in despair that he would never see his wife and children again, Father Kolbe volunteered to be put to death in his place. He took literally these verses from John's Gospel (15:12-14):
This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you.Camp officials, irritated that Father Kolbe was taking so long to starve, finally gave him a lethal injection of carbolic acid. Francis Gajowniczek survived and lived long enough to see Maximilian Kolbe canonized as a saint in 1982.
I feel a pang in my cynical, jaded heart and a lump in my throat whenever I read the story of the heroic life and death of Maximilian Kolbe. Here are some of the last words he wrote:
The real conflict is inner conflict. Beyond armies of occupation and the catacombs of concentration camps, there are two irreconcilable enemies in the depth of every soul: good and evil, sin and love. And what use are victories on the battlefield if we ourselves are defeated in our innermost personal selves?
This quotation reminds me of some similar words by Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitzyn:
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being, and who is willing to destroy his own heart?
Memories involving the more primitive senses, smell and taste, are often the strongest and most persistent. That's certainly the case with me. Although I've eaten Ivory soap only once in my life, I recall vividly how it tastes.
When I was seven years old, some of the older boys in my neighborhood gave me a vocabulary lesson and taught me several new words. Most were of the scatological variety. I marched around all afternoon around chanting these words (which I probably didn't understand very well) until my mother heard me. She washed out my mouth with soap, and I learned the hard way to watch my tongue. The punishment did me no permanent harm, and was more or less effective.
About fifteen years ago I spent a week's vacation visiting a monastery in a small New England town. On Wednesday nights, for the amusement of themselves and their visitors, the monks used to show movies, with an old-fashioned projector and tape reels.
During the screening on the Wednesday evening of my visit, I noticed that the sound occasionally faded out. Afterwards I mentioned this to one of the regular visitors, who said, "Oh, yes. Brother Tim previews the movie ahead of time and notes the spots where bad language occurs. When the movie is shown, he turns down the volume at those spots."
Some might mock this as excessive prudishness, but I don't. You often see signs proclaiming drug-free zones near schools and playgrounds (although I wonder if signs really keep drug dealers away), and Berkeley, California, was the first of many cities to declare themselves nuclear-weapon-free zones (will this really protect them once the bombs start falling?). So why on earth can't a monastery decide to be an obscenity- and blasphemy-free zone?
I'm a fan of most Alfred Hitchcock films, but Brother Tim would have been constantly turning down the volume during a screening of Hitchcock's last movie Family Plot (1976). Actor Bruce Dern's character, the crook and taxi driver George Lumley, several times exclaims to his girlfriend, "Oh, for Christ's sake, Blanche!" In the made-for-TV version, he says "Oh, for rice cakes, Blanche!" instead, which isn't much of an improvement, to my way of thinking. Does this gratuitous blasphemy improve the movie? Not a bit.
Once at university I was called upon to translate an especially scabrous passage in the satires of the Latin poet Juvenal, who wasn't one to mince words. There were women in the class, and I racked my brain for suitable euphemisms and circumlocutions. With relief I finally came to the end of my construe without having said anything too shocking. The teacher complimented me on my delicacy.
School editions of the classics used to omit these passages. A sure-fire sign that the editors had omitted something juicy was a sudden jump in the line numbers of a poem. For example, in my copy of Arthur Palmer's The Satires of Horace (one of the "Macmillan Red" editions), the line numbers in Horace's Satire 1.5 show 80, then 86, but there is only one line between 80 and 86! In my copy, I pencilled in the missing lines at the bottom of the page, and I'm sure that many other students have done the same.
Older editions in the Loeb Classical Library series used to translate the naughty bits not from Latin to English, but from Latin to Italian! As those older volumes are replaced with newer translations, this custom is being phased out. You can find some rather blunt language, for example, in D.R. Shackleton-Bailey's recent translation of Martial.
Outside the sanctuary of one's own home, it's difficult or impossible to escape the barrage of foul and blasphemous language. If you doubt it, try riding the Lake Street bus in Minneapolis. You almost become inured to the non-stop obscenity and barely notice it most of the time.
But one thing I'll never get used to is hearing the name Jesus Christ taken in vain. It always shocks and unsettles me. Someone with a more forthright and assertive personality than mine might object and request that the blasphemer cease and desist. As it is, I bow my head and recite silently the beginning of the "Divine Praises":
Blessed be God.
Blessed be His holy Name.
Blessed be Jesus Christ, true God and true Man.
Blessed be the Name of Jesus....
Other suitable rejoinders to blasphemy, when you can't "turn down the volume," are these: