“Ballast & Millstones”

Skip the B.S.

by Skip Eisiminger

“Twenty tons of rock in a clipper’s hold/on the high seas is worth its weight in gold.”

—The Wordspinner

“The past has a vote, not a veto.”

—Mordecai Kaplan

CLEMSON, SC—(Weekly Hubris)—6/28/10—In the battle of the sexes, cold war is inevitable and unmistakable.

On those rare occasions over the last -40 years when my wife refused to speak to me, kiss me goodbye, brush lint from my shoulders, straighten my tie, or wave from the door, the temperature on Blue Ridge Drive plummeted. The restoration of passion and peace is marked when she squeezes toothpaste on my toothbrush or accepts the toothpaste I offer her. It all depends on who first uses the bathroom, our Hall of Mirrors, before retiring.

By their absence or presence, ritual and ceremony define our relationship, its cold and hot spells, its spats and reconciliations. In a word, ceremony is the “flywheel,” as William James put it, that maintains the comfortable impetus of our lives. When the big wheel slows, the engine misfires and threatens to quit.

Unfortunately, that flywheel can become a millstone around the neck, as it was when my German brother-in-law and his bride took 20 hours to marry. (The only thing worse is a drive-by wedding in Vegas!) While my wife and I were enduring every bleary-eyed word and stultifying gesture, I found myself rethinking my faith in tradition but, after a good night’s sleep, I was back on board. Would I want to see wet silverware tossed in a pile for the diners to sort through? The banquet dishes unwashed? The glasses spotted? Of course not. A beautifully set table is the military pride (“Forks left!”) of the home, an acknowledgment of our ancestry, a tribute to the guest, and “a temporary stay against confusion,” as Robert Frost put it so well.

Many of the ideas I’ve briefly alluded to are treated metaphorically in the short story “Sonny’s Blues,” by James Baldwin. Ceremony, or the lack of it, figure significantly in the downfall and rehabilitation of Sonny, a young jazz pianist. After a year behind bars on a drug charge, Sonny returns to a night club in Harlem. In the small but enthusiastic audience is his older brother, the only family he has left. Despite their mother’s mandate that the older brother “be there for” Sonny, the lad is bereft of love and structure after her death.

Fortunately, Sonny survives prison and, with his brother’s belated help and that of his new “family,” the quartet in which he plays, he returns to the stage. With actions described as “extremely ceremonious,” Creole, the quartet’s father surrogate, conducts Sonny out of the back-stage murk to his spot-lighted piano. The brother observes, “And Sonny, also being . . . ceremonious, and so touched [by the applause] . . . that he could have cried, but neither hiding it nor showing it, riding it like a man, grinned, and put both hands to his heart and bowed from the waist.” Of course, he could have ignored his appreciative fans or gestured indecently, but his bow was worthy of Arthur Rubenstein at Carnegie Hall.

In the first set, Creole, a recovering addict himself, coaxes Sonny to leave the safety of “the shore” and “strike out for the deep water” where the jazz artist must sail if he is going to be successful, for such is the nature of jazz—innovate or perish. At the end of the session, Sonny’s brother orders a scotch and milk for his brother. It’s not entirely clear, but if this is Sonny’s favorite mixed drink (as I suspect), perhaps this is the brother’s way of saying, “I won’t forget you again; I will nurture you the way I promised our Mother I would.”

After Sonny takes a drink and returns the glass to the piano, it appears to the brother that the glass and its contents “glowed and shook above [Sonny’s] head like a very cup of trembling.” And so the story ends. The allusion to Isaiah’s speech to the Israelites implies that Sonny’s fears, like those of the faithful, are now a thing of the past. Fear is banished, self-confidence is restored, and Yeats’s “centre” shows it can hold.

Just as Sonny is saved in part by the reestablishment of order, so does it keep the peace between nuclear rivals. The daily opening and closing of the Wagah checkpoint in the Punjab region between India and Pakistan illustrate the role of ceremony on a much larger stage. Simply put, it is war disguised as peace. It is also, as the BBC’s travel-film narrator Michael Palin observes, “chauvinism at its most camp,” for it provides entertainment to hundreds by being so absurdly overwrought. To view it, click on: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZ0ue-XGl9c

When I first watched these theatricals, I could not help thinking of over-the-top analogies: roosters on speed, drunken gay men on parade, or Liberace at the keyboard. Like Clemson vs. Carolina on a crisp day in November, the Punjabi rites come with brass bands, microphoned cheerleaders, pep rallies, nationalistic chants, colorful banners, large men with intimidating hair, padded uniforms, animalistic helmets, press coverage, fanatical fans, permanent grandstands, and a handshake at midfield. But for all the kicking and strutting on a well-marked field, there is no ball, and the sole referee is ceremony itself.

The origins of these formalities are surely British. Observe the palm-out salutes and all those stiff upper lips. Ancestors of these Muslims and Hindus lived and labored for a hundred years under British colonial rule, and it shows. The mannered artifice of the ceremony is in some ways a reenactment of an afternoon tea at Windsor Castle with all cup handles at 4 p.m..

Though the violent separation of the two countries occurred in 1947, the slammed steel gates, quivering faces, and stamping feet of the soldier-actors might lead an observer to think that the million who died 60 years ago were buried yesterday. Somehow, both sides have agreed to wear hackle-topped turbans expressing their barely contained disrespect. They’ve also agreed on the pattern of their marching. Miraculously, the old hostilities have been sublimated in this ritual of “choreographed contempt,” as Michael Palin says. Thumbs-down gestures replace raised middle fingers as the national flags of the two sides rise and fall with precision timing.

Absurd as this ironic parade is, in the final analysis, it, like baptisms, weddings, and funerals the world over, has much to recommend it. If the two sides can agree on how to make a right about face and shake a hand, perhaps the future is brighter in this volatile part of the world than we thought. Now, if we could only persuade the Israelis and the Palestinians to dance at their border.