Lighting the Candle (versus Cursing the Darkness): Stoics

Skip the B.S.

By Skip Eisiminger

“One anonymous prisoner, who’d come to grips with spending the rest of his life behind bars, told his interviewer, ‘Well, at least in here you always have the home-court advantage.’ This plucky observation led me to write a half-serious piece called ‘Finding the Silver Lining in a Cast-Iron Cell,’ in which an African-American lifer writes home, ‘Guess what, Momma? In here, minorities have finally achieved real power, and the sisters are earning on a par with the brothers. Moreover, there are no shirts to iron, taxes to pay, 401Ks to track, wallpaper to hang, carpets to vacuum, nor telephone solicitations. You get three squares a day and free medical care. Both the library and the imam come to you, and exercise is regular. Conjugal visits provide all I ever wanted from my lady, and if I do get out, the ride back is free.’” Skip Eisiminger

“No one who ever sang ‘I Believe’ on Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts lost.”—Dick Cavett

“Just gimme a coupla aspirin, I already got a Purple Heart.”—Bill Mauldin

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—4/11/2013—I remember my Georgia grandfather leaning against the hay barn, squinting at a dusty sky. He didn’t say a word, but I knew he was weighing the odds on rain. His mouth gaped like the gauge he’d optimistically nailed to one of the cedar fence posts. I recall asking him if he wasn’t worried that everything was going to dry up. Putting back the grass spear he often wore in the corner of his mouth, he said, “Sometimes you just gotta play the cards you’re dealt, Son. I wish I knew a way to bluff Mother Nature, but when it’s real dry like now, she’s holding all the cards.”

Like so many farmers, Papa was a stoic man. To him and millions like him, there’s no bad weather, just the wrong clothes, as the Scandinavian proverb states. At my grandmother’s funeral, I sat crying while Papa wore a stone-face. Working around animals like a mare in the throes of a breech birth, he had learned to bottle his emotions. On another occasion, when I told him about a bully at school, he said, “He can’t get your goat, Skippa, if he doesn’t know where it’s tied.” So I learned early in life to tie my goats out of sight. I might tear up at home but never in the presence of my rivals or peers. When three urologists and four nurses labored for over an hour to get a catheter in me, I assumed the plank position but seldom opened my mouth. As soon as I saw my wife, however, I broke down and sobbed.

One of Robinson Jeffers’ best poems deals with a broken-winged hawk that comes on foot from the underbrush to a man on a rocky coast and “asks” for “the lead gift in the twilight.” Naturalists never seem to tire of describing animals like the caribou surrounded by wolves who display Hemingway’s “grace under pressure.” My own favorite example concerns the week-old antelope separated briefly from its mother who lies down on a hill of red ants when it senses danger. Despite hundreds of stinging bites, the youngster passes for a small brown rock until the mountain lion moves on.

What Boris Pasternak described as “soil and fate,” is also at the core of the “ballad attitude” towards life. Here’s one stanza that summarizes that spit-in-the-face-of-despair view:

He saddled, he bridled,

and gallant rode he,

and home came his good horse,

but never came he.

Each of the stoic paradigms above is philosophically related to the following cast members: the Japanese poet who consoles himself after his house burns down that he now has a better view of the rising moon. The twelve-year old girl of the American West who coolly notes in her diary, “Father was busy reading and did not notice that the house was being filled with strange Indians until Mother spoke about it.” The helicopter pilot who responds to an air traffic controller’s request to send help saying, “I don’t know; I ain’t done crashin’ yet.” The Spartan soldier who said if the Persian arrows blotted out the sun, he and his men would “fight in the shade.” And the GIs in Afghanistan on their third or fourth deployment who remind each other when morale is ebbing to “embrace the suck.”

One anonymous prisoner, who’d come to grips with spending the rest of his life behind bars, told his interviewer, “Well, at least in here you always have the home-court advantage.” This plucky observation led me to write a half-serious piece called “Finding the Silver Lining in a Cast-Iron Cell” in which an African-American lifer writes home, “Guess what, Momma? In here, minorities have finally achieved real power, and the sisters are earning on a par with the brothers. Moreover, there are no shirts to iron, taxes to pay, 401Ks to track, wallpaper to hang, carpets to vacuum, nor telephone solicitations. You get three squares a day and free medical care. Both the library and the imam come to you, and exercise is regular. Conjugal visits provide all I ever wanted from my lady, and if I do get out, the ride back is free.”

I used to think one could not take the stoic ideal too far. That was before I read of a Minnesota farmer who confessed to his minister, “I love my wife so, I almost told her.”

More measured stoics than this Midwestern farmer who are taking their hair loss in stride often seek birds of similar plumage; indeed, I can’t think of a single friend whose taste betrays a hint of schmaltz. Take Richard: playing rugby, he lost a front tooth when he slammed into an opposing player. The referee called time while Richard and his mates scoured the field for the lost incisor. It was found impaling the forehead of the young man with whom Richard had collided. Play resumed after the tooth was “extracted.”

Scott, another friend, who’s a carpenter, told us how he’d shot a two-inch nail through three of his toes. He pulled it out, “whip-stitched it,” and finished the day on the job before going to see a doctor.

“Man, that had to hurt,” I said.

“It did,” Scott said. “The trick is not to care.”

My father and his Midwestern family have a vein of iron comparable to Richard and Scott’s. When my father had a transient stroke, he got up off the kitchen floor, asked a neighbor to look in on his wife, and drove himself ten miles to the hospital for an evaluation. The same year, Dad’s sister, my Aunt Norma, slipped on the ice going out for the mail. Unable to get up, she chipped ice as far as she could reach until a neighbor came home and spotted her lying on a cold but ice-free porch.

These folks have all been bruised, and some more than once, but you won’t find them rubbing the inflamed spot where the ball hit them until they get back to the dressing room. God knows I love them.

Note: The illustration for this column was taken via Flickr from Ambuj Saxena’s Photostream (620) which may be found at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ambuj/421070422/.