Telling Time

As a nod to Presidents' Day, I watched a documentary, 'Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment',   courtesy of TCM my greatest distraction platform.  Like many of these pre-digital black and white documentaries, it felt deliberate and important.  At that time there was comparatively little spontaneous footage of official discussions and phone calls. I was mesmerized.  For much of the afternoon I obsessed about Bobby Kennedy… the way he put his little daughter on the phone to Nicholas Katzenbach, the way both of them enjoyed the moment—  from a time when political policy-making seemed groundbreaking and permanent.  Their wise approach to a civil rights problem set a precedent.  Democracy was working; the absurd directives of segregation were being avenged, legally.  

The intimacy with which the negotiating was presented-- well, it was reassuring and human.  Bobby's access to his brother, the president, was direct and personal.  The contrast between his lively breakfast table and the staged, formal interaction of George Wallace and his daughter-- well, it was everything.  After a quick 'shoot', Wallace's little girl was removed by her black housekeeper.  Robert Kennedy had a total of eleven children.  Their chatter was not filtered from the soundtrack behind his conversations.  His compassion and humanity were on display; also the courage and devotion to the founding principles of the Constitution.  It was quiet and effective leadership.  

Watching history being made via a 1960's style phone receiver had its charm, for me, craving more and more any connection with what felt like an era of solidity and trust.  Newspapers reported news... speeches were grammatically correct and archive-worthy.  I was 10 years old when the first Afro-American students  enrolled at the University of Alabama.  Just seven years later I was in college, discussing civil rights, protesting the policies of a Nixon-led administration which was slated to be brought down. 

'Who knows where the time goes,' a lyric from that same era asks? It's difficult for me to pinpoint the small events of the last two years which have felt depopulated of joy.  Mostly deaths, cancellations... forgettable birthdays and Christmases, sorrows.  In the papers, daily articles addressing anxiety, depression; even the pod-popular professor of the Happiness course at Yale has taken a leave.  Time is a bitch, they say; it yaps at my heels.  

'I met an old lover on the street today...' This used to be a sort of nostalgia-evoking occurrence.  Often in the city-- on subway platforms or sidewalks-- we have these intersections, we relive small intimate moments and tiny passions.  Some of these people would be forgotten-- the bartenders, the roadies, the casual one-nighters that for the most part had a certain poetry in my life.  Each encounter added color and depth.  Some of them became long-standing affairs or even a marriage or two.  But today-- I passed what literally was an aged man, who tapped me on the shoulder.  Wiping his eyes, removing his mask, with a couple of proffered hints, I remembered him from so long ago.  I guess it is only by registering the age of our peers that we really take stock of our own.  It was a little shocking. None of the poetry that filled my heart on those other encounters-- just the stark realization that we are old people. Grow old with me, my young husband begged when he proposed, paraphrasing the words of Robert Browning-- not exactly the material of seduction for someone like me who lived in the present tense, but comforting-- reassuring.  How we both surely have grown old; while at the same rate, not together.  

The New Yorker today suggested a great archived short piece by Hannah Arendt on the poet W. H. Auden, born on this day 115 years ago, which quotes one of his lethal poems 'If I Could Tell You'.  Hard to imagine that this was written a mere 23 years before the Kennedy moments I watched.  Nearly sixty years from these moments I read, as Auden observed, 'Time says nothing but I told you so.'  

Most of the figures in the 'Crisis' documentary are long gone. Online today I followed the trajectories of Robert Kennedy's children, all of whom are much past the age of their father when he was killed.  It surely was a fairy-tale but tragedy-suffused family; many of his children have grown to honor their heritage and avenge the 'curse'. It's so easy to find information now-- photos, footage, gossip, letters... What is difficult to find is trust.  We live with many of the same terrible issues, but without the old version of democratic credibility or faith.  I doubt things.  Is that simply age and a kind of sour wisdom?  Things don't seem to have the same weight... we are further than ever from solutions and a compassionate human denominator.  Most of the world was afflicted with the same virus; was there no lesson learned from this?

Besides heroic politicians and leadership, I lament the lack of really good poetry.  Auden, we miss your ilk more than ever.  And your trustworthy, perfect lyric, posthumous as it is, 'If I could tell you I would let you know.'