Dale Williams Barrigar

Walt Whitman’s Bones and My Own by Dr. Dale Williams Barrigar

“If you want me again look for me under your boot soles.”

– Walt Whitman

“I am the man. I suffered. I was there.” – Walt Whitman

“A splendid old soul.” – Mark Twain on Walt Whitman

“Whitman is my daddy…Opulence is the end.” – Lana Del Rey

These are the words of Walt’s that first chilled my bones (when I was seventeen years old) (from “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”):

“Closer yet I approach you, / What thought you have of me now, I had as much of you – I laid in my stores in advance, / I considered long and seriously of you before you were born. / Who was to know what should come home to me? / Who knows but I am enjoying this? / Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?”

And these are some of the words I read aloud from the pulpit at my mother’s funeral twenty-seven years later (from “Song of Myself”):

“This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers, / Darker than the colorless beards of old men, / Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths. /

“O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues, / And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing. /

“I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women, / And the hints about old men and mothers, / And the offspring taken soon out of their laps. / What do you think has become of the young and old men? / And what do you think has become of the women and children? /

“They are alive and well somewhere, / The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, / And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, / And ceased the moment life appeared. /

“All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, / And to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier.”

….

PERSONAL DECLARATION:

Today on this day that is the day that is one day before the 207th birthday of Walt Whitman, I hereby formally declare myself to be a BLOOMIAN critic, which means I follow Harold Bloom, although not in all things, which would have made perfect sense to Harold, who, like Ralph Waldo Emerson, never wanted anyone to follow him in all things. Bloom has done more to boost Walt Whitman’s reputation than any other critic in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, by far.

The title of Walt Whitman’s book was/is so great that it matches Tolstoy’s WAR AND PEACE: LEAVES OF GRASS. His book itself is so great that it too matches Tolstoy, although in a different mode, the mode of poetry. (There is also a reason why they both had long white hair and long white beards.)

The other day I was observing my Siberian Husky mix, Boo, and I realized that he was individually sniffing every single blade of grass in the area in which he was standing in a field in northern Illinois outside Chicago. Let me repeat that: individually sniffing every single blade of grass. It was like Horton discovering a WHO! inside a clover, it was that mind-blowing.

Walt Whitman used to watch Abraham Lincoln walking around Washington during the Civil War. Lincoln knew who Walt was, and would nod to him, although they never spoke. But Whitman was studying Lincoln. Whitman was working, for free, as a volunteer nurse for both Northern and Southern soldiers in the hospitals of D.C. He saw the worst of the worst of the worst of the worst of the horrors of war (many, many times), and did things like write letters home for the incapacitated soldiers, hold them while they died, and write to their families (beautifully) after they expired. During this time, he was also working as a humble and lowly government clerk. He had numerous nervous breakdowns during this time, small and then large, and eventually a stroke at the age of 54.

Walt Whitman was very concerned with the way his beloved America would turn out. He lost much of his faith in the USA during the Gilded Age (named by Mark Twain). But he never lost all of his faith.

So let me say this:

There are many, and I mean many millions, of physically living human beings walking around among us now who have zero, and I mean zero (no), human emotion/s at all. They feel nothing but nothing (unless it’s a smoldering rage), and the occasional sneer (or a chuckle at someone else’s pain) is all they can muster. (See the President of the United States as well for this, as well as all of his henchmen and henchwomen.) (No wonder zombie and vampire movies are so popular.)

WATCH OUT!

There are also people walking around among us now who act like (or are) angels.

A Bard of the Old School by Dale Williams Barrigar and “Bonus” Material by the Goatfooted Balloonperson

(Note–Bob Dylan’s 85th (!) is tomorrow. A Great many words have been written about him, but I feel that this essay by Dale, which first appeared in Literally Stories UK, is as fine as anything you will find in print!-Leila)

Bob Dylan is a bard of the old school, and also of the school that never gets old. Long after every single Hollywood movie ever made will be penned by androids, computers, zombies, vampires, and “AI,” scattered humans everywhere will still be searching out the work of Bob Dylan, whether to read or listen to it. When Dylan released “Murder Most Foul,” his longest song, in the middle of the Covid Pandemic, he proved every critic who’d ever said he didn’t deserve the Nobel Prize in Literature wrong.

With a terrifying title from Shakespeare, this long song and short fiction is a mini-novel about the Kennedy assassination. And all assassinations, and all murders ever committed, now and in the future. Almost as if to prove that he’s a poet and story-teller more than a musician, Dylan doesn’t even sing this song. He speaks it. He tells the tale like an ancient bard, maybe even going as far back as Homer.

Dylan is often compared to Shakespeare, and for good reason. It could be that a more apt comparison is with the older writer. Homer, like Bob, spent his life traveling from town to town and speak-singing his story-songs to the accompaniment of a stringed instrument. This image of Homer has been accepted for so long that it’s become a fact of fiction that tells the truth, as real as any other Greek mythology, from Zeus to Athena.

Dylan has always cited literary writers as some of his most important, if not his most important, influences. He claimed that “Blood on the Tracks” was inspired by Anton Chekhov’s short stories. He listed his two favorite writers as Emily Dickinson and Arthur Rimbaud. He read T.S. Eliot and James Joyce in high school. He resurrected Charles Baudelaire in “Idiot Wind.” He said that all writers and artists should read John Keats and Herman Melville.

He acknowledged Walt Whitman’s genius. He went to the grave of Jack Kerouac and read Kerouac’s poetry aloud with Allen Ginsberg. He wrote his songs on a typewriter. He created an absurdist book of prose poems, and he composed a memoir that isn’t his best work but is highly readable, filled with signs of the times, then and now.

Someone once compared Bob Dylan to Ernest Hemingway, another writer for whom Dylan has expressed his approval. Both writers diagnosed their times, and fought the wars of their times. While Hemingway went to Italy as an ambulance driver, Dylan went to Mississippi as a liberal Jew who stood out in an open field and sang Civil Rights protest anthems, surely as dangerous as Hemingway heading to the front as a non-combatant who wanted to help injured soldiers.

Dylan has already entered the canon of great American authors. When we look back at history, we see that there are many authors who did not deserve the Nobel Prize, and many authors who did deserve it who didn’t receive it (James Joyce, Leo Tolstoy, and Jorge Luis Borges are a famous three of these). A hundred years from now, Dylan will be seen as a writer who deserved this prize, and then some. His humanity, and his ways of expressing it in English story-language, will last a very, very long time, even, or especially, as the rest of the mainstream world continues to become more and more robotic, tyrannical and inhuman.

The forewarned Bonus Material

Happy Birthday Bob D a Prose Poem

I believe that the first two dorky looking guys to make being dorky looking guys cool were you and Buddy Holly. Can’t imagine Steve Reeves singing Peggy Sue on AM or Dash Riprock getting all Positively Fourth Street on the weird radio. Thank Zimmerman you have traveling angels on your side. Seems an obscenity that all that time flew by. But if I could play God and select people to have it all to do again, far off, in distant years, to clean up the future, amongst such I’d have you and Buddy headlining a cold winter night concert in Clearlake, Iowa. And I would replace the airstrip with a seven star hotel, a temporary home til just spring, inhabited by goatfooted balloonmen and bellboys, fey and wee.

Stroke Out by Dale Barrigar Williams

(All images produced by DWB)

“It was just like a song being played on the radio in my mind.”

– Richard Brautigan

One of these pictures is the countdown: less than sixty minutes until STROKE time two years ago.

Another picture is a view from my hospital room in Chicago. Without access to the futuristically good health care services of the Second City, I would probably have ended up quite a bit worse off than I was and am.

Another pic’ is me contemplating my situation and reliving many memories, since I can see the University of Illinois Chicago from my window, the place where I taught for fifteen years and completed my PhD in English and Creative Writing. And I’m realizing again that I possess a certain fearlessness, and have always possessed a certain fearlessness.

Another pic’ is one of the verses that helps reinforce my so-called certain fearlessness, a fearlessness that is not without its failings and is not always as evident (to myself and even others) as I might want it 2 B.

But many people are afraid of me, especially on the street when they see me and the wolf I walk around with (and sometimes a second wolf and a pit bull).

Picture five is the REUNION: I had an incredibly vivid nightmare while in the hospital that he would forget me while I was gone. I was wrong.

At one point I said to/asked one of my doctors, “I had a MINOR stroke, right?”

His answer was (and I quote it directly): “There are no minor strokes.”

I was in the hospital for one week; one neck surgery; a million tests, pokings, and proddings; and tons of gratitude about being alive with zero paralysis or facial drooping or any of the other horrors that often come with a stroke.

(I also have Stage One Emphysema, which I can sometimes feel burning a little bit at the tops of my lungs. Quite an accomplishment for 59.)

The nurses and various attendants (and some of the doctors) who took care of me were like human angels.

One wonders why the ones seemingly working the hardest were also the ones being paid the least (or at least too little in comparison).

The same was true the last time I was in the hospital for a week twelve years ago (same hospital, different issue, what they sometimes euphemistically refer to as a “mental breakdown”). (I recovered quickly then too and ended up smarter than when I went in, both times.)

But this pay issue $, or lack of good pay issue, it’s like the so-called leader of the free world at the moment, who spends (obviously) the vast majority of his time golfing and re-posting total crap on the internet; or re-posting total crap on the internet while golfing; or telling endless lies about how he won the 2020 election and didn’t start an insurrection; or consuming vast quantities of Mickey D’s and diet Coke while viewing propaganda TV featuring none other than himself.

Hey people who like this guy! The free world really needs a president who’s willing to do a little real work around here once in a while.

The best you can say for him is that he both does, and does not, back down.

He makes Dick Nixon (Nixon the dick) look like Abraham Lincoln.

His actual presence in a room is overwhelming, especially to weak-minded sycophants.

He isn’t a racist in the sense that he values absolute loyalty over skin tone every time.

He hires some really good-looking women.

He’s married to one who appears to want to have zero to do with him (can’t say as I blame her).

He falls asleep in the meetings all day long because he stays up all night long posting crap on the internet and talking on the phone if he can find anyone who will answer.

He NEVER shuts up.

Him and his pals are the ravenous nihilists Dostoevsky predicted.

Sometimes he’s kinda funny and almost likable for some reason!

The uniform (or costume) he’s concocted for himself is hilarious.

I just wish all these other fools wouldn’t keep wearing the same thing.

If he invited me to the White House I would probably go and try to talk some sense into him, not that I would hold my breath about the results.

But I would never travel the country singing his praises like Kid Rock, who I used to think was a kind of genius. Same with Snoop Dog. Come to your senses y’all!

A hundred and forty-six years ago, the great Russian saint-and-sinner Dostoevsky wrote: “Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself, and others. And having no respect, he ceases to love.”

Except for the love of money.

Solvitur Ambulando y Dr. Dale Williams Barrigar

(All images taken by DWB)

Solvitur ambulando: it is solved by walking.

Kierkegaard, the great Danish philosopher, Christian Existentialist before there was such a thing, and wild-hearted comedian bachelor, said: “Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts; and I do not know of any thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.”

The fact that he also, quite literally, collapsed into the gutter and died while walking at the age of 42 in 1855 has nothing to do with it. He died while he was out doing what he loved. What better way can there be to expire!?

He was writing to his sick sister-in-law who was having trouble getting out of bed because of clinical depression. He was throwing down the gauntlet in an effort to try and get her to do something to save herself.

His most famous quote comes from a private letter.

Because that’s the kind of writer he was.

All dogs in all times and all places and of all sizes and all kinds, obviously agree very heartily with these sentiments, at all levels.

Dogs literally possess the wisdom of philosophers (maybe without knowing it but don’t be so sure).

It is said (and I have seen it) that they can also accept their own bodily deaths with perfect equanimity; because they know that this too is only part of the world; and they love the world – but not too much.

End Note: Thanks to the great Michigan poet Jim Harrison from whom I first heard this quote some time in the 1990s.

And, of course, co-starring, the one and only Boo!

Dr. Dale Barrigar Williams

F ICE by Dr. Dale Williams Barrigar

I deeply respect law enforcement because I deeply know that when the shit really hits the fan, it’s them who you have to call for assistance.

But when it’s them you have to start barring and blockading your door against, worrying that they’re going to barge in for no real reason in the middle of the night, times have changed around here for some of us.

Such things have happened in my neighborhood too recently – and there are many who say such things will start happening again soon, in earnest.

The world has never been a safe place for anyone – just ask all those folks who used to have to spend so much of their time keeping their eyes peeled for saber-toothed tigers around every bush, tree, rock, and boulder.

It was so hard to spend time scrolling on your phone when the big cats were out to get ya.

No wonder we find cats’ eyes to be so weird and eerie (as well as cute and cuddly).

Even now, too much comfort and complacency is a great killer in the good ol’ USA.

FUCK ICE indeed – especially if you have a heart of ice – no matter which side you’re on.

END NOTE/S:

I was born in Dearborn, Michigan, USA, which is the town where Henry Ford invented that thing we now call “the car.” In my birth town currently, over fifty percent of the population reports Middle Eastern or North African ancestry, which means it has one of the highest percentages of that type of population in the entire country. I very much embrace such diversity, even though I also know it can cause problems, especially for the ones who get kicked out of the place/s they used to live, which happens here in the USA, just like anywhere.

Regarding ICE barging into my apartment in the middle of the night, mostly I’m worried that if they did so, my Siberian would attack them and they’d shoot him dead.

That is why I bar and blockade the door/s in the middle of the night, so I can hear ’em coming, if they want to come, even though I’m very much an American citizen, born and bred, and hardly ever left to go anywhere else but here.

Because my Sibe and I would die for each other without thinking twice, if that’s what it took.

Dr. Dale Williams Barrigar

Mona Lisa Street Scene by Dr. Dale Williams Barrigar

“Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues, you can tell by the way she smiles.” – Dylan

The Mona Lisa Street Scene series arose on the West Side of Chicago, along Madison Street.

Sketchy people were wafting about there and here, buses were pulling in and out of the hulking garages, the El tracks were shaking with trains, cars going by, seagulls soaring above all in from the lake looking for chicken bones in the gutters, grass blowing in the vacant lots, garbage rotting in the alleyways, food smells floating from nearby hot dog stands (Chicago has more hot dog stands than McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and Burger King combined, even though McDonald’s was invented here and has its world headquarters here), leaves fluttering on the trees, weeds coming up from the cracks in the sidewalks, cats climbing on stairways, buildings groaning with ghosts, rats baring their fangs and claws, doves cooing and gently moving their wings without flying, but dreaming of flying, which is, after all, only – another kind of flying.

Because I’m feeling silly and I like to celebrate my city, these are the names of eleven comedians who are from Chicagoland, i.e., Chicago and environs: John Belushi, Jim Belushi, Bill Murray, Harold Ramis, Betty White, Steve Allen, Jack Benny, Chris Farley, Robin Williams, Redd Foxx, Bob Newhart.

Blue or Blue Bucket by Dale Williams Barrigar

(Note–We begin a new week of fresh looks at life by our own DWB with a study in blue–LA)

This little photo series attempts to illustrate William Blake’s justly famous phrase “to see a world in a grand of sand.”

It is like when Horton hears a Who!

Inside a clover.

Thank you Dr. Seuss!

With Picasso and Dali, you make a third as the greatest artist of the Western World in the twentieth century (say I, or says me).

It takes decades of patient and periodic study (including years away) in order to tell who’s better and one still doesn’t know: and will never know; but will never stop returning to the question (for a million different reasons)…

I do not have a favorite color because I heart all colors, but whenever someone has forced me to choose (yes, these are the things we used to discuss) my immediate answer has always been BLUE.

That answer has sprang (or sprung) so often to my lips that I think it must be coming from the depths of my being, a place so mysterious to me that I consider it more mysterious than the rest of the universe.

By far.

I don’t have much (including my pride) any more but that is mine.

I associate Blue with water, the sky, baptism, the word dale and all it implies, Dali, Picasso, Van Gogh, Rimbaud, Easter (the crucifixion), melancholy, sex (blue movies), and my (if forced to choose) favorite music: The Blues.

(Weirdly, some of us avoid sex for a decade or more because the aftereffects are always a drained melancholy; and we are too busy putting our energy into something else, like art; God knows why!)

I live not far away from the graves of both Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf.

McKinley Morganfield and Chester Arthur Burnett.

RIP.

And: in my mind, you are still alive.

I do not know all the reasons why that fact is so comforting (quite) to me.

This picture series has three (3) titles, which is key: Blue; Blue Bucket; and Blue or Blue Bucket.

Signed,

The Photographer Because Everyone Does

DWB

Martin Luther and Lenny Bruce by Dale Williams Barrigar

The Colonel

Martin Luther was a man who had one of his most profound religious revelations of his entire life while in the middle of a painful bowel movement. And he found this fact, in retrospect, to be so extraordinary, and so hilarious, that he never hesitated to tell this little tale to almost anyone who would listen when the mood struck him; and he especially enjoyed telling the tale in mixed company. He especially told the tale after putting a bunch of ale into himself. He was a man who enjoyed copious quantities of beer like most in his day. His sense of humor was so ribald, wild and infectious that he sometimes kept the folks around him in stitches for an entire evening. Then again, back then there was no television. And yet, we can still see that Martin Luther’s powers of humor were extraordinary and subversive. Just like Lenny Bruce.

Back then, messing around with THE LAW, which meant the Catholic Church, was not just something that could get you excommunicated, or even just exiled from the community. Dante, when he was banished from his hometown, was told: if we ever see your face around here again, mister, we will jump you and burn you alive publicly at the stake. It was a good enough reason for Dante to never see Florence, which he deeply loved, again. Back then, messing around with the law, i.e. The Church, meant that you might have your arms and legs cut off while you still lived. Then for good measure they would take your intestines out of your body and show them to you in case you were wondering what they looked like. And only then would they chop your head off and place it on a pike so they could put it on the corner to warn other ne’er-do-wells such as yourself. Martin Luther faced down the Catholic Church and condemned them in fiery and public terms for being a corrupt institution that cared nothing for anything at all except money, money, money. The way to win your eternal forgiveness back then was to make a little donation to the Catholic Church, who would then contact God on your behalf and make sure you were okay now with The Big Guy. They had forgotten what their great hero, Jesus, said about a rich man, heaven, a camel, and the eye of a needle. Luther spent an awful lot of time in hiding, and he escaped torture and execution because his wily nature and the truth of his position won out in the end.

In 2018 or ’19, Elina, Mary Ellen, and I saw Bob Dylan live on the campus of the University of Illinois Chicago at the small stadium there which was right across from the building where I had my office at the school for fifteen years. We were in the third row and the only thing we ever actually saw of Dylan himself was his wild and messy hair bobbing around above his electric piano, because of where we were in the crowd, because of how his piano was set up to block him, and because he hid behind his instrument the entire time with his head mostly bent down low and never once directly addressed the crowd, at all, except in song.

When he began to sing his song “Lenny Bruce,” from his 1981 Christian album Shot of Love, a sudden hush went over the entire audience, and it was obvious that more than just me in the crowd knew that this was a special and unusual moment. “Lenny Bruce” is one of Dylan’s least-known, truly great songs. The surprise performance he gave of it that night was almost heavenly, or at least as heavenly as it gets on this side of the Great Divide. Anyone who thinks Bob Dylan can’t sing was not there that evening, or is mentally sleeping.

“They said that he was sick / ’cause he didn’t play by the rules / He just showed the wise men of his day / to be nothing more than fools / They stamped him, and they labeled him / like they do with pants and shirts / He fought a war on a battlefield / where every victory hurts / Lenny Bruce was bad / He was the brother you never had.”

Dale Williams Barrigar (All images by DWB)

The Dark Lady Revisited by Dale Williams Barrigar

(Images by DWB)

If forced or requested to select my favorite character in all of Shakespeare other than wild and wily Shakespeare himself, it would probably have to be the Dark Lady (or at least today it would definitely be the Dark Lady).

She is Good Will’s Mary Magdalene.

Anyone who’s ever loved a brilliant, promiscuous, raven-haired Spanish woman with darkly olive-colored skin and a shady reputation (to say the very least) will understand the attraction.

Her musical and poetic and intellectual abilities, her independent spirit and the fact that she inspired all this (all these deathless sonnets by the Western world’s greatest writer other than those who wrote the Bible) are her greatest calling cards.

“I do believe her, though I know she lies,” is one of my all-time favorite lines of poetry.

There have been myriads of scattered interpretations about the shades of meaning contained in this line.

And I know just what it means.

It’s about, among other things, Shakespeare’s voyeuristic obsessions and jealousies; and mine.

Dale Barrigar Williams

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Cat Woman by Dale Williams Barrigar

(All images by DWB)

Loving lady at the end

of the block, you were once an

urban cougar with a single silky black

feline.

But time passed, as it must.

It is a lot of them that haunt you now, I see.

The lizard-eyed landlord tried

to evict you many times.

Then they came, and did evict

you eventually, for this.

The cats were scattered, or rounded up

and taken away, somewhere, some when.

Shakespearian Cat Woman you fought them,

and tried to escape them,

you died for them, you plied them with

fine liquor, wine, and gold eye shadow, and you

heavily sighed.

But when they took the cats away,

did you know,

did you know then that this

was only the ethereal end

of one more love?

And do you now, do you ever remember

me, at all?

And how?

Dale Williams Barrigar