F. L. Lucas is remembered more as a literary critic than as a poet. The amazing thing, though, is how scholarly writers like Lucas can write powerful poems, like the following one:
Beleaguered Cities
Build your houses, build your houses, build your towns, Fell the woodland, to a gutter turn the brook, Pave the meadows, pave the meadows, pave the downs, Plant your bricks and mortar where the grasses shook, The wind-swept grasses shook.
Build, build your Babels black against the sky – But mark yon small green blade, your stones between, The single spy Of that uncounted host you have outcast; For with their tiny pennons waving green They shall storm your streets at last.
Build your houses, build your houses, build your slums, Drive your drains where once the rabbits used to lurk, Let there be no song there save the wind that hums Through the idle wires while dumb men tramp to work, Tramp to their idle work, Silent the siege; none notes it; yet one day Men from your walls shall watch the woods once more Close round their prey.
Build, build the ramparts of your giant town; Yet they shall crumble to the dust before The battering thistle-down.
Here in its entirety is “The Parable of the Buyer of Nothing” from Farid-Ud-Din Attar’s The Conference of the Birds about which I posted yesterday. Attar’s Sufi beliefs are a far cry from the doctrinaire conservatism which we associate with Islam. In fact, in one line of the work, Attar writes, “These lofty words are an antidote for anyone sickened by extremism’s poison.” And to think this was written in the twelfth century!
One night as Gabriel rested in Paradise, he heard the Blessed Beauty respond “Here Am I” to a supplicating, prayerful voice. The angel thought, I don’t know who this person may be, but he must be a pure man, dead to his ego and alive in his soul.
Curious, the angel searched the Seven Heavens for the name of this man, but could not find it. He then searched the earth and the oceans, the mountains and the fields, and still failed to find the supplicating soul. Gabriel then hastened back to the Almighty, and again heard the Blessed Beauty’s “Here I am.” The angel’s head spun from envy and he went off again searching the earth once more, but to no avail. Finally, the angel pleaded: “Great One, guide me to this supplicating servant. Who is he?”
The One on High replied: “Go to Rûm, and seek him in a temple of idolaters.”
The angel hastened back to Earth and found a man crying and praying before an idol. Gabriel was moved by what he saw and returned to the Almighty, sobbing and begging: “Self-Sufficient One, unveil this mystery to me. He is praying to an idol, but it is you who in your grace answers him.”
The Blessed Beauty replied: “This man’s heart is darkened by ignorance. He does not know he has been misled. He has committed this error unknowingly, but I do not commit errors. I will now guide him to the Path. My benevolence will lead him to repentance.”
The Almighty then opened the Path to the man’s soul and liberated his tongue so that he could speak the Beloved’s name.
Know that this is the way of the Almighty. That Great One needs no reason for what it does. If you have nothing to offer the Great Court, don’t worry, it doesn’t matter. Over there the market isn’t keen on only pious deeds. At the Great Court, nothing is also accepted and bought.
It all started over half a century ago when I discovered the books of the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges. At two places within his Other Inquisitions: 1937-52, I saw intriguing references to a medieval Persian work, Farid-Ud-Din Attar. In “Note on Walt Whitman,” he wrote: “Attar, a twelfth-century Persian, sings of the arduous pilgrimage of the birds in search of their king, the Simurg; many of them perish in the seas, but the survivors discover that they are the Simurg and that the Simurg is each one of them and all of them.”
In the same volume, in the essay entitled “The Enigma of Edward FitzGerald,” Borges writes:
From the study of Spanish [FitzGerald] he has progressed to the study of Persian; he has begun a translation of the Mantiq-al-Tayr, that mystical epic about the birds who are looking for their king, the Simurg. They finally reach his palace, situated in back of seven seas, only to discover that they are the Simurg and that the Simurg is all of them and each one of them.
I was fascinated by this brief summary, which lay fallow, but unforgotten, in my memory for more than five long decades.
Quite unexpectedly, when I attended the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at the University of Southern California campus on Saturday, by chance I listened to a reading by a local Persian poet, Sholeh Wolpé, who had translated Attar’s Mantiq-al-Tayr into English as The Conference of the Birds, as well as another work of Attar’s called The Invisible Sun. I was ecstatic that I could not only buy both works but have them signed by the translator.
Jorge Luis Borges has been, for me, a gateway to world literature. Through him I discovered G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Chuang-tze, Thomas De Quincey, the Icelandic sagas, W. H. Hudson, Blaise Pascal, and Emanuel Swedenborg. I quickly found that any name mentioned by Borges was worth following up on. Farid-Ud-Din Attar is one of them: I am currently reading Sholeh Wolpé’s translation of The Conference of the Birds with great pleasure. (You will see it mentioned in some future blog posts I am contemplating.)
And I am by no means finished with Borges. There are still some avenues which I hope I can follow, if I had but world enough and time.
Wilford Brimley (1934-2020) or Jim Paris (b. 1945)
No, that is not a picture of me—but it might as well be. Apparently, I am a dead ringer for a deceased character actor named Wilford Brimley, who appeared in such films as True Grit (1969), The China Syndrome (1979), Cocoon (1985), The Firm (1993), and Timber the Treasure Dog (2016). So if you should meet someone who looks like the above photo, please don’t come up to me and ask if I’m Wilford Brimley. I am James Alex Paris, an entirely different person, one with no acting experience whatsoever, even though strangers seem to think I am an actor.
I did act in one short student film about half a century ago, but that was my filmography in toto.
The one thing which throws people off is that I have the same facial expression as Brimley had. He didn’t smile much, and neither do I. (Among other things, my teeth are decidedly not photogenic.) As is well known among my friends, I eschew all contact with strangers. When a stranger addresses me in public, my standard response is in Hungarian until they go away with a confused look on their face.
Among other things, Wilford Brimley was decidedly NOT Hungarian. He was born in Salt Lake City, Utah and was born of a bona fide Western American than I am, having been born in Cleveland, Ohio.
Brimley was a pretty good actor, but I do not take credit for any of his roles. Just as I hope his estate doesn’t take credit for any of my blog posts.
This is a re-post from Multiply.Com from January 18, 2011. I thought I would post it again because, if my father Elek would still be alive on April 17, he would be 115 years old. Alas, he died in 1985.
It’s been a while since I revisited my past. This time, I’m going back into the period before my birth. The above picture was taken at some point in the 1930s and shows the Paris twins, Elek (Alex) and Emil, and their sister Margit.
Can I tell which one of the men is my father? Probably, it is the one on the right, because my father Elek was always better tanned and more athletic but not so well dressed as Emil. Even later in life, I sometimes had to wait for them to start talking before I recognized them, because they had very distinctive voices.
Elek and Emil could never live far apart from each other. When Emil bought a condominium in Hollywood, Florida, my Dad followed—in the same Carriage Hills condo complex. My father died in October 1985; and Emil died a few months later, of pretty much the same combination of diabetes and heart failure. At my Dad’s funeral, Emil was visibly shaken, as if his world had been taken away from him.
All their lives, the two twins competed through their children. Dad had the two sons, my brother Dan and myself; Uncle Emil had a son and daughter, Emil Jr. and Peggy. At times, the competition got bitter, especially when my cousins faltered in school and in their personal lives. Dan and I, however, always liked our cousins and regretted any bad blood between the brothers. They were just that way.
Margit was a different case: She never married. I don’t even know whether she dated very much or even wanted to marry eventually. Some years after this photo was taken, she opened May’s Bridal Shop in Garfield Heights, Ohio, and lived on the premises spending her time sewing bridal gowns. My job when visiting there was to pick up fallen pins with a magnet. I would also look with admiration at all her old calendars with Currier & Ives illustrations.
I don’t remember when Margit (whom we called Nana) closed the shop and retired to Florence, South Carolina, but I think it was in the early 1970s. She didn’t last very long because, shortly after I returned from Hungary in 1977, I got a call that Margit had died suddenly. The timing was unfortunate, as my parents were still in Hungary visiting. So I notified my brother and the two of us attended the funeral—after sending a telegram to Dad in Hungary. He was very broken-up that he couldn’t make the funeral in time, but was grateful that Dan and I went.
Whatever the competitiveness between the frequently warring twins, I always felt that my Uncle, my cousins, and my Aunt loved us for what we were. Although Margit was closer to her brother Emil than to her brother Elek, that never impacted on the next generation. I did feel, however, that my Dad had said certain unkind things about my cousins that I wish he hadn’t. Cousin Emil Jr was always good-hearted and frequently protected me from neighborhood bullies when I was a little shrimp of a kid; and Cousin Peggy was, I always thought, incredibly cute.
A life is always strange when one looks at it all of a piece. I cannot help but feel that I have grossly oversimplified the complex web of interrelationships that existed among us. The important thing is that I accepted the few bad things because they were more than made up for with kindness and love. Elek, Emil, and Margit now exist inside of me; and all the conflicts have been resolved.
I’ve come a long way since my teen years when I was afraid of tasting my Mom’s home-made lecsó, which was made with rice and Hungarian banana peppers, some of which were fiercely hot. Now, most of what I eat is seasoned with chiles. Today I finished up my Spanish Rice, made with fire-roasted hatch chiles and dry Chiles Japoneses. This morning, I had home=made quesadillas with Mexican jalapeños en escabeche.
Yesterday I dropped in for lunch at a popular Culver City restaurant called Tito’s Tacos in Culver City. I suddenly realized that I had come a long way from my early days. The two hard shell tacos tasted like unseasoned hamburger with a bit of shredded lettuce. Where were the chiles? Nowhere, to be exact. There weren’t even any bowls of pickled jalapeños to spice things up.
In the space of half a century I have morphed into a chile-head. Interestingly, my brother Dan is one as well. I remember going with him to a farmers’ market in Templeton, California and being offered a sample of olives stuffed with habañero chiles, which, as you may know, are probably the hottest chiles in common use, except for special purpose lethal items like the Carolina Reaper.The man offering the stuffed olives expected us to crumple with flames coming out our orifices. When Dan and I looked at each other and expressed approval, we asked for another sample—to the consternation of the seller.
Few of the people I know are able to match me on the Scoville Scale, where I am quite comfortable at tyhe 100,000 Scoville heat units level. For a look at the Scoville scale, check out Wikipedia.
I have always admired Joyce Carol Oates for being that most rare thing: a prolific writer of quality. Currently, I am reading one of her psychological mysteries, Jack of Spades, about a mystery writer with two personas, one of them destructive. The question arose: Did Joyce ever write any poetry? Upon checking, I found the following sobering poem about everyday life:
Women Whose Lives are Food, Men Whose Lives are Money
Mid-morning Monday she is staring peaceful as the rain in that shallow back yard she wears flannel bedroom slippers she is sipping coffee she is thinking— —gazing at the weedy bumpy yard at the faces beginning to take shape in the wavy mud in the linoleum where floorboards assert themselves
Women whose lives are food breaking eggs with care scraping garbage from the plates unpacking groceries hand over hand
Wednesday evening: he takes the cans out front tough plastic with detachable lids Thursday morning: the garbage truck whining at 7 Friday the shopping mall open till 9 bags of groceries unpacked hand over certain hand
Men whose lives are money time-and-a-half Saturdays the lunchbag folded with care and brought back home unfolded Monday morning
Women whose lives are food because they are not punch-carded because they are unclocked sighing glad to be alone staring into the yard, mid-morning mid-week by mid-afternoon everything is forgotten
There are long evenings panel discussions on abortions, fashions, meaningful work there are love scenes where people mouth passions sprightly, handsome, silly, manic in close-ups revealed ageless the women whose lives are food the men whose lives are money fidget as these strangers embrace and weep and mis- understand and forgive and die and weep and embrace and the viewers stare and fidget and sigh and begin yawning around 10:30 never made it past midnight, even on Saturdays, watching their braven selves perform
Where are the promised revelations? Why have they been shown so many times? Long-limbed children a thousand miles to the west hitch-hiking in spring, burnt bronze in summer thumbs nagging eyes pleading Give us a ride, huh? Give us a ride?
and when they return nothing is changed the linoleum looks older the Hawaiian Chicken is new the girls wash their hair more often the boys skip over the puddles in the GM parking lot no one eyes them with envy
their mothers stoop the oven doors settle with a thump the dishes are rinsed and stacked and by mid-morning the house is quiet it is raining out back or not raining the relief of emptiness rains simple, terrible, routine at peace
When I last visited the Museo Fernando Garcia Ponce Macay in Mérida, Yucatán in 2020, there was an exhibit of the sculptures of Rodrigo De la Sierra. They made an impression on me by their dark sense of humor—almost Kafkaesque.
One thing I have learned about Mexican art: There is no hesitation to hit the viewer between the eyes with a sledgehammer. Here are two more samples of De la Sierra’s work:
Rodrigo De la Sierra lives and works in Mexico City where he was born in 1971. After completing his Bachelor’s in Architecture, and a course on Creativity at Universidad del Valle de México, he worked as an architect for 12 years. De la Sierra later studied Plastic Arts for 4 years, taking different workshops such as Materials and Patina Techniques, and Sculpture Workshop at the Pippal’s Sculpture and Art Circle. He was trained in modeling, wood carving, molds and casting, and figurative sculpture at Universidad Iberoamericana. After that, he went on with his development through a self-teaching approach.
In 2016, he receives an Honorary Doctorate from the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México, and in his honor, the Architecture and Design Faculty of the UAEM names the Art Plaza Rodrigo de la Sierra “Timoteo”. In 2018, in homage to his professional career and his social assistance works, Lotería Nacional dedicates its draw to his character Timoteo. That same year, Timoteo appears in the national Post Stamp to commemorate “World Post Day”. In 2021, he is positioned by Forbes magazine in the Top 10 of the 100 Most Creative Mexicans in the world. Today, his work is exhibited in Mexico City, San Miguel de Allende, Puebla, Xalapa, Chicago, and cities in South Korea and Malaysia.
Did You Know That Indy Was Based On Hiram Bingham III?
He had colonialism his his genes. The man who “discovered” Machu Picchu was the grandson of the New England Protestant missionary who forbade the Hawaiians to surf in the nude and who Christianized the islands. This same grandson trained to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps and make the peoples of Hawaii even more messed up than they already were.
Instead the younger Hiram decided to become an explorer and archeologist in Peru, where he was probably the first white man to visit Machu Picchu. He pretty much claimed the site as his life’s work, though he made a couple colossal error in judgment that tarnished his reputation: First, the site was not the same as Tampu Tocco, where the Incas under Manco Capac first emerged. And it certainly was not the same as Vilcabamba, where the Incas under Tupac Amaru fled for safety after Pizzaro’s Conquistadores laid waste to his kingdom. And it was not inhabited by the colorful “Virgins of the Sun.” Hiram liked the whole “lost cities” shtick and applied it everywhere his boots trod.
Missionary Grandpa Hiram Bingham I
That was only the beginning of Bingham’s trials and tribulations. Early on, the government of Peru decided they wanted control over what was dug up at their archeological sites. That is a reasonable request which is generally observed today; but back in the early days of 1911-1912, archeologists and their sponsoring stateside institutions wanted to do their own empire building. In Bingham’s case, he was bankrolled by Yale University and the National Geographic Society.
Bingham was a bit squirrely when it came to observing the Peruvian government’s reasonable restrictions and did his level best to sidestep them at every opportunity.
So the natural next step was for Hiram to go into politics, becoming in short order, lieutenant governor of Connecticut, governor of Connecticut, and Republican U.S. Senator.
One of the treasures in my recent reading is W G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, in which the haunted main character, Jacques Austerlitz, attempts to track down his parents who were lost to him in the War. At one point, he visits the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Alas, he remains “oppressed by the vague sense that he did not belong in this city either, or indeed anywhere else in the world.” I was on the top floor of Los Angeles’s Central Library when, fittingly, I read this beautiful passage.
As for himself, Austerlitz continued his story after a long pause, during my first stay in Paris, and indeed later in my life as well, I tried not to let anything distract me from my studies. In the week I went daily to the Bibliothèque Nationale in the rue Richelieu, and usually remained in my place there until evening, in silent solidarity with the many others immersed in their intellectual labors, losing myself in the small print of the footnotes to the works I was reading, in the books I found mentioned in those notes, then in the footnotes to those books in their own turn, and so escaping from factual, scholarly accounts to the strangest details, in a kind of continual regression expressed in the form of my own marginal remarks and glosses, which increasingly diverged into the most varied and impenetrable of ramifications. My neighbor was usually an elderly gentleman with carefully trimmed hair and sleeve protectors, who had been working for decades on an encyclopedia of church history, a project which had now reached the letter K, so that it was obvious he would never be able to complete it. … Some years later, said Austerlitz, when I was watching a short black and white film about the Bibliothèque Nationale and saw messages racing by pneumatic post from the reading room to the stacks, along what might be described as the library’s nervous system, it struck me that the scholars, together with the whole apparatus of the library, formed an immensely complex and constantly evolving creature which had to be fed with myriads of words, in order to bring forth myriads of words in its own turn.
Shades of Jorge Luis Borges’s story, “The Library of Babel”!
Tarnmoor 
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