Monthly Archives: May 2006

The lake, my lover

words and images Posted on by

The lake is with me every night like a lover. After daybreak I must leave him, but I know that I will return to him and that he will be waiting.

Like a lover, he is moody, often unfathomable. In the morning he may be calm, mirroring the world exactly as he sees it — bright and cloudless. Or he may feel imaginative, clearly reflecting the shapes the illuminated clouds playfully form and re-form. Sometimes the low-lying clouds try to influence his emotions by casting themselves between him and the sun, which can make him kick up a few choppy waves of impotent protest and frustration. If the clouds leave him alone long enough, he may settle down.

At other times, the clouds and the lake will continue to spar, each forgetting that their conflict started as a game. The clouds gather in mutual support until they block the sun and blacken the sky. The wind, like an annoying younger brother who cannot help but provoke the combatants, joins in the battle, teasing the lake, at first ruffling him, then turning him wild with fury, unsettled and grey. Then the lightning and the thunder and the rains come, and it becomes all-out war. It can last for minutes or for hours.

When it is over the air clears, and the wind exhausts itself, but the lake is slower to stop seething than his foes. After a time, though, his complexion will change from white-capped steel grey to breathtaking blue, and I will know that we are once again all that is in each other’s hearts.

I am away for most of these outbursts, which are frightening and beautiful at the same time. I do not understand these tantrums, but they are as much part of my lover as peace and calm and loveliness.

His moods can change in what seems like moments. He may arise cheerful with the sun, but turn gloomy and chill so quickly that I do not notice the transition. At other times, the change is so slow and gradual that its escapes even my observation until it is complete.

I love all of the lake’s moods because I feel and understand all of them — the inexplicably happy ones, the playful ones, the torn and confused ones, even the angry ones — but the quietly sad ones most of all.

It is on moonlit nights that I love the lake best. The moon glows across his surface, making a strip of his nakedness glow incandescently and leaving the rest in the mystery of semidarkness. It is then that I feel the coolness of his touch, the influence of his soul over mine.

The moon is a silent witness to our coupling, slow, deep, intense, with a hint of danger. It is exhilarating for me. For him — I cannot be sure, for despite his passion he holds himself and his power in reserve.

Even now I know that the lake and I will someday part. I do not know what will separate us beyond some kind of change in circumstance. I dread the thought and therefore do not think about it very often. Always I am aware of it, in the same way that I am aware that I must die. I do not know when or how, but I understand why. The lake changes, I change, all of life changes. Life is change. Then, finally, there is the end to change that death brings.

The lake is immortal; I am not. But we love where we can and how we may. Is not that the way of all lovers?

"To sleep, perchance to dream"

words and images Posted on by

Every day meaningless words in meaningless combinations are ripped from me by the will of another. I worry that there will be — that there are — no words left for me. No thoughts, no emotions, no imagination, and no way to express myself or, worse, nothing to express. I see now how difficult it is to mix the real workaday world with a creative or thoughtful life. How difficult it is to shed or bury or repress all the baggage of daily life, the anxieties, the worries, the pressures, the stresses, the resentments, and to be free to think, to feel, to create. The inner life is both denied and suffocated by the exigencies of reality, by the weight of humanity and its constructs, but mostly by its will and desires that are so different from mine.

My days are a veil that tries to obscure the beauty that lies hidden in this inner world, but at times the sleep of early morning pulls the veil aside to let me see some, just a little, of what is possible. Endless forest and valleys, houses in both town and country, indoor waterways, mythological creatures evil and good, magical waterfalls, oceans that embrace but do not drown, trains unrestricted by tracks, roads that lead to the unimaginable, and my own newfound ability to see forever and to soar forever — and just when I am highest, when I see most clearly, when I have found an inner world that is rich with the unexplained and the inexplicable, the veil falls back into place even as I fight it, and it is another day of anxiety, worry, pressures, stresses, and resentments. Just as I am about to understand, understanding fails. “To sleep, perchance to dream” . . .

"Clothes make the man"

words and images Posted on by

I often think and write about changing times. Today, change is rapid and seems to be accelerating. My dad grew up on a family farm with mules for horsepower; in the year of his birth (1913), there were probably still more horses than cars. By the year in which he died (2001), the American family farm was nearly extinct, having been carved up into lots for suburban housing or absorbed into factory farms, where animals are treated like products, not living beings. Even certain breeds of draft horse are endangered or threatened (see the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy). Within my dad’s 88 years, the U.S. was paved over with interstates, malls, shopping centers, and parking lots; men landed on the moon; and radio filled the home entertainment void, then TV, then the Internet, online gaming, and video games. And that’s only the barest glimpse of how much has changed.

It makes me wonder what I will see happen in the next 20–40 years of my life — what new technologies, devices, conveniences, treatments, and cures will arise, as well as the ensuing problems that such changes invariably create.

One change that has occurred in my lifetime is a small social one, but it’s worth mentioning as it is so prevalent. It’s our switch to casual dress in almost any setting.

I thought of this a few days ago when I saw a couple of families entering one of the churches downtown. Adults and children alike wore jeans and tee shirts. They could have been entering McDonald’s, a tavern, or a sports stadium, judging by their dress.

This is quite different from when I was a child, when men and even boys wore suits and ties, and women and girls wore dress or skirts — no slacks or even pantsuits. Jesus may have dressed casually, but you were expected to approach and enter the house of God with respect, and respect meant dressing up. Even when girls stopped wearing dresses to school, they still wore them to church.

The American attitude toward dress has, of course, changed. In the late 1980s, my then Big 8 consulting firm implemented casual Fridays. At first, if I remember correctly, it was in the summers only, then it was extended to every Friday year-round, then to every day. The only exception was if you had meetings with clients or vendors, or similar activities. All but a few sticks in the mud were ecstatic, and even the partners began wearing business casual clothing on the rare days on which they didn’t have meetings.

As for me, I loved it. I had always hated wearing dresses (to school, church, or work), and trying to pull pantyhose up over sweaty, sticky, fat legs in 90ºF, high-humidity weather became an epic challenge and a heroic effort (with many pairs damaged as a result).

My new company also switched to business casual every day, with similar exceptions, at some point after I started. At this point, I don’t even have a dress wardrobe left, even when I need it.

Now, when you walk around downtown Chicago during a weekday, it is the man or woman wearing a conservative business suit who stands out as the exception, the oddity. Except for occasional ethnic attire or trendy costume, the rest of us march in a uniform of casual, virtually indistinguishable, shirts, tops, and bottoms.

Casual attire has evolved in conjunction with the team-oriented workplace, in which work is done, in theory, in collaboration and by consensus, in which “leaders” guide and mentor rather than simply order and decide. Yet, for some reason, a person wearing a suit seems to command unspoken respect, at least more so than someone sporting a golf shirt and slacks. If a vendor comes in and sees three men in business suits and three in casual dress, the odds are good that they will address the bulk of their proposal to the “suits,” whom they will assume are the decision makers.

I suspect that those who wear suits are also treated differently outside the workplace. I can picture security guards, cab drivers, maître d’s, servers, even traffic control officers, showing greater deference to the elite in suits than to the masses in business casual.

I’ve read that business dress is coming back, but I haven’t seen it. I don’t often see anyone voluntarily dressing up for work; the joke has always been that someone who shows up at work in a suit or dress must have a job interview.

As much as I prefer casual dress and the symbolic (not actual) egalitarianism that it implies, I admit that I miss the professionalism and a certain distance that seemed to go along with a more formal attire. Perhaps it is even the sense that clothing separates the different aspects of our lives — that casual wear is for one’s personal life and that dress is for work, that the two are separate spheres. Now, with people working 80-hour weeks, working at home, working on the road, working while on vacation, using cell phones, laptops, BlackBerrys and PDAs, and ubiquitous wireless connections, these separate spheres of home and office, personal and work, are merging — or have merged — into an amorphous blob.

Off to work we go, or to church, to dine, to visit family or friends, to a date, to a baseball game, to home — it’s all the same to us, judging from the way we dress. If “clothes make the man,” what kind of men (and women) are we? What is left that is special enough to dress for, to care about?