No One To Witness And Adjust, No One to Drive the Car

There are few times, in your life, I think, when you are entitled to a sense of your own momentousness. I've only felt momentous three times, I think, and would not be terribly surprised if I never felt momentous again. There's a reason that the kind of desperation that most lives are led in is quiet. Even the three times I have felt momentous, I have retroactively decided against it. "Not so momentous after all," I write on the Life Event Review. Momentousness is a weird thing, anyway; I think the reason so many people are keyed in to getting to something momentous already is because they watch television. I have talked about this before, I think: one of the major ways in which deal with other human persons is like this:

A SERIES OF EVENTS --> A BIT OF MYSTERIOUS MOMENTOUSNESS --> and then the screen goes black and says LOST or whatever, and you don't deal with things until next week. But really, you've got to brush your teeth and wake up tomorrow.

Anyway, the three times that I felt like there was some momentousness approaching were the three times I graduated from anything (yes, my catholic grammar school made a big deal about moving up from eighth grade, and called it graduation, and had a commencement speaker and a valedictorian, and such). You would think that after the eighth grade and high school graduations had proved themselves to be not quite the unassimilable ends of old forms of life I'd thought, I'd have learned my lesson. But I didn't, and in May 2007, I went to Hilton Head, South Carolina, to do Nothing and to feel momentous for a while before going back to Massachusetts to graduate from college. And one of the only Things That I Did while I was there was read "The Emperor of Ice Cream" by Wallace Stevens, to help one of my friends, back north, write a paper about it.

"The Emperor of Ice Cream" is about a kind of thwarted momentousness. It begins with an invocation, to call in the roller of big cigars. The first time that I read this poem was in seventh grade, back in Lockport, for a guy called Mr. Brown who made us read stuff that seems a little heavy in retrospect for seventh-graders; in addition to this and "The Cask of Amontillado" and a couple stories by H.P. Lovecraft, he had us read the "Snowden" chapter of Catch-22, about which both holy shit and, come on, Mr. Brown, give us a spoiler alert. Anyway, I remember even Fat Young Dumb Schratz figured out that what this poem is all about is the movement from the title's having an Emperor in it and the calling of the roller of big cigars into the mundanity of the wenches dawdling in such clothes as they are used to wear. The poem is all about the crashing of two languages, the language of emperors and the language of ice cream. And something interesting happens.

Being momentous in Hilton Head, I spent a lot of time drinking beer and buying carne asada at the taqueria down the street and making plans while drinking beer to buy more carne asada. I read part of Tom Jones by Henry Fielding and went to the beach with my sneakers on, which is something I do whatever beach I go to. What no one did, me least of all, was verbalize anything like "Well, this is it" or "So ends college, chums" or "Of what great moment is this week!" and out of a sense of ruining anything, but out of the sense that it would've been stupid. That any kind of language of Momentousness would've been dumb because there were still things going on. And there are always things still going on. "The Emperor of Ice Cream" helps to teach us that there are always things still going on, that even at the death of the poor woman whose horny feet protrude, there is only an emperor of ice cream.

It is a point of actual fact that the poem that my friend was writing about was not "The Emperor of Ice Cream" by Wallace Stevens, but "To Elsie, or The Pure Products of America Go Crazy" by William Carlos Williams, which is a very good poem but doesn't have a lot to do, that I could figure out, with momentousness and Hilton Head. My brother the Duck suggested using Stevens instead.

It's the day after National Poetry Month; National Poetry Month 2010 is done, embalmed, put in its monument. I missed out on writing about it from a combination of laziness and actual busy-ness. I even missed out on National Poem in Your Pocket Day. April 2010, the Month I Let National Poetry Month Down is now in the same book as that week in May 2007, the Week I Went to Hilton Head with the Rest of My Graduating Class. They're momentous events; they are the kind of things my brother Connor would make fun of me for calling "famous"; call the roller of big cigars. But me, I'm not in the book; I'm just outside of it, still here. The only emperor is the emperor of Ice Cream.