The Big Picture and the Closeup

We must have surrendered emotionally to Herman Wouk’s old-fashioned attitudes about war, whatever our intellectual take The Winds of War. How could we not, when the faces of the great leaders were presented to us at the outset of every episode, peering out of the giant letters of the title, set against a background of roiling clouds, while Robert Cobert’s majestic Love Theme rolled in the background and the opening titles rolled with it?

What I’d learned from experience was to tell myself things like nobody’s dying as I confronted whatever lesser crisis I encountered. The trouble was, on this occasion, I was pretty sure somebody I did not want to lose was dying.

In a modest and untrained way, I was evolving a theology of escape and renewal, if you will. I still believed in building lasting things – sometimes. But sometimes, I thought, you needed to leave off, and leave. It wasn’t contrary to God’s plan; it was God’s plan. And I wanted to share my point of view.

I reflected that Moses could never have had a business plan when he left Egypt either. You had to be crazy enough to count on some parted seas and columns of fire and manna and burning bushes and water flowing out of rocks. As a wiser Jiminy Cricket might have said, Always let your anger be your guide.

Our one-year-old son Matthew had a “language tape,” a VHS video transcription of the first three Muppet movies that I had made in the previous decade for his older brother and sister during a Muppet marathon on old Channel 45. It was complete with commercials and station breaks and really, really bad video, but it was perfect for Matt.

I had to get to know my plaintiffs. I know, my client was the defendant. But in order to try to defend that client, I still had to know the plaintiffs, these machinists and brakemen and engineers and firemen and maintenance-of-way workers, and I thought of them as mine. I had to get to know about their individual asbestos exposures, their individual careers, their medical histories, their hobbies, their tobacco use, their families, their non-railroad occupational exposures to asbestos. Of course they were not being honest about asbestos disease; I daresay most of them knew that. But I’m sure they viewed the litigation as a way of getting a little bit of their own back against an employer which, if it didn’t exactly inflict asbestosis on them, had still completely let them down. I did my duty by my client, but I was glad it was so ineffectual.

There’s a sentence in George Gissing’s novel Sleeping Fires which summed up my feelings about Mary: “It was the woman whom a man in his maturity desires unashamed.” And there I was, unashamed after a long process. To capture that feeling, a song would have be something that began in a long and hesitant fashion, but then moved from diffidence to confidence, lyricism, and joy. Bebel was the song.

Life’s major transitions are often messy. When (halfway between two marriages) I finally gave up playing the field, that was a major transition. And majorly messy.

Rupert Holmes and Susannah McCorkle understood the sadness in the limits life places on our love lives. We can try, for a little while – I did – to break the short tether of human finitude that so restricts our access to romance, but we can never pull hard enough to snap it. We can, at best, meet an infinitesimal fraction of the people with whom we could have mated. Good things may come from crying uncle in this struggle, but let us not disguise the defeat as a victory.

The visual is Vladimir busking with his saxophone in a park. The song he plays is the first song we got to know him with at the outset when he was a musician in a Russian circus band. In that milieu the melody (no doubt by design) sounded cheerful but superficial. Now, played solo with lots of jazz riffs, it sounds distinctly mournful and much more profound. Michael Rod leaves pauses between the phrases, which begin to be filled in by singer Chaka Khan, singing a song called Freedom.