Sin City

I have of late been wrestling with the Noon Day Demon.  It’s not so much his strength that tires me as it is his wily moves, letting up from a terrifying hold, just enough to allow you some breath and the illusion of getting free, then twisting around and coming at you again from another and unexpected angle, making you ready – almost ready – to cry “Uncle” and throw in the towel.  I keep grappling with him though.  I demand that he tell me his name.  Can you imagine the power that would come from knowing his name, having him in command, invoking or dismissing him at will? 

One thing I know for sure: his name ain’t “Uncle”, and I keep pushing back.

 *

Why is it that people most enjoy the posts that I think are well-enough done but slight?  I have been a writer long enough to know that the ease with which they come, writing themselves effortlessly, is evidence of their virtue.  Being most directly the product of my muse and not of my over-wrought mind, these posts are most true.  But for me the posts on which I have worked hardest to carve the representation of my thoughts in the jelly-like stone of language are dearest.  I take pride (O! that deadly sin) in that which is born of my effort.

*

The day before the day before yesterday was Labor Day.  I had been thinking for the previous few weeks about the curse that the evil old God Yahweh piled on Adam and Eve after they had had the temerity to behave in the ways He had made them to behave.  He cursed Eve with pain in childbirth, which is called “labor.”  He cursed Adam with earning his bread by the sweat of his brow, which is called “labor.”

I mentioned this fact to a young couple who got into my cab at Pier 39 and asked me to drive them to their home in the Sunset.  We then found ourselves in a rapidly unfolding conversation about Labor Day, about the exploitation of the working person in this country these days, and ultimately about Henry George, “the Philosopher of San Francisco.”  As they were getting out of the cab, I also made a plug for this blog, something I do whenever I have a good conversation with passengers.  I hope some of them are reading this.

The young man teaches history at City College.  That fact gave me – gives me – hope.  He said that he give great prominence to Henry George.  Having discovered George entirely on my own in that little bookstore in New Hampshire, I doubted that anyone paid much attention to him these days.  Now I know that at least in this city, his work continues.

*

In “The Seven Deadly Sins,” the sin the heroine(s) experience in San Francisco is envy.  What do you suppose Brecht and Weill find in this town to envy?  The surrounding beauty of the land and sea?  The mild weather?  The riches of the earth in the local food?  The riches from under the earth in gold and silver?  The riches of a cosmopolitan mix of cultures from all over the globe that dates back to the first days of the city’s eruption out of the sand hills in the 1850s?

No.  In San Francisco one is envious

            Of those who pass their time at their ease and in comfort

            Those too proud to be bought

            Of those whose wrath is kindled by injustice

            Those who act upon their impulses happily

            Lovers true to their loved ones

            And those who take what they need without shame.*

Henry George could not, I believe, have found fault with a single line.

[For more on “The Seven Deadly Sins of the Petite Bourgeois”, Brecht and Weill’s final collaboration, which was originally produced as a “Sung Ballet” at the Paris Opera and choreographed by George Balanchine, see this Wikipedia article.]

* trans. W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman