Douglas Mercer
July 17 2024
In the Catcher In The Rye J.D. Salinger wrote the secret book which holds the key to the web of fate. The title is a misquote of a poem by the Scot Robert Burns, a noted Freemason, echoes of which doctrine appear in the book. Throughout his brief career (so far) Salinger was intensely interested in issues of a religious or spiritual nature as seen by seers, sages or holy men.
In one of Salinger's books a story is related of how a former Quiz Show whiz kid recounts that when she was a baby in her crib she used to fly around the room but when the Quiz Show master scoffs and says she only dreamed it she holds her ground, and says no sir, she knows she did because when she got back to the crib she had dust on her fingertips from the light bulbs; he has an epigraph about the sound of one hand clapping; a blank note is left in a cigar box by way of explanation; the perfect horse is said to kick up no dust and leave no tracks; we hear of a boy named Teddy (Teddy Boy) who attains divine consciousness and a mysterious death in a swimming pool and an eerie and fatal reverberation; there is a book called the Secret Of The Gold Fish (God Fish, god flesh).
All of this is to say that Salinger is an adept, or interested in adepts, or the Sick Man as he ironically calls those engaged in delving into the creative processes and psychotic breaks of the interior of the wonderland of the mind. Indeed, if all of this is stealing anyone’s thunder it is his; his son says that for the final half century of his life he wrote every day for eight hours day (unlike God he apparently did not rest on Sundays); and, they say, in five or so years, the tranche will come pouring gradually out. My guess is he at least missed a trick or two but, as is said, we will see (time will tell).
***
They say that J.D. Salinger was American Intel, that he washed ashore on D Day a few hours behind the troops, and at the bloody Battle Of The Bulge he lost his mind; and it’s true that he liked to drive around his New Hampshire compound looking surly and sullen in a jeep like he was working in an occupied zone donning an old Army Jacket; and they say that when he went to pick up his daughter from her school and saw her hanging around the hippies he was outraged; and when he saw that she had inked a peace symbol on her ankle he flew into a fury and said she might as well have a swastika there (grim double irony). Indeed, by all accounts Salinger was an American Patriot. The one sole but solid glimpse of what he thinks of the counterculture we get is when he writes of and derides the Dharma Bums, The Beats, and the Sloppy and the Petulant, the chosen cultists, the bearded and proud and unlettered young men, the unskilled guitarists, the Zen Killers and the incorporated aesthetic Teddy Boys (1959).
Salinger was able in the guise of a nominal bildungsroman he was able to purvey the central text in the network of prophecy which touched every nerve. The iconic image of the wild cowboy riding a nuclear bomb is cribbed from him; the narrator remarks that Olivier played Hamlet like a godamned general not as a “screwed up kind of guy”; he picked up from Swift when he said that a horse is after all human; and he even got Albert Pike wedged in there; and the mysteries of Egyptians initiation rites; and three weird sisters in the Wicker Bar (Wicca, Wicker Man); it’s a quest narrative for the ring that ends on a carousel with the horses going round and round; and that his book got caught up in the maelstrom of murder is certainly not mitigated by the fact that Holden has a people hunting hat.
Man after all is the most dangerous animal.
Carpenter: car/pen. The word is the means of transport. Just before his murder John Lennon said he did not fear death because it was just getting out of one car and getting in another.
It is quite easy to interpret J.D. Salinger as a purveyor of Christianity; he certainly was quite interested in Eastern Religions but nothing is as simple as you think, both literally and figuratively. At the end of Franny and Zooey, a book saturated by seer talk, he identifies a mysterious figure Seymour has concocted in his brain as Christ himself. He wrote a novella called Raise High The Roof Beams, Carpenters and the word carpenter is indelibly associated with Jesus, as he was said to be a carpenter, the master builder, the one who laid the cornerstone, in some accounts he even made crosses including his own; it was prominently the master carpenter named Zimmer with whom Holderlin was gently housed during the many decades of his madness; and Lennon said that on reading Lewis Carroll more closely he should have said I am the carpenter, not I am the walrus; Jesus is also associated with the word house (my father’s house, build your house not on the sand for otherwise we are foolish builders/ bildungroman, a novel of development). For the rain comes and washes all away (when the rain washes you clean you shall know).
The world proceeds by symbols (cymbals), and each symbol often has more than one meaning until it can be stabilized in the linguistic field by the one who is master, that is all.
In the Middle Ages monks would refer to Mary as The Fat Lady.
***
Raise high the roof beam, carpenters. Like Ares comes the bridegroom, taller far than a tall man (see Building, White Biocentrism, May 19 2024).
This is from Sappho, a high born and aristocratic Greek poetess (630-570 BC). She comes down to us in fragments (shored for our runes) like Heraclitus. She used an ornate and flowery beautiful and lush and even exotic form of purple prose that was thought obscure and was scorned by the Greeks by the time of Sophocles who used more direct and straightforward sentences, that is she was one step closer to the source. Ares is Mars or War. Jesus too said he brought war not peace; and the god of war is associated with the word coming or arriving like Jesus; he is also a bridegroom like Jesus, with the undercurrent of groom as one who deals in horses (the ranches and the mustangs and the way you said you can have all this, at least a horse is human, Houyhnhnm and homonyms).
All can agree the arriving one is the man at the altar (alter) awaiting his bride which is the world (Fat Lady, mother earth), and the union will be consummated or consecrated with a few appropriate last words. It will be a marriage feast and a wedding and a celebration, when like fire it kisses and consumes (Romeo and Juliet, 1596), though the water will become milk, not wine. One key distinction: Jesus said he brought a sword; but Mars is war itself, and this figure which is taller than the tallest man is like Mars. And of course we have the proper injunction to the ones of development and growing and building, building it up in their minds (seers, sages, holy men): raise high the roof beams, carpenters (roof, root, floor, roof). Then the ceiling (sealing) will be blown away. In Salinger’s story (Raise High The Roofbeams, Carpenters, 1955) this message from Sappho is written on a mirror (looking glass world) with a moist sliver of soap (moist star, water, cleaning agent, quicksliver).
From out of the archaic Greeks world and its lovely blue comes the thunder of the gods and speaks plain as day. Take this brother, may it serve thee well.
***
In his penultimate book (so far) Salinger tells the story of Franny and Zooey and takes up specifically Christian themes. The two protagonists are the youngest children of Les and Bessie Glass, two retired vaudevillians. All seven of the Glass children are genuine geniuses and one after another they have trooped through the children’s TV Quiz Show called It’s A Wise Child. When we meet Franny she is a college co-ed in the mid 1950s (think Freudianism, and Sylvia Plath) on a date before the Yale football game with a boy named Lane who is depicted as a conformist. In typical Salinger fashion she begins on about egotism and inauthenticity and wonders whether college is even worth going to (why stay in college? why go to night school? will it be different this time?)
Worse, she is wrapped up reading a book called the Way Of The Pilgrim in which the hero take’s Paul’s injunction in Thessalonians to pray incessantly to serious extremes; and she has taken this so much to heart that she excuses herself to go the what was then called Ladies Room where, her nerves on edge and distraught, she has a minor nervous breakdown in the stall. She is able to return to the table but after her boyfriend says they are late for the football game she faints. Upon her waking the boyfriend calls a taxi and leaves her alone, she is last seen moving her lips wordlessly, praying without cease one supposes.
We then meet the baby of the family Zooey to whose older brother Jesus once showed up in kitchen unobtrusively asking for a small ginger ale. Franny is at the family home convalescing from her psychic break; naturally they pore over family lore but Zooey still cannot get through to her about her misapplication of the Jesus Prayer, so he decides on a ruse; expert at acting and imitation he goes into another room and calls Franny from an internal line (unknown now common at that time) and pretends to be the second oldest child Buddy. He recounts a time when as a child he became fed up with the morons around him while on It’s A Wise Child: he told Seymour that the people they met were fake, that the announcer was smarmy and slimy, that everyone was simply awful and he was going to quit.
He said he no longer wanted to even shine his shoes as his parents prescribed, he wanted to quit; Seymour the oldest child told him not to; that it didn’t matter that everyone was a fool, that he still had to shine his shoes and still had to do his best no matter what. He told him that he had to shine his shoes and, what is more, he had to do it for the Fat Lady. Then Zooey in confidence reveals who the Fat Lady is. He says who the Fat Lady is is a terrible secret, but the Fat Lady is Christ—Christ himself in fact. Comforted by these words Franny slips into the primordial hum of the dial tone and is last seen with her lips not moving (the band begins at ten to six without sound, see K And H, White Biocentrism, July 4 2024).
His son claims that J.D. Salinger wrote every day for eight hours a day for fifty years; so the hard drive must be brimming though memory can never be full; they say that at the end of this decade they will begin to publish the gold or word hoard of his oeuvre slowly so it will drip out across the 2030s. Pynchon aside (with his guiding principle of paranoia, of connecting this and that in loops to infinity) only J.D. Salinger could possibly steal this thunder, but though his was written first this is in print first and priority on that score is clear, I will insist on it, no one cribs from me, my lawyers are like sharks, you just try me on. But really I am not holding my breath and I won’t get blue in the face (In Lovely Blue). I have wandered through my playing cards often enough to know what I am holding. No one has seen nothing yet, as far as I know.
***
Befitting his name Yogi Berrra became famous for being a kind of loveable down-home yokel and home spun Zen master saying if you come to a fork in the road take it; you can observe a lot by watching (it’s true); but foremost among his aphorisms is it aint over until it’s over. It is a tautology but it means something; it means stranger things have happened, or don’t count your chickens; or anything remains possible, a Hail Mary could be used, or perhaps the marching band will refuse to yield the field. Like when I pull a rabbit out of my hat; there is no rabbit and no hat but much amazement ensues.
There was a time in this country when the phrase it aint over until it’s over had a counterpart that went: the opera is not over until the Fat Lady sings. You don’t hear it much anymore as it is out of fashion, and universal amnesia holds sway; that is the phrase has gone the way of the way of the world as is said. It seems like one of those statements like it’s a bridge too far which seems like it’s been around for time immemorial or time out of mind but actually has a definite point of origin.
All idioms are like that; someone said it first. We don’t know because there were not as many texts back then but sink or swim might have been a common saying that Shakespeare picked up along the way or perhaps it emanated from his teeming brain; perhaps his merry and rosy-cheeked father used to say it around the house: we shall never know. There is always the problem of misattribution (ask Kevin Alfred Strom), misquotation deliberate or otherwise (Burns, The Catcher In The Rye), and genuine coinage (printing currency). But no matter. The speaker does not speak: the words do, the words are a virus that circulates and are the property of no one, though we must own them. And the words stand in their finality as long as they are spoken and spoken at just the right time, in the right context, when they are fit and proper and suitable, until they fade away like that famous cat’s smile, language being only breath on wind and transitory after the transition.
The opera is not over until the Fat Lady sings. Opera is work or world, drama, total work of art. When she sings she will sing her art out.
The world is not over until the Fat Lady sings.
“The first known use in media appeared in the Dallas Morning News on March 10, 1976: Despite his obvious allegiance to the Red Raiders, Texas Tech sports information director Ralph Carpenter was the picture of professional objectivity when the Aggies rallied for a 72–72 tie late in the SWC tournament finals: Hey, Ralph, said Bill Morgan, this is going to be a tight one after all. Right, said Ralph, the opera ain’t over until the fat lady sings.”
So a man named Carpenter first (we think) said the opera is not over until the fat lady sings.
“In the same newspaper on November 26, 2006, Steve Blow followed up the discovery by contacting Bill Morgan about the incident: Bill vividly remembers the comment and the uproar it caused throughout the press box. He always assumed it was coined on the spot. Oh, yeah, it was vintage Carpenter.”
The phrase caused a commotion. It was vintage carpenter.
“The 1976 use of the phrase was discovered by Fred Shapiro who published it in The Yale Book Of Quotations. It had previously been attributed to sportswriter and broadcaster Dan Cook who used the phrase after the first basketball game between the San Antonio Spurs and the Washington Bullets during the 1978 NBA Playoffs. Cook used the line to illustrate that while the Spurs had won once, the series was not over yet. Shapiro called this a notable example of misattribution.”
So it was thought to be Cook because he had the bigger platform and microphone, was able to broadcast it wide, but after some digging Carpenter got the palm. Whether Cook heard of what Carpenter said is unknown to us at present. Perhaps one could dig it up, but there would be no point at this point. In the end the dead bury the dead.
“The phrase is thought to have originated in the opera world. In many operas, there is a tradition of having a large, imposing woman sing the final aria. This aria is often a triumphant one, and it signals the end of the opera. As a result, the phrase it’s not over till the fat lady sings came to be used to mean that something is not over until the very end, when all the loose ends have been tied up and the final victory has been achieved. The phrase seems to be particularly connected to Wagner’s opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen. The final opera, Gotterdammerung, is the particular reference, where the fat lady is the Valkyrie, Brunhilde, usually sung by a well-built singer. Her farewell scene is a huge climax to the whole of the Ring cycle. The world is about to come to an end with a bang, as soon as the fat lady stops singing. Once she does it’s all over.”
This is vague; the phrase is thought to have originated with Carpenter; had it been used in the world of opera we would know about it presumably. What the writer meant was that Carpenter was alluding to opera in making up the phrase. Folk genius is the best genius.
“It’s not over till the fat lady sings is a very popular phrase, deeply embedded in the English language now.”
But the question remains: who is the Fat Lady who ushers in victory?
The owl of Minerva flies only at dusk. Is it the gold horned strapping and well-built lass, or a man taller than any man?
Or someone else altogether?
Who's there?
***
Notes:
Suzuki was a soft-spoken Japanese man who had lived, studied, and lectured extensively in Europe and America throughout his life. In the 1950s, he graced the pages of Time, Newsweek, and The New Yorker. When he lectured at Columbia in the same decade, people on the New York art and intellectual scene, including possibly Salinger, flocked uptown to follow his courses. His writings had a remarkable global and interdisciplinary reach. A still minimal list of those who cited him as an influence would include Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Martin Heidegger, C. G. Jung, John Cage, Jack Kerouac, Yoko Ono, and Salinger.
The Fat Lady Sings
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Douglas Mercer
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- Joined: Tue Mar 28, 2023 7:29 pm
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Douglas Mercer
- Posts: 10963
- Joined: Tue Mar 28, 2023 7:29 pm
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Douglas Mercer
- Posts: 10963
- Joined: Tue Mar 28, 2023 7:29 pm
