Planet of the Apes Meets A.R. Ammons

Today I watched the original Planet of The Apes with the kids. It reminded me of how writers in the 70’s, like Rod Serling, were willing to take on such heady stuff (even as Charlton Heston warns Julius, more than a bit comically, to “never trust anyone over 30.” Ah, so sweet. Next week our family film festival will feature True Grit, the original Star Wars and Robert Redford in Jeremiah Johnson. Good, strong, honest 70’s fare. The only fallout of the viewing is that my kids were intoning, “Get your paws off me, you damn, dirty apes” all night. I hope the little one doesn’t use that on his kindergarten teacher tomorrow.

I love the “See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil” scene during the trial. Can anyone find a t-shirt with that on it anymore? News Flash: Still available on eBay for $12.99

The 70’s were the age of self-indulgence, yes, but also a much more ponderous time. The 24-hour news cycle had not intruded yet. I can remember honestly poring over the concept of goodness after the week’s Little House on the Prairie episode. Such naïvete is what the 70’s are despised for these days. Why in that age even Charlton Heston could stand revealed as a hero. How my kids will be devastated when they learn what happens to him later.

Ammons in The Selected reminds me of this kind of intrepid spirit to take on the imponderables. Ammons holds up his galactic perspective of nature for our perusal. I remember reading “Gravelly Run” for the first time and having that feeling of the top of your head being taken off, that feeling which, when it does still happen years later, provides satisfaction even though it is much rarer. The surprising details in the line that Shawn Pittard quotes from is the mention of the “algal hair,” and the “shoulders” of the highway bridge, a blunt attempt to anthropomorphize nature. There is something deeply satisfying for me (and perhaps all readers) to see humanity reflected in nature.

In the end, though, nature is sealed off from the speaker and his gaze “so I look and reflect, but the air’s glass / jail seals each thing in its entity.” The realm of the human and the realm of nature are separate. Philosophy is futile. The only answer one is going to find is to keep moving (which leads us to Mark Strand’s “Reasons For Moving,” the real juggernaut from that age in my opinion . . . the one poem, more than any other, that influenced me to write poems). Here Ammons is of the “Natural Prozac” school. Don’t think about the futility and it can’t get you down. I wonder if such an attitude is still recognized as commendable.

the poem of ammons I’ve always admired, though it is never as often anthologized as “Gravelly Run” or “Corson’s Inlet” is “Mansion.”

Mansion

So it came time

for me to cede myself

and I chose
the wind

to be delivered to

The wind was glad

and said it needed all

the body
it could get

to show its motions with

and wanted to know

willingly as I hoped it would

if it could do
something in return

to show its gratitude

When the tree of my bones

rises from the skin I said

come and whirlwinding
stroll my dust

around the plain

so I can see

how the ocotillo does

and how saguaro-wren is
and when you fall

with evening

fall with me here

where we can watch

the closing up of day
and think how morning breaks

The wind shows gratitude. An elemental force personified. If only all interactions with the big things of nature could be so magical. I suppose the lack of this kind of thing is what I was harping on the other day with Gary Snyder. Obviously, this flight of fancy is more romantic than the level-headed observations that Ammons usually makes in his poems (and Snyder makes virtually all the time). I think it may be necessary and important to point out that Ammons is interacting with nature in this poem (even though it is interaction of a more hypothetical nature). This may lead him to personify nature in order to facilitate this interaction in his poem. So many of his others he merely plays the witness and pontificates about man’s place in nature. Can we get back to it? Can we even get back to the 70’s (when the back-to-the-landers were prevalent)? What makes Ammons so sweet is that he raises this question, a question that we, now, have resoundingly answered with man’s place is in nature, mucking around in it. Why just last week I saw a bunch of simians . . . or were they my arboreal cousins trying to withhold the knowledge from me that they were my forebears?