Basil King
Playing Cards - A Tulip and Fish and Chips
Two women and three men are seated at a round table. On the table there is a Tulip in a glass of water and plates of Fish & Chips. No one has touched the food because they are playing Seven Card Stud and as for the tulip no one knows who brought it.
Pause
We know the origin of playing cards in Imperial China.[ They first appeared as early as 9th century Tang China (618–907 b.c.e). It is not known when playing cards arrived in Persia. Maybe the Silk Road, maybe they were brought by the Mongol conquerors in the 13th century. Playing Cards next appear in Egypt during the era of Mamluk control. From there they went into Europe through both the Italian and Iberian peninsulas.
Pause
By the second half of the 14th century in Europe there are woodcuts and watercolors of men and women, families, playing cards. And in the same period accomplished artists such as Konrad Witz were executing beautiful large cards depicting the courts of Kings and daily life that the nobility and the rich used as works of art.
Pause
A game of cards is less cerebral than chess and more thought demanding than dice. Cards, give me three, I raise you, and I raise you, and I raise you, I hold. I hold I don’t know what to do, I hold I have no cards. I raise, I know what you’ve got, I raise you to frighten you and I raise you again I have a Full House. Raise and hold the optimist and the pessimist, the vulnerable, the oppressed, the face card is a mirror a calculated risk that you can be a queen, a king, a wild card never being asked why or what you are doing when you cross into unknown territory.
Pause
Are games as important as religion? See Bosch, Garden of Earthly Delights 1503-1505. Pieter Bruegal the elder, Children’s Games 1560. Games and religion, ability and faith, control? See Georges de La Tour (1593-1652) See the misconception that playing cards is a game of chance. Is the hand as quick as the eye? Is Van Eyck’s eye always accurate? Does Grunewald internalize Christ’s pain?
Pause
Freud’s fear of anti-Semitism is never discussed but it is always present consistently gnawing at him. When Freud was treating the poet H.D. or any other patient did that fear ever influence or contradict his insights? Was he threatened by what patients told him? I wonder if Freud’s initial interest in psychoanalysis and the unconscious was driven by why is the Jew despised?
People are jealous of the sons of rich men. Jesus was a prophet and he wasn’t rich. After Jesus died he became a figure to be admired, worshiped and feared. Did Jesus demand something, something of people that wasn’t easily attainable? He demanded that people change.
The people heard Jesus and they were ashamed that they did not follow his teachings and they turned and had to find someone to blame. Jesus is a Jew and sometimes this is forgotten but what isn’t forgotten and what makes the Jews vulnerable is that Jews do not accept God’s son as a savior. That has repercussions.
If it fails begin again. There are no endings every ending is like a short story and a short story has no ending.
Pause
H.D. complains she never has enough money when the truth is she has a secret she is a millionaire.
H.D. had a living allowance from her parents when she went to England to live in 1911. Meanwhile her younger brother Melvin invested money for her and managed it, so a large fortune accumulated. She was worth about ten million dollars when she died in 1961.
Pause
H.D. was very tall and she never bought her clothes in a store she always had her dresses made by a dressmaker.
The dressmaker stands on a stool. She is a small woman and when H.D.is with her she thinks of her mother and her mother’s efficiency. H.D.’s mother Helen Eugenia Wolle Doolittle never had time to spend with H.D. or any of her children. Her mother ran a very demanding household for a very generous but demanding husband. When H.D. was born her father Charles Leander Doolittle was Professor of Astronomy at Leigh University later to become Professor of Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania. He would inform his wife at the last minute how many people he was bringing home for supper and she would be expected to shop and prepare all the meals with the cook.
The dressmaker lives alone and has no artistic interests. She was married and her husband left her for a man he fell in love with. She has never told her story to H.D. H.D. has been very cautious to say anything to her about her love for men and women.
In her free time the dressmaker raises a few flowers she thought about raising tulips but decided against it. Tulips remind her of her husband. He has presence, he has color and he stands tall and straight.
The dressmaker admires H.D. her height and vocabulary her access to people, her travels, H.D. embellishes her heart and her body with drama. The dressmaker loves standing on a stool next to H D. Then and only then does she feel that she is H.D.’s equal.
Pause
In a photograph taken of Freud’s desk there are antiquities and miniatures from ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt and India. Most of the antiques were acquired from dealers in Vienna. Freud’s passion for collecting books and miniatures was second only to his love of cigars.
Pause
The author Cervantes like Freud translated men and women’s fantasies, most intimate mishaps, and dreams. Freud liked cigars and drugs. Cervantes was a gamble and he is the first to mention Black Jack in his short stories. Black Jack is a card game. No one knows where it originated. Black Jack, players are dealt two cards, players must get as close to, or equal 21, without going over, the ace is considered either a one, or an eleven. Face cards are valued at 10.
A family can be two people a couple than a family can have more than three or four children, a family can have more that five children but Black Jack is 21 and Bach went over 21, he had 22 children.
Pause
The English painter Francis Bacon was addicted to gambling. He spent hours in the casinos’ of Monte Carlo playing the roulette wheel. He was to say, “You can’t understand the tremendous draw gambling has unless you’ve been in that kind of position where you terribly needed money and you manage to get it by gambling.” Bacon loved the sensation of loosing but he loved winning even more. More, sensation, the distortion becomes apparent, disparate things come together.
Pause
During the winter months when we are without flowers from our garden I buy Martha a White Rose from Bloom the florist. Bloom told me on the night of November 25, 2012 he parked his car. It was storming raining hard and the wind was ferocious. He stepped out of his car and had a sensation that he should run. As he ran a tree come down right where he would have been standing. He said the tree might not have killed him but certainly would have injured him. He was bewildered he wanted to know what told him to run? Nothing like this had ever happened to him before. He hadn’t heard voices but something told him to run. He shook his head in disbelief, what made him run?
Pause
Time out the players have decided to stop and pause. One of the women asks who brought the Tulip? A man with large hands and blue eyes says, me, it brings me luck.
Tulips were originally cultivated in the Ottoman Empire (present-day Turkey), and when Carolus Clusius (February 19, 1526 –April 4, 1609), a Flemishdoctor and pioneering botanist, perhaps the most influential of all 16th-century scientific horticulturists, wrote the first major book on tulips in 1592-1593 he planted his collection of tulip bulbs in Leiden and found they were able to tolerate the harsher conditions of the Low Countries. Shortly thereafter the tulip began to grow in popularity. They became so popular that his garden was raided and bulbs stolen on a regular basis.
This all took place in Holland’s Golden Age. Dutch merchants could yield profits of 400% from one voyage alone. The new merchant class showed off its success by setting up large estates surrounded by flower gardens, and the tulip, the sensational tulip, was given a place of honor.
By 1636 the tulip bulb became the fourth leading export product of the Netherlands, after gin, herrings and cheese. Tulip prices skyrocketed and because of speculation in tulip futures among people who never saw the bulbs fortunes were made and lost overnight.
Bulbs became so expensive that they were used as money until the market in them crashed.
Tulip Mania reached its peak during the winter of 1636–37, bulbs were reportedly changing hands ten times in a day. No deliveries were ever made to fulfill any of these contracts because in February 1637, tulip bulb contract prices collapsed abruptly and the trade of tulips ground to a halt. The collapse began in Haarlem. No buyers showed up at a routine bulb auction.
There may have been reasons that no buyers came to the auction. Haarlem was then at the height of an outbreak of bubonic plague. While the existence of the plague may have stopped the buyers from coming and speeded the inevitable, the bubble was going to burst.
Pause
Vermeer reminds us domesticity is the Wildest and if you leave home
And go into the streets
You will find Holland’s Golden Age
Silk satin and lace
The Night Watch defers to sunlight
To a God that is never challenged
Catholic Protestant and Jew
Rembrandt sleeps knowing he is envied
Master of fortitude he fingers
Between two thighs the pulse to conceive
The Dutch have more ships than
England France and Spain combined
Craft and canal urge on
Urge on a portrait a desire
For more Vermeer
Delft Haarlem and Amsterdam
She pours milk she reads a letter
The Queen opens her mouth
And eats the first herring
Red light Green light
Frans Hals’s introduces his patrons
To a light they have never seen
Light is a question not an answer
When sex ignites
Tulip Mania
Pause
She’s a winner she doesn’t always win but she is a winner and everyone at the table knows the man sitting next to her wants what she had, a grandmother and a grandfather who knew Sigmund Freud before he knew H.D.
Freud met her grandparents when he was a young man visiting London. Her grandfather spoke at a Zionist rally. Freud introduced himself and they immediately hit it off and her grandfather brought him home. Our grandmother was not educated but she was stunning with Tartar eyes and blonde curly hair and she enjoyed her husband’s friends. The two men corresponded for a while but when our grandparents moved to Argentina they lost contact with each other.
Pause
Freud had secrets he become an honorary member of the Vilna organization for the preservation of Yiddish. He was a Zionist. He loved his wife’s sister. But Freud didn’t keep his birthplace a secret from H.D. He told her he was born in Galicia in the Moravian town of Freiberg. Moravia was very important to H.D. she believed she had inherited a “psychic gift” through her mother’s Moravian ancestors. H.D. was intrigued by 18th-century Moravian mysticism especially Zinzendorf’s ecumenical plans to unite all true Christians.
Pause
One of the women playing cards is my sister and she knows I’ve written a poem that includes our grandparents and she asked me to include it in this piece.
SOFT HANDS
So that we could renovate
And rent out the top two floors
We cleaned out my studio
104 paintings were cataloged
And 84 went to storage
Hundreds of drawings shelved
The basement looks like Fort Knox
Books magazines letters post cards
Foreign landscapes archived
One 1973-74 Michigan license plate
Rusty ice skates a figure eight
A short-lived academic career
The chairman of the faculty
Rides a white horse
An equestrian replacement for flying
Pause
My mother’s parents never
Labored with their hands
It’s in the photograph
She has Tartar eyes
High cheekbones
Blonde curly hair
He is a few inches taller
With brown hair and brown eyes
Pause
Secrets migration Sisyphus
Bronze and silver candlesticks
Russia France England
Argentina Canada America
The Flamingo in Key West
Rests its neck and ignores the Hawk
A Turtle spits every time it gets fed
Pause
My mother was eight years old
When her father died
She never forgave him
Pause
Freud had soft hands
H.D had soft hands
Bryer had soft hands
Framed in my grandparents
Soft hands
The head conjugates
An afterthought
Pause
Looking at my paintings at Black Mountain College Fielding Dawson said, “There are always things under the surface of your paintings. Do you know what they are?” And years later in another studio Fielding said, ”You paint your Toons, your Gremlins.”
To paraphrase something that I have already written: I build houses for them their grief is mine. I feed their grief three times a day. I make love to everything that has been given to me and to everything that has been taken from me. I understand that if their grief starves I too will starve.
Part 2
Soutine sold sixty paintings to Barnes
Got into a cab on a Paris street
And told the driver
Drive me to Nice
Pause
Soutine’s terror encourages
Him to continue
To disobey authority
Soutine broke his thumb
Whilst painting
Oh Christ Oh Jew
Russia’s carcass hangs
On the back of your studio
You grieve for your mother
The village that never wanted you
You grieve for Modigliani
Pause
Did my grandparents
Tell the truth
Did Freud tell the truth
Did H.D. tell the truth
Did Bryer tell the truth
Framed in my grandparents
Soft hands
The head conjugates
An afterthought
Pause
My sister is married and has three children her husband never plays cards. We grew up with an uncle that played cards and he gave both of us the bug. The five players have been playing for hours it’s time to eat. They realize the food on the table has gotten cold. After some discussion a new plate of fish and chips is ordered from Foley’s on 33rd Street in Manhattan.
Pause
Fried fish was first brought to England by Portuguese and Spanish Jews in the 17th century. They prepared fried fish in a manner similar to Pescado frito,” which is coated in flour. Battered fish is first coated in flour then dipped into a batter consisting of flour mixed with liquid, usually water, sometimes beer, corn flour is added, and instead of beer, soda water is added.
Pause
In 1860, in London, an Ashkenazi Jewish family named Malin began frying chips in a downstairs room of their house to increase the family income. They were rug weavers. Chips were a novelty in London at that time. There was a fried fish shop near their house and their 13-year-old son Joseph probably didn’t give it much thought when he combined fried fish with the chips. But people in the neighborhood bought the combination he began to peddle on the street. He realized the potential and in a few years opened the very first fish and chips shop in the East End of London.
Pause
I remember eating fish and chips when I was a boy in England. In those days the fish and chips were rolled up in old newspaper and vinegar was applied from a very large bottle and I’d walk down the street eating hot fish and chips.
The last few times I’ve been back to England I can’t remember seeing anyone eating out of rolled up newspaper.
Today there is a fish and chip shop in Finchley Road outside of London that boasts their fish and chips are better than anything the Queen eats.
Fish and Chips being an English staple during World War 11 it was essential that morale be maintained. The Minister for Food, Lord Woolton, exempted fish and chips from rationing.
Pause
In April 1938, Freud his wife and his daughter Anna left Vienna for London England. Freud’s four sisters were unable to leave and they died in concentration camps. A year and a half later September 23, 1939 and thirty operations later Freud died in his home in Hampstead London. The house is now the Sigmund Freud museum. He had been diagnosed with cancer of the mouth in 1923. At that time he kept his illness a secret. Freud always had secrets. In times of trouble the chest is a being where we float our expectations.
Antiques, miniatures, books and drugs I wonder what were the questions he never asked himself or his patients?
Pause
Kings, Queens and Jacks
A royal rush is worn
Like a coat of many colors
The cards exact power
And interpret unfulfilled dreams
Pause
Male and female bodies
Have cavities
When we are in love
Are there exceptions?
Who anchors the imagination?
One tulip many tulips
She will give and he will take
What she will take
A tulip as diverse as a landscape?
Pause
The nation sports
A longing a hero’s
Tooth cracks its tongue
And eats fish and chips
Two women and three men are seated at a round table. On the table there is a Tulip in a glass of water and plates of Fish & Chips. No one has touched the food because they are playing Seven Card Stud and as for the tulip no one knows who brought it.
Pause
We know the origin of playing cards in Imperial China.[ They first appeared as early as 9th century Tang China (618–907 b.c.e). It is not known when playing cards arrived in Persia. Maybe the Silk Road, maybe they were brought by the Mongol conquerors in the 13th century. Playing Cards next appear in Egypt during the era of Mamluk control. From there they went into Europe through both the Italian and Iberian peninsulas.
Pause
By the second half of the 14th century in Europe there are woodcuts and watercolors of men and women, families, playing cards. And in the same period accomplished artists such as Konrad Witz were executing beautiful large cards depicting the courts of Kings and daily life that the nobility and the rich used as works of art.
Pause
A game of cards is less cerebral than chess and more thought demanding than dice. Cards, give me three, I raise you, and I raise you, and I raise you, I hold. I hold I don’t know what to do, I hold I have no cards. I raise, I know what you’ve got, I raise you to frighten you and I raise you again I have a Full House. Raise and hold the optimist and the pessimist, the vulnerable, the oppressed, the face card is a mirror a calculated risk that you can be a queen, a king, a wild card never being asked why or what you are doing when you cross into unknown territory.
Pause
Are games as important as religion? See Bosch, Garden of Earthly Delights 1503-1505. Pieter Bruegal the elder, Children’s Games 1560. Games and religion, ability and faith, control? See Georges de La Tour (1593-1652) See the misconception that playing cards is a game of chance. Is the hand as quick as the eye? Is Van Eyck’s eye always accurate? Does Grunewald internalize Christ’s pain?
Pause
Freud’s fear of anti-Semitism is never discussed but it is always present consistently gnawing at him. When Freud was treating the poet H.D. or any other patient did that fear ever influence or contradict his insights? Was he threatened by what patients told him? I wonder if Freud’s initial interest in psychoanalysis and the unconscious was driven by why is the Jew despised?
People are jealous of the sons of rich men. Jesus was a prophet and he wasn’t rich. After Jesus died he became a figure to be admired, worshiped and feared. Did Jesus demand something, something of people that wasn’t easily attainable? He demanded that people change.
The people heard Jesus and they were ashamed that they did not follow his teachings and they turned and had to find someone to blame. Jesus is a Jew and sometimes this is forgotten but what isn’t forgotten and what makes the Jews vulnerable is that Jews do not accept God’s son as a savior. That has repercussions.
If it fails begin again. There are no endings every ending is like a short story and a short story has no ending.
Pause
H.D. complains she never has enough money when the truth is she has a secret she is a millionaire.
H.D. had a living allowance from her parents when she went to England to live in 1911. Meanwhile her younger brother Melvin invested money for her and managed it, so a large fortune accumulated. She was worth about ten million dollars when she died in 1961.
Pause
H.D. was very tall and she never bought her clothes in a store she always had her dresses made by a dressmaker.
The dressmaker stands on a stool. She is a small woman and when H.D.is with her she thinks of her mother and her mother’s efficiency. H.D.’s mother Helen Eugenia Wolle Doolittle never had time to spend with H.D. or any of her children. Her mother ran a very demanding household for a very generous but demanding husband. When H.D. was born her father Charles Leander Doolittle was Professor of Astronomy at Leigh University later to become Professor of Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania. He would inform his wife at the last minute how many people he was bringing home for supper and she would be expected to shop and prepare all the meals with the cook.
The dressmaker lives alone and has no artistic interests. She was married and her husband left her for a man he fell in love with. She has never told her story to H.D. H.D. has been very cautious to say anything to her about her love for men and women.
In her free time the dressmaker raises a few flowers she thought about raising tulips but decided against it. Tulips remind her of her husband. He has presence, he has color and he stands tall and straight.
The dressmaker admires H.D. her height and vocabulary her access to people, her travels, H.D. embellishes her heart and her body with drama. The dressmaker loves standing on a stool next to H D. Then and only then does she feel that she is H.D.’s equal.
Pause
In a photograph taken of Freud’s desk there are antiquities and miniatures from ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt and India. Most of the antiques were acquired from dealers in Vienna. Freud’s passion for collecting books and miniatures was second only to his love of cigars.
Pause
The author Cervantes like Freud translated men and women’s fantasies, most intimate mishaps, and dreams. Freud liked cigars and drugs. Cervantes was a gamble and he is the first to mention Black Jack in his short stories. Black Jack is a card game. No one knows where it originated. Black Jack, players are dealt two cards, players must get as close to, or equal 21, without going over, the ace is considered either a one, or an eleven. Face cards are valued at 10.
A family can be two people a couple than a family can have more than three or four children, a family can have more that five children but Black Jack is 21 and Bach went over 21, he had 22 children.
Pause
The English painter Francis Bacon was addicted to gambling. He spent hours in the casinos’ of Monte Carlo playing the roulette wheel. He was to say, “You can’t understand the tremendous draw gambling has unless you’ve been in that kind of position where you terribly needed money and you manage to get it by gambling.” Bacon loved the sensation of loosing but he loved winning even more. More, sensation, the distortion becomes apparent, disparate things come together.
Pause
During the winter months when we are without flowers from our garden I buy Martha a White Rose from Bloom the florist. Bloom told me on the night of November 25, 2012 he parked his car. It was storming raining hard and the wind was ferocious. He stepped out of his car and had a sensation that he should run. As he ran a tree come down right where he would have been standing. He said the tree might not have killed him but certainly would have injured him. He was bewildered he wanted to know what told him to run? Nothing like this had ever happened to him before. He hadn’t heard voices but something told him to run. He shook his head in disbelief, what made him run?
Pause
Time out the players have decided to stop and pause. One of the women asks who brought the Tulip? A man with large hands and blue eyes says, me, it brings me luck.
Tulips were originally cultivated in the Ottoman Empire (present-day Turkey), and when Carolus Clusius (February 19, 1526 –April 4, 1609), a Flemishdoctor and pioneering botanist, perhaps the most influential of all 16th-century scientific horticulturists, wrote the first major book on tulips in 1592-1593 he planted his collection of tulip bulbs in Leiden and found they were able to tolerate the harsher conditions of the Low Countries. Shortly thereafter the tulip began to grow in popularity. They became so popular that his garden was raided and bulbs stolen on a regular basis.
This all took place in Holland’s Golden Age. Dutch merchants could yield profits of 400% from one voyage alone. The new merchant class showed off its success by setting up large estates surrounded by flower gardens, and the tulip, the sensational tulip, was given a place of honor.
By 1636 the tulip bulb became the fourth leading export product of the Netherlands, after gin, herrings and cheese. Tulip prices skyrocketed and because of speculation in tulip futures among people who never saw the bulbs fortunes were made and lost overnight.
Bulbs became so expensive that they were used as money until the market in them crashed.
Tulip Mania reached its peak during the winter of 1636–37, bulbs were reportedly changing hands ten times in a day. No deliveries were ever made to fulfill any of these contracts because in February 1637, tulip bulb contract prices collapsed abruptly and the trade of tulips ground to a halt. The collapse began in Haarlem. No buyers showed up at a routine bulb auction.
There may have been reasons that no buyers came to the auction. Haarlem was then at the height of an outbreak of bubonic plague. While the existence of the plague may have stopped the buyers from coming and speeded the inevitable, the bubble was going to burst.
Pause
Vermeer reminds us domesticity is the Wildest and if you leave home
And go into the streets
You will find Holland’s Golden Age
Silk satin and lace
The Night Watch defers to sunlight
To a God that is never challenged
Catholic Protestant and Jew
Rembrandt sleeps knowing he is envied
Master of fortitude he fingers
Between two thighs the pulse to conceive
The Dutch have more ships than
England France and Spain combined
Craft and canal urge on
Urge on a portrait a desire
For more Vermeer
Delft Haarlem and Amsterdam
She pours milk she reads a letter
The Queen opens her mouth
And eats the first herring
Red light Green light
Frans Hals’s introduces his patrons
To a light they have never seen
Light is a question not an answer
When sex ignites
Tulip Mania
Pause
She’s a winner she doesn’t always win but she is a winner and everyone at the table knows the man sitting next to her wants what she had, a grandmother and a grandfather who knew Sigmund Freud before he knew H.D.
Freud met her grandparents when he was a young man visiting London. Her grandfather spoke at a Zionist rally. Freud introduced himself and they immediately hit it off and her grandfather brought him home. Our grandmother was not educated but she was stunning with Tartar eyes and blonde curly hair and she enjoyed her husband’s friends. The two men corresponded for a while but when our grandparents moved to Argentina they lost contact with each other.
Pause
Freud had secrets he become an honorary member of the Vilna organization for the preservation of Yiddish. He was a Zionist. He loved his wife’s sister. But Freud didn’t keep his birthplace a secret from H.D. He told her he was born in Galicia in the Moravian town of Freiberg. Moravia was very important to H.D. she believed she had inherited a “psychic gift” through her mother’s Moravian ancestors. H.D. was intrigued by 18th-century Moravian mysticism especially Zinzendorf’s ecumenical plans to unite all true Christians.
Pause
One of the women playing cards is my sister and she knows I’ve written a poem that includes our grandparents and she asked me to include it in this piece.
SOFT HANDS
So that we could renovate
And rent out the top two floors
We cleaned out my studio
104 paintings were cataloged
And 84 went to storage
Hundreds of drawings shelved
The basement looks like Fort Knox
Books magazines letters post cards
Foreign landscapes archived
One 1973-74 Michigan license plate
Rusty ice skates a figure eight
A short-lived academic career
The chairman of the faculty
Rides a white horse
An equestrian replacement for flying
Pause
My mother’s parents never
Labored with their hands
It’s in the photograph
She has Tartar eyes
High cheekbones
Blonde curly hair
He is a few inches taller
With brown hair and brown eyes
Pause
Secrets migration Sisyphus
Bronze and silver candlesticks
Russia France England
Argentina Canada America
The Flamingo in Key West
Rests its neck and ignores the Hawk
A Turtle spits every time it gets fed
Pause
My mother was eight years old
When her father died
She never forgave him
Pause
Freud had soft hands
H.D had soft hands
Bryer had soft hands
Framed in my grandparents
Soft hands
The head conjugates
An afterthought
Pause
Looking at my paintings at Black Mountain College Fielding Dawson said, “There are always things under the surface of your paintings. Do you know what they are?” And years later in another studio Fielding said, ”You paint your Toons, your Gremlins.”
To paraphrase something that I have already written: I build houses for them their grief is mine. I feed their grief three times a day. I make love to everything that has been given to me and to everything that has been taken from me. I understand that if their grief starves I too will starve.
Part 2
Soutine sold sixty paintings to Barnes
Got into a cab on a Paris street
And told the driver
Drive me to Nice
Pause
Soutine’s terror encourages
Him to continue
To disobey authority
Soutine broke his thumb
Whilst painting
Oh Christ Oh Jew
Russia’s carcass hangs
On the back of your studio
You grieve for your mother
The village that never wanted you
You grieve for Modigliani
Pause
Did my grandparents
Tell the truth
Did Freud tell the truth
Did H.D. tell the truth
Did Bryer tell the truth
Framed in my grandparents
Soft hands
The head conjugates
An afterthought
Pause
My sister is married and has three children her husband never plays cards. We grew up with an uncle that played cards and he gave both of us the bug. The five players have been playing for hours it’s time to eat. They realize the food on the table has gotten cold. After some discussion a new plate of fish and chips is ordered from Foley’s on 33rd Street in Manhattan.
Pause
Fried fish was first brought to England by Portuguese and Spanish Jews in the 17th century. They prepared fried fish in a manner similar to Pescado frito,” which is coated in flour. Battered fish is first coated in flour then dipped into a batter consisting of flour mixed with liquid, usually water, sometimes beer, corn flour is added, and instead of beer, soda water is added.
Pause
In 1860, in London, an Ashkenazi Jewish family named Malin began frying chips in a downstairs room of their house to increase the family income. They were rug weavers. Chips were a novelty in London at that time. There was a fried fish shop near their house and their 13-year-old son Joseph probably didn’t give it much thought when he combined fried fish with the chips. But people in the neighborhood bought the combination he began to peddle on the street. He realized the potential and in a few years opened the very first fish and chips shop in the East End of London.
Pause
I remember eating fish and chips when I was a boy in England. In those days the fish and chips were rolled up in old newspaper and vinegar was applied from a very large bottle and I’d walk down the street eating hot fish and chips.
The last few times I’ve been back to England I can’t remember seeing anyone eating out of rolled up newspaper.
Today there is a fish and chip shop in Finchley Road outside of London that boasts their fish and chips are better than anything the Queen eats.
Fish and Chips being an English staple during World War 11 it was essential that morale be maintained. The Minister for Food, Lord Woolton, exempted fish and chips from rationing.
Pause
In April 1938, Freud his wife and his daughter Anna left Vienna for London England. Freud’s four sisters were unable to leave and they died in concentration camps. A year and a half later September 23, 1939 and thirty operations later Freud died in his home in Hampstead London. The house is now the Sigmund Freud museum. He had been diagnosed with cancer of the mouth in 1923. At that time he kept his illness a secret. Freud always had secrets. In times of trouble the chest is a being where we float our expectations.
Antiques, miniatures, books and drugs I wonder what were the questions he never asked himself or his patients?
Pause
Kings, Queens and Jacks
A royal rush is worn
Like a coat of many colors
The cards exact power
And interpret unfulfilled dreams
Pause
Male and female bodies
Have cavities
When we are in love
Are there exceptions?
Who anchors the imagination?
One tulip many tulips
She will give and he will take
What she will take
A tulip as diverse as a landscape?
Pause
The nation sports
A longing a hero’s
Tooth cracks its tongue
And eats fish and chips