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"Night in Saint-Cloud"

From the time he was a child, Eduard Munch knew that he was suicidal.
 His mother died when he was five.  His sister when he was fourteen.
 Death floated above his early life like a dark angel.
 His father, a Norwegian Army doctor, feared for his life.
 
 Everyone was pleased when he took up painting, but not for long.
 The images of gloom and despair that came forth
 worried his father, who feared the worst.
 When Munch's father died in 1889, Eduard fell into black despair.
 
 He saw himself in a room in Paris.  It is evening but the lamp is dark.
 He is sitting by a window watching the sun set over the River Seine
 He forgot to remove his hat when he came in from the street.
 The only remedy he can think for a desperate life, is more life.

 The Two Pistols Overture

I'm looking at a salted paper print by Egbert Guy Fowx
 of the officers of the New York 7th Regiment during the Civil War.
 
 They are drinking beer and whiskey while eating from
 a wicker basket in front of a tavern somewhere in Virginia.
 
 A young Negro man is serving them.  They appear not
 to understand the incongruity of a black man acting as their slave.
 
 Raised by Brig. Gen. Michael Corcoran just 9 months earlier,
 most of these men escaped from the Irish Potato Famine.
 
 They appear glad of good food and clothes while
 a divided nation pays them to fight, something they'd do anyway.
 
 It's summer, the windows of the tavern are open.
 These 17 officers started the war leading 820 men.
 
 By the end, there'll only be 130 left, just two years later.
 How cocky and sure of themselves these officers look.
 
 When this picture was taken, they'd just fought one skirmish.
 They thought they'd all go home with money in their pockets.
 
 They pose gaily, even triumphantly. The war will be over by fall.
 "I'll have some tobacco for my pipe now," one is saying to the servant.
 
>
 first appeared in Wilderness House Literary Review

All in the Family
 
 
 Jesse James' last letter recently sold at auction
 for $105,300., plus buyer's premium.
 
 That's way more money than Jesse and his gang
 ever got from robbing banks and trains.
 
 The letter was signed "Tho Howard,"
 his last alias, one month before his murder.
 
 Ironically the letter shows Jesse was trying
 to get out of the bank robbing business.
 
 He wanted to return to a quiet life of farming
 with his wife (and first cousin) Zerelda.
 
 Jesse was killed by Bob Ford, a gang member
 on April 3, 1882 for the reward money.
 
 After that, his brother Frank turned himself in,
 but they never convicted him of anything.
 
 Soon after Jesse's death, his guns and gunbelt
 were auctioned off for fifteen dollars.
 
 He owned a Colt .45 Peacemaker and
 a .45 Smith and Wesson, both classy weapons.
 
 For years, Jesse's mother sold hundreds of guns
 claiming that they all belonged to Jesse.
 
 She bought them by the dozen and sold them
 for outrageous prices to Eastern slickers.
 
 The whole family had a streak of larceny in them,
 but there's more than one way to rob a bank.

Also Sprach Fred

On January 3, 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche, champion of the power of free will,
 ran out into a Turin street to embrace an Italian draft horse that was being beaten.
 He wept bitter tears for the fate of the poor animal, then fainted, leaving his mind behind.
 Months later, without ever recovering, he died, still in his own mind a Superman.
 
 On January 3, 1989, my brother-in-law posed as Fred Nietzsche on a trans-Atlantic flight.
 He explained to a pretty American girl, "I'm just a mixed up philosopher who needs love."
 When she took him home to meet her parents, he explained, "I'm a poor orphan in this world."
 For two weeks, they fed and loved him to excess.  He was philosophically satisfied.
 
 Then he called his mother to come pick him up, but he stressed the necessity of remaining
 an orphan. "There's no need to disillusion these nice people now," he explained.
 His mother had to wait a long time at the bus station. "Are you all right, my darling?"
 Fresh from a fortnight in the Hamptons, he responded, "I'm fine, mom. I feel like a superman."
 
 
 First appeared in Subtle Tea, then Strange Horizons, and in the UK,  Interlude Magazine.

The New World from Scratch
June, 1843 Concord, Massachusetts

Weather cool slightly overcast Bronson Alcott loaded a wagon with tools for the garden.
 Then he loaded his family -- Louisa May, the two younger girls and mother.
 The elder daughter, Anna, 11, walked. There was no room in the wagon.
 It was a long walk, 14 miles. European idealists financed the venture.
 
 Their destination was an old farmhouse in the country
 where they started a utopian farm community called Fruitland.
 Their goal was to live in harmony, off the fruit of the land.
 Bronson naturally made room for his bust of Socrates.
 
 Some rules guided the ideal farm, but only those essential to a moral life.
 Cotton and sugar were banned as the evil outcome of slave labor.
 Linen, made of the flax plant, would be their sole source of cloth.
 This rule worked fine on a slightly overcast day in June.
 
 No milk would be consumed. It rightfully belongs to the calf.
 No wool would be taken. It is the lawful property of the sheep.
 No oxen or cattle would be enslaved to the plow.  That's not humane.
 No fertilizer was allowed. It was the property of the animal that produced it.
 
 By December, the community disbanded.  They ran out of food.
 Besides, it was getting cold and the financiers had withdrawn to Europe.
 Some outsiders claimed that Bronson Alcott is a wooly-heade Fundamentalist.
 Things didn't work out as they planned, exactly, but no one objected to the rules.
 

© All Copyright, Gary Lehmann.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.