Freedom to imagine

Time out. Society is facing a veritable plethora of serious problems. No question about it. It's important that we give them our serious attention. But maybe we could do ourselves (and perhaps even the world) a favor by not taking ourselves too seriously all of the time.

I've always thought that there's real value in occasionally loosening up and allowing ourselves to transcend the "real world" in order to gain a different perspective on things. At last my suspicions have been validated.

It's the weekend. Sit back, kick off your shoes, put your feet up and feel free to let go.

Who knows where an epiphany might be hiding? (GW).

Inspired by a Bunny Wabbit

By Billy Collins

Wall Street Journal

June 28, 2008

The freedom in cartoons to transcend the laws of basic physics, to hop around in time and space, and to skip from one dimension to another has long been a crucial aspect of imaginative poetry.

Bugs
There he leans:
cracking wise,
biting his bright orange carrot
bugging the world
speed demon
ventriloquist
and master of disguise
he is everywhere at once
buck-toothed
and spectacularly eared
he is armed with dynamite
he is the only one
who really knows what's up.

Whenever a writer is interviewed or subjected to a Q&A session after a reading, one of the questions that always comes up has to do with influence. If only we knew who made the author jealous enough to move him to emulation, a secret would be revealed and the mysteries of the creative process would be clarified. Such a curiosity is akin to wanting to trace the lineage of a foundling abandoned one snowy night on the steps of a convent. Locate the parents and discover the nature of the child. The question of literary influence itself is a tricky one. For one thing, it offers the author the opportunity to duck it by substituting for his actual influences certain names the dropping of which is designed to impress. Thus, an author may actually choose his parents by devising a more respectable list of forebears than the stuff that really formed his imagination or made him reach for a pen. A poet, for instance, might stroke his chin thoughtfully, look up at the ceiling, as if his influences resided there like putti, and say "Well, Yeats, of course. And Eliot. We mustn't leave out Eliot."

Another tendency that limits and skews the discussion is that writers almost invariably stay within their own genre when pressed to identify influential predecessors. Poets name poets. Novelists nod to other novelists. But the truth is that influence enters us from all sides. It is the chlorine in the flood of experience that spills continuously into the conscious mind. A short-story writer may have been influenced by 18th-century Dutch painting as much as anything else -- or by his mother's cooking. A painter may have been marked by her love of album covers or the childhood love of her cousin. And with that said, I am free to confess that my own poetry would have not developed in the direction it did, for better or worse, were it not for the spell that was cast over me as a boy by Warner Bros. cartoons. The very first time I heard the pulse-quickening blast of the zany theme music by Carl Stalling -- enough to bring any American boy to attention -- and saw the colorful bull's-eye emblazoned on the big screen, I was hooked.

Porky
Happy only
when he is gardening alone
far from conversation
and the terrible stammering
far from Petunia, nag and tease
just resting on a hoe
unembarrassed
as he contemplates
the blue background of his flat world --
a Zen pig.

I think what these animations offered me besides some very speedy, colorful entertainment was an alternative to the static reality around me that dutifully followed the laws of the physical world. The brothers Warner presented a flexible, malleable world that defied Newton, a world of such plasticity that anything imaginable was possible. Bugs Bunny could suddenly pull a lawn mower, or anything else that might come in handy, out of his pants pocket, and he wasn't even wearing pants. Flattened by a 500-pound anvil, Wile E. Coyote could snap back into shape in a heartbeat. A box containing a pair of Acme rocket-powered roller skates would arrive in the desert with no sign of a delivery service (though you suspected it would be called Ace Delivery).

Plus, characters could jump dimensions, leaping around in time and space, their sudden exits marked by a rifle-shot sound effect. Anticipating the tricks of metafiction, these creatures could hop right out of the world of the cartoon and into our world, often Hollywood itself to consort with caricatures of Eddie Cantor and Marilyn Monroe. Or Bugs would do the impossible by jumping out of the frame and landing on the drawing board of the cartoonist who was at work creating him. This freedom to transcend the laws of basic physics, to hop around in time and space, and to skip from one dimension to another has long been a crucial aspect of imaginative poetry. Robert Bly developed a poetics based on the notion of psychic "leaping," where the genius of a poem is measured by its ability to leap without warning from the conscious to the unconscious and back again. Bly's short poem "After Long Busyness" provides an example of leaping by association and captures the skittish motions of thought:

I start out for a walk at last after weeks at the desk.
Moon gone, plowing underfoot, no stars; not a trace of light!
Suppose a horse were galloping toward me in this open field?
Every day I did not spend in solitude was wasted.

As an early devotee of Looney Tunes cartoons, I was fascinated by the strange freedoms of these characters, especially their ability to shape-shift -- like Ovid on speed. Clearly, Bugs Bunny knows as much about leaping, not to mention whirling, zooming and, of course, hopping, as any of the great Spanish poets whom Bly credits with the knack of slipping through walls from one room of the psyche into another. Bugs can be in two places at once, which he is whenever Elmer Fudd points his shotgun down one of the two holes of the rabbit's underground residence. And just as Pirandello and other modern dramatists sought to break down the actor/audience barrier, so Looney Tunes allowed an animated character to talk directly to the movie house audience or to criticize the very hand of its animators, thereby betraying the text itself. In one cartoon which mixes animation with a live action sequence, Porky Pig barges into producer Leon Schlesinger's office demanding to be let out of his contract. Another cartoon opens quietly with the figure of Elmer Fudd in full hunting regalia tip-toeing left to right through the woods. Then, as if noticing a noisy late-comer to the theater or the sound of a shaken box of candy, Fudd stops, turns to face the audience, puts one of his four fingers to his lips and says in a seething whisper: "Shhhh! It's wabbit season." Ah, Elmer, you unlikely modernist! What were your creators reading? Was animator Chuck Jones curling up at night with a volume of French surrealist poetry?

Daffy
He tears across the landscape, blabbering
in lunatic flight
from those who would
pluck his jet feathers
wring the stem of his neck
twist his yellow beak
flatten him under steamrollers
his brain is a gumball and with it
he tears across the landscape, haywire
jabbering and amok
outdistancing clouds of dust.

Strange as it may seem, these cartoons also provided me with an education about things that were not part of the curriculum of a Catholic grammar school of the 1950s. The nuns at St. Joan of Arc in Queens were adroit at teaching me spelling, geography, and lots of catechism, but Looney Tunes cartoons (despite their frivolous name) introduced me to much that lay beyond the precincts of a fairly sheltered childhood. They gave me my first taste of worldliness itself.

As unsophisticated as any nine year old, I had never been to an opera when I saw Chuck Jones's Wagnerian parody in which Bugs sings Brünnhilde's role in a blonde wig stuffed under a helmet with horns. The first symphony orchestra I ever saw was a cartoon one with a fat man playing a tiny flute and a studious-looking dog with triangle duties -- plus, a conductor wielding a "baton" and wearing "tails." There I saw my first bassoon. Before I had ever been to a French restaurant, there on the movie screen was a canine waiter twirling his mustache and pouring wine for a poodle and his date at "Café de Paris." I was innocent of undertakers until I saw a large dog in a black suit measuring Daffy Duck for a coffin. I didn't know what "running away from home" meant until I saw Porky Pig walking toward the vanishing point with a stick over his shoulder, a polka dot kerchief tied to it containing the sum of his material possessions. I'm not sure I knew what Champagne was until I saw Pepé Le Pew popping a bottle while dressed in smoking jacket (huh?) and fancy slippers. A bullfight, badminton, a punch-clock, a barbershop complete with hot-towel cooker and razor strop -- all of these pieces of the adult world were delivered to me in Technicolor episodes six minutes long. This was the length that was set as a minimum for a "short" by movie theatre exhibitors and as a maximum by a frugal Leon Schlesinger. In the labor-intensive days before digital, one second of film involved 12 to 24 drawings. A good animator could produce just 15 seconds per week. In the end, it was the perfect-size package to deliver all this wacky news.

Elmer
The mailbox in front of the neat cottage
spells out the unfortunate name.
This morning the homebody
is singing in his sunny kitchen
dum-dee-dum, waiting
for the tea water to boil.
Later he will have his nap,
the enormous pink head
rolling on the pillow
dreaming again of the wabbit,
the private carrot patch.
Waiting by his bed
is the shotgun and the ridiculous hat
for he is the human.

The Mount Rushmore of Warner Bros. cartoons would be composed of the not-so-solemn faces of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and the token human, Elmer Fudd. As a young viewer, I had no doubts about the superiority of this gang to the characters of Disney. Disney cartoons were tame, conventional, Apollonian. Warner Bros.' were manic, unnerving, iconoclastic, spastic, Dionysian. The most telling difference was that the Disney characters had romantic partners, spouses, even families of a kind. There was something treacly about the scenes where Mickey and Minnie's smooches were accompanied by all those little red hearts floating in the air. Donald had his Daisy and somehow three nephews even though their parent, the duck's brother or sister, was never mentioned. The Disney characters were socialized, domesticated, bourgeois. Warner Bros. characters, with the exception of hen-pecked Porky and his Petunia, were mavericks -- unregenerate, anti-social. There is no Mrs. Fudd. And a Mrs. Daffy Duck? Inconceivable. Sex in the Warner toons was more likely to be transgressive and connected to deception, especially cross-dressing. Bugs is quick to put on a frock and kiss Elmer on the mouth but only for the purpose of fooling his perennial victim. Disney-romance led to marriage. Warner Brothers-romance was linked to guile and aimed at redress.

My taste for these cartoons would grow into adulthood obsession, which I shared with a few friends. One fellow addict was Todd McEwen, whose novel "Arithmetic" ends with a tour-de-force paean to these cartoons, his language keeping pace with the pictorial speed of animation. My pal Michael Shannon was not only a fan but a brilliant re-enactor of many famous Looney Tunes scenes. He and I would habitually visit the Museum of Cartoon Art, then housed in a castle-like building in Rye, N.Y., where we would ignore Popeye, Pogo, Archie, and other distractions to sit in an otherwise empty screening room and order from a menu of Warner Bros. classics. I remember several debates we had on the directorial merits of Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng, always arriving at the same conclusion: Freleng's work was energetic and zany, but Chuck Jones was blessed or cursed with a touch of divine madness.

Mr. Jones's illustrated autobiography, "Chuck Amuck," is peopled by a group of illustrators and idea-men like Tex Avery, Robert McKimson and Mike "Road Runner" Maltese, plus musical director Carl Stalling, sound-effects genius Treg Brown, and, of course, Mel Blanc who did nearly all the voices. Strange to think of these grown men, usually photographed in dark suits and ties, gathering in their own shack on the Warner Bros. lot to devise new ways for a rabbit to hoodwink a duck. But under the zaniness, Mr. Jones saw only human behavior. As he puts it: "Bugs Bunny is simply...trying to remain alive in a world of predators; Elmer Fudd considers himself a simple sportsman -- he hunts only for the "thwill" of it...Wile E. Coyote and Sylvester are simply trying to get something to eat." And what could be more human than the allegorical battle of cat and canary? Incidentally, one gem found in his book is that the actual camera crane used in the animation studios (up to 6,000 drawings had to be photographed per cartoon) was indeed an Acme product.

And speaking of the good people who supplied the hungry coyote -- dinner napkin hopefully tied around his neck -- with his anvils, TNT plungers, and helicopter-in-a-backpack, one sign of the unflagging interest in Looney Tunes is the recent publication of "The Acme Catalog." Now anyone can purchase a Rocket Sled, a Y-Shaped Branch, or -- my favorite -- Instant Tunnel Paint. In his introduction, the Vice-President of Customer Service claims that the business "is guided by a simple two-word philosophy: caveat emptor -- 'the customer is always right,' or something." And that is evidence enough to reassure me that the Looney Tunes flag still flies high -- the unmistakable bull's-eye and Porky Pig letting us know that that is, indeed, all, folks.

The four accompanying poems appeared in Billy Collins's first publication, "Pokerface," from 1977.