New Year's Resolutions & Blue Devils

This was the first year in midlife that I did not make New Year’s resolutions to lose weight, drink less, or exercise more. Which is not to say that I couldn’t stand to reduce my avoirdupois, just say no to that second, O.K. third, glass of Fat Bastard Chardonnay, or take the dog for the mile loop through the neighborhood instead of to the yellowed patch of snow at the end of the driveway beneath the mailbox where all the neighborhood dogs lift their legs. But New Year’s Resolutions are easy to make, and even easier to break. Some time around the end of January or the beginning of February, the nagging bad habits reappear; they come back like grainy scum around the bathtub, like the Christmas cactus of dust above the chandelier, like the facial hairs that grow at the cleft of one’s chin, no matter how much nightly tweezing they are subjected to.

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, I therefore resolved to make resolutions I could keep. I decided to embrace my blue devils. I’m not talking about rooting for Duke University’s football team. Or bidding for back issues of Blue Devil comics on E-bay. I’m not talking about smoking pot or having an affair or consuming an entire Sachertorte, all of which is way too much work for this post-menopausal princess, whose idea of debauchery is taking a scalding hot bath and retreating to bed with E.H. Gombrich’s A Little History of the World…I’m talking about something more mysterious and possibly more dangerous: I’m talking about letting myself go.

Where would a woman go, syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman asked in her final column on January 1, 2010, if she gave herself permission to let herself go? Goodman explained that she planned to spend a lot of time hanging out, sans make-up, sans shoes, sans Blackberry, on her front porch in Maine. This lowly blogger, who stopped wearing high heels in the ‘90s, who has never owned a Blackberry or coastal Maine real estate, has humbler aspirations: to let herself go into cyberspace to learn the secrets of blue devils.

Here are seven salient facts about blue devils that you never knew you needed to know: (1) The marauding Celts and Germans, intent upon terrorizing their enemies, painted their bodies blue when making war upon the Romans, which may explain the origins of blue devils; (2) Blue devils may alternatively be connected to the ill effects of woad dyes, which, when mixed with the mordant of a drunken man’s urine, made their dyers bad-tempered; (3) Blue devils were all the rage in the Middle Ages, and popped up on stained glass windows of French cathedrals, as well as in the crowded canvases of Hieronymus Bosch, where they worked overtime to convince people it was not a good idea to engage in excessive amounts of fornicating, drinking, eating, and lounging around ; (4) Blue Devils enjoyed their run through the Enlightenment, appearing in illustrations by Isaac Cruikshank, jeering in groups of two or more around one sorry figure suffering from too much of the aforementioned bad behavior; (5) By the 19th century, the phrase had become a cliché, with Henry David Thoreau boasting that his solitary mornings at his cabin overlooking Walden Pond were filled not with “the blue devils” but with “the blue angels,” while one of Edith Wharton’s characters, the adulterous metropole Gus Trenor, claimed that “dining alone gave him the blue devils.” (6) In the twentieth-century, blue devils underwent a makeover worthy of the late Michael Jackson, deleting their surname and becoming synonymous with the haunting African-American music called, “The Blues." (7) Blue devils continued to morph from bad boy to hero-icon, becoming “Les Diables Bleus,” the nickname for the Alpine infantry unit of French soldiers who fought in the First World War, as well as other American military groups, such as the 88th Infantry Division, “The Fighting Blue Devils,” who served in both world wars. Athletic teams took up the blue devil mantra, with Duke University grabbing the moniker for its football team in 1920, and prompting other universities and secondary schools to play copycat, which, in turn, encouraged the mass marketing of blue devils to sell everything from wines to comic books to blockbuster movies. If you doubt the truth of this analysis, consider the recent enthusiasm for the cute skinny Blue People in Avatar.

But lest you think that embracing your blue devils is all fun and games, and not without its risks, consider the case of Carl Jung. In 1913, Jung was a world-renowned psychologist and lecturer, having realized at the age of 38 nearly all of his worldly ambitions. But he was like one of T.S. Eliot’s Hollow Men, having lost connection with some wild wolfish part of himself. While traveling on a Swiss train, Jung was overcome with a vision of the world being overrun with blood, which he would come to see as a metaphor for his own spiritual crisis as well as a kind of clairvoyant channeling of the First World War. The vision was so powerful that Jung could not let it go: after a busy day of seeing patients at the sanitarium Burghozli and lecturing at the University of Zurich, Jung sat down at his desk every evening from 6 until 7 p.m. struggling to fix, in watercolors and words, the bizarre creatures and shapes galloping around in his imagination.

An accomplished painter and calligrapher, Jung began to transcribe the words and images from a series of black notebooks into a large, over-sized red journal with thick parchment pages, which he called Liber Novus, or The New Book. He would spend the next fifteen years on this work, amassing some 1,000 pages, which stretched into two volumes, Liber Primus and Liber Secondus. With its calligraphic writing and colorful images, Jung’s evening pages are reminiscent of illuminated manuscripts from the Middle Ages. But the Red Book is no pastoral idyll of peasants and nobles engaged in the parallel play of planting and jousting. Crammed with monsters, dragons, and serpents, as well as figure eights and mandelas, Jung’s “method of active imagination” resembles some forbidden work of alchemy, for which its author might have been imprisoned or burned at the stake. The blue devils in Jung’s work, fish-like piranha creatures snarling in the waves, don’t much resemble the jokey satyrs in Bosch or Cruickshank; these devils are dead-serious, intent upon their ends as manufacturers of nerve gas; this is the underworld of Jung’s secret self, blue in tooth and claw, nothing but devil between the devil and his deep blue sea.

The images in Liber Novus were so bizarre that Jung decided not to let them see print, fearing that his critics would think him mad. For the next thirty years, Jung kept the Red Book locked away in his study. After his death in 1961, he willed the behemoth to his six children, who secured it in a safe deposit box in a Zurich bank. Forty-years after Jung’s death, thanks to the efforts of Jungian scholar, Sonu Shamdasani, the Society of Heirs of C.J. Jung finally agreed to release the Red Book to the public, and a facsimile, coffee table sized edition of The Red Book can now be had from W.W. Norton for $195.

Jung’s Red Book, pages of which are currently on display at The Rubin Museum in New York, is one of triumph, but for every Carl Jung, there are thousands of men and women whose journeys into their unconscious will lead straight to the locked ward of mental institution or federal penitentiary. I think of the inmates of Mattawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, in Beacon, New York, whom I taught years ago when I was a student at Bard College. These men had never heard of C.J. Jung, and they certainly didn’t look like him. (“Jung looks exactly like my grandfather,” said my friend, Christine, after studying the full-page black-and-white portrait in the museum’s catalogue of an unsmiling fiftyish burgher in three-piece suit, sporting gold waistcoat watch and pearl-studded tie pin.) My students at Mattewan were mostly black and covered in tattoos: serpents crawling down their arms and biting their wrist bones, Jesus or Satan spread-eagled upon their hairy chests; big-breasted mermaids diving from their shoulders. These were men who had committed horrific crimes, crimes so unspeakable that they could literally not be spoken of, and everywhere my co-teacher and I went, there were big-bellied guards with nightsticks to ensure that we weren’t subjected to any funny business, verbal or physical. (Several times during our earnest discussions of T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men, the guards had to remove one soft-spoken bald-headed man, who never said a word as he sat in a middle row and masturbated.)

There was one Hispanic fellow who kept a lined notebook filled with drawings and poems, the energy and detail of which were not unlike the effluvia that spilled forth from Jung’s hand. This man, and I’ll call him Carlos because I confess I have forgotten his name, was a born-again Christian who had gotten Jesus long after he’d done whatever he’d done to get into Mattawan. His face was covered in pimples and his hair was short and dark, slicked back from his forehead like a 50s-style greaser. He wore a gold-plated crucifix, which gleamed menacingly from his hairy chest. He was short and slight, the kind of guy who was picked on when he was in middle school. No doubt he also suffered from the unwonted attentions of child sex predators—a history that was pretty much standard issue for these men. Carlos was obsessed with the Book of Revelations, and he sat glaring in the back row, several desks between himself and his fellow inmates. His beliefs were never going to win him friends or influence people, and even my co-teacher and I sometimes ignored his raised hand, since he tended to dominate discussion and/or incite shouting matches with the other inmates. And yet, I have never forgotten the precision and passion of his drawings—a blue-penned, flowing-bearded Christ rising up in a haloed cloud like an a-bomb exploding over the New Mexico desert. How I wish I might have told him that his artwork reminded me of the Red Book.

Embracing the blue devils is clearly not an occupation for the faint-hearted, and yet as any artist, or artist manqué, can testify: it is something to which one feels driven. I was thinking about this recently while watching The Last of the Blue Devils at my local art house cinema. Now I should explain that I don’t know squat about Jazz. When my husband found out that I was going out alone on a weeknight to catch this documentary of Kansas-City musicians from the 1930s, his only comment was, “Since when have you been interested in Jazz?” And I really had no credible explanation, except to explain that ever since starting this blog, I am like a dog with its bone, compelled to masticate on anything connected to my blue theme.

The theater was full that night—it was a one-night-only showing, hosted by Tom Raney, our local Public Radio’s Jazz a la Mode host, and drawing the Pioneer Valley’s pasty-faced kooks and spooks, most of whom looked like they never went to bed before midnight. I felt like I’d turned up at the race track when I should have been at the dog track, and secretly imagined that my seatmates knew perfectly well that I couldn’t tell Cannonball Adderly from Hot Lips Page and were planning to throw me out and make me go next door to watch Coco Before Chanel, a very entertaining movie which I had already seen and wouldn’t mind catching again, but not tonight, because I really needed to get the skinny on blue devils.

The lights went down, and the movie started, and no one threw me out. And even though I was moderately bored, and didn’t burst into applause when Eddie Williams and Big Joe Turner appeared on screen, there was one scene that made me sit up a bit straighter in my seat, and that was of Count Basie, a huge bear of a man in his 70s sporting a captain’s cap, who needed help as he negotiated the icy steps of the club in Kansas City where the old Jazz greats were gathering, someone to carry his pearl-handled cane, someone to take him by his elbow, someone to call 911 if the good-natured ribbing (“Hey, Captain, where’s your ship?”) made his heart go fluty. But when he sat down and played the piano, the frailties dropped away, and he was like a man who gets the news that he’s cancer-free, or that his life sentence has been commuted, that he’s free to let himself go. And all I could think of was: Sweet Lord, give me some of that joy juice, because if anything will make me feel like I’ve dropped ten pounds, dropped ten years, this is it.”

“And now Jazz is exported to the world, “ mused Martin Luther King, Jr. to the Berlin Jazz Festival in 1965. “For in a particular struggle of the Negro in America, there is something akin to the universal struggle of modern man. Everybody has the Blues. Everybody longs for meaning. Everybody needs to clap hands and be happy.”

Clap hands and be happy. Another New Year’s resolution I could actually keep.

Acing the Blues

The funeral home sits so close to Rally Point that when my teammate and I were driving there from Massachusetts, her global positioning system cheerily announced, as we passed the sumptuous blue-and-white striped awnings, that we had arrived at our destination. This foot-faulting technological glitch made us laugh, soothing our nerves as we lugged our racquet bags and water coolers into the club, ready to play our first match at the United States Tennis Association’s New England District Adult League Championships in Greenville, Rhode Island.

Tennis in America began in Rhode Island—in nearby Newport, where the United States Lawn Tennis Association held the first Men’s Singles Championships on grass courts at the Newport Casino in 1881 (the event was not open to women but ladies’ competitions were held at the Philadelphia Cricket Club in 1886). The Newport and Philadelphia championships added doubles competitions and evolved into the current U.S. Open at the Billie Jean King Tennis Center in Flushing Meadow, New York, played on DecoTurf II courts that were painted blue in 2005, in order to make the matches more telegenic.

Tennis, which was first played in the Middle Ages by monks during religious ceremonies and taken up by the French royal family in the 16^th century, gets its name from the French nobility’s habit of shouting, “Tenez,” or “Heads Up,” before starting the game. In the late 19^th century, tennis had overtaken croquet at the sport of choice for the leisured rich on both sides of the Atlantic. Lawn tennis courts, which could be grafted onto smooth croquet courts, appeared on estates owned by European barons and American robber barons alike, as well as on the grounds of watering holes and spas throughout Europe. Edith Jones Wharton learned to play tennis on her family’s private court at Pen Craig, one of the immense ‘cottages’ on Newport Sound. In 1876, a 14-year-old Edith Jones, writing to her governess, Anna Bahlmann, described the newfangled sport as “difficult, tiresome, destructive to pretty dresses and to the complexion, but nevertheless delightful.”

Not that I was focused on the history of tennis as I was playing the number two singles spot for the Aces Wild Tennis Team on court six. But I was thinking, during a long, sweat-soaked rally--indoor tennis in Rhode Island in mid-August can be punishingly hot--which ended when I whipped a cross-court forehand to a remote corner near the baseline where my opponent’s coltish 33-year-old legs would not take her, that there is nothing like tennis to free the mind from morbid thoughts of depression, failure, and death.

I have been playing tennis for most of my life—my mother, in the summer months when she wasn’t in bed with her mysterious colds, teaching me to play on hot, lazy afternoons at the Pittsfield Country Club, a sprawling, many-porched 19^th century mansion that Edith Wharton herself could have belonged to. I had a wooden racquet in those days, and the courts we played on were red clay, which turned everything—the service and base lines as well as our white Treetorn tennis balls, white tennis shoes, and white ankle socks with fuzzy pom poms at the heels--a rusted, dried-blood-colored pink. I had a two-fisted backhand (still do, though it was more of a lethal weapon in those days) in the manner of my heroine Chrissie Evert, who was already making a name for herself as a junior, and who would win the U.S. Open Women’s Singles in 1975, when it was played on Har-Tru clay courts at the West Side Tennis Club at Forest Hills.

When my mother was well enough not to be indifferent to the fortunes of her daughters, she used to brag about how good I was. She saved all the trophies I had won in tennis tournaments throughout New England, and displayed them in the living room of our home on West Street. When she moved to Florida, she took them with her, proudly displaying them in the all condos and bungalows she inhabited. The story she liked best was the time I was in the finals of a 14-and-under tournament in New Haven--it was at the New Haven Lawn Club, founded in 1891, in the posh East Rock section of the city—and the club pro started watching me and told my mother I was good, that I could be really good, and that if she wanted to develop my game, she should send me to California to work with Pancho Segura, who had been number one in the world in 1952 and who was now coaching promising juniors, including legend-to-be Jimmy Connors.

“I taught her how to play myself,” my mother boasted to the pro, which wasn’t strictly true as I also played with my dad, particularly when I got good enough to beat my mom. In addition, I took several summers’ full of group and private lessons from Dudley Bell, who all the kids called Dud, and who had the good humor and patience of Segoo himself as he drilled me for hours in the split step.

“I know she’s good,” my mother went on, “But she’s only 14. I’m not taking her out of school and sending her to California. Anything could happen to her. She could be sold into ‘white slavery.’”

The pro wisely chose to ignore this bit of melodramatic foolishness and proposed that my mother accompany me to southern California.

“And let my husband fend for himself?” my mother said. “Not on your life.”

Chrissie Evert probably would have begged her mother to send her out west to play tennis—although it’s a moot point as Evert grew up in Florida and was coached from an early age by her tennis pro dad--but I didn’t argue with my mother. When you’re 14, you pretty much do what you’re told, especially if you’re a girl. Then, when the United States Lawn Tennis Association’s New England division rankings came out the next year (the organization dropped the snooty-sounding ‘lawn’ from its moniker a few years later), I had my first identifiable-as-such crisis of confidence. The number one player in the 14-and-under girls’ division was a big, muscular girl from Westerly, Rhode Island, and I had lost to her 6-0, 6-1 in another tournament several weeks after New Haven, barely even winning that one game. I had achieved the number five spot, which was hardly anything to cry about, but I knew very well that I was miles away from being number one. Maybe all the talk about Segura and California was just that—talk. Even if my mother had been willing to send me, I wasn’t sure I had what it took to be the best.

Then I did something only a crazy teenager could justify: I gave up tennis. I gave up the very thing that gave my emerging life passion and purpose. My reasons were as silly as a toddler’s: if I couldn’t get what I wanted, i.e., the number one spot in my age group, then I wouldn’t play. As the years passed and I found increasingly unwholesome activities to fill up the hours that tennis had occupied—taking up with a series of druggie boyfriends, who would have sold me into white slavery in a heartbeat if given the chance—I developed new reasons to spurn tennis. Tennis was a rich girl’s game, the mindless diversion of Republicans and Nixonites and corporate drones. Never mind that a smart, soft-spoken black man named Arthur Ashe, who learned to play tennis on segregated public courts in Richmond, Virginia, was busy winning majors and breaking the color line and speaking out against racism and apartheid.

I took up competitive tennis again when the Williams sisters started to dominate the women’s tour. I was moved by their story—how they grew up in the projects of Los Angeles and hit hundreds of balls every afternoon from an old shopping cart, how their parents heaped positive encouragement upon them, telling them, from an early age, that they were destined for greatness. There was really no connection between me, a middle-aged, overweight mom trying to adjust to a second marriage and working off her post-baby weight while playing in a local 4.0 USTA League in northern Vermont…and Venus and Serena, their dread-locks encased in white beads, screaming as they hit their 120-mile-an-hour serves, reaching the finals of the U.S. Open at 17 and 19, respectively. Then again, maybe Venus and Serena’s success--thanks to Venus’ efforts, women pros are now, for the first time in tennis history, making as much as men--made me believe that there was something about the game that whispered of hope and transformation, even to an old duffer like me, who wanted to drop twenty pounds and get a break from feeling like such a loser.

The Aces Wild Tennis Team did not ace the Districts in Rhode Island. In fact, we beat only one other team (and they were from western Massachusetts, and we had already trounced them three months ago so it hardly seemed like a real win). Most of the players on the other teams were younger, fitter, and steadier. Though many of us lost in nail-bitingly-close third-set tiebreakers—on Day two, I was taken out by a much younger woman in a match that went on for nearly three hours--it wasn’t enough to send us to the next level of competition—the Sectionals in South Hadley, Massachusetts. But as we headed home past the blue-and-white awnings of the Anderson-Winfield funeral home, stopping for ice cream at the Newport creamery just beyond the town green (not to be confused with the Blue Hills Crematory, whose services were being offered through the funeral home), we talked about how, next year, we were going to start practicing earlier, organize more scrimmages, maybe even do some clinics with the Amherst College assistant tennis coach.

Next year, we vowed, wiping the soft-serve, anti-oxidant-rich blueberry ice cream from our sweaty fingers and high-fiving one another, we were going to do it, advance to Sectionals, and, maybe, with a little luck and a lot of PMA (positive mental attitude), even to Nationals.