The Bee's Knees

Do you ever wonder, gentle reader, where in the blue blazes certain phrases come from? What in tarnation do we mean by these slangy turns of expression? Are they slangy? By George, I just don't know.

What I do know, as an official language appreciator -- and, therefore, professional non-doer -- it that using these types of phrases is the bee's knees.

The bee's knees!

Apparently, this harmless little nonsense phrase was thrown around a little during the late 18th century to denote "something of a small nature" or just plain old "smallness." The initial thinking behind this phrase derived from a literal bee and its literal knee and the pollen caught there. The tiny bits of pollen. Small amounts. Smallness. The bee's knees.

That little yelling match I had with the sandwich artist at Subway about the correct way to cut my sandwich bread was the bee's knees. It won't lead to any trouble. I'm a regular there. They know me. And if they didn't know me before, they certainly do now. Besides, I can watch to make sure nobody spits in my sandwich. Clear Plexiglas.

(Were there sandwich artists in the 18th century? A bee's knees issue.)

Fast forward to the Roaring '20s and we observe the flappers instituting their sense of cool upon this almost-forgotten kenning. Sans hyphen, of course. (No offense to Beowulf or his bard.) The bee's knees was thrown in with other nonsense phrases to simply mean cool. As in groovy or sweet or rad or boss.

As in cool. No antonym for warm, no verb for to decrease temperature. Just cool.

That monster truck Harley with the shark fins and the fireworks and the bacon. That thing is the bee's knees.

That sandwich artist reference above sounds illicitly bad, redundantly so, like a Daisy Buchanan screw-up, which, in its offending awfulness, is the bee's knees. The awfulness, not the deed.

The what?

The bee's knees.

Good Advice from a Bad Guy?

"You can say that things could have turned out differently. That they could have been some other way. But what does that mean? They are not some other way. They are this way. You're asking that I second say the world. Do you see?"

So says Anton Chigurh, the chilling, pseudo angel of death nihilist that haunts the pages of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. He says this right before killing the possibly most innocent character in the book, killing her for some logical reason completely disconnected from her. Killing her after conceding to the fairness of a coin toss, which she loses.

Killing her. But not before responding to her pleas of how things could have been different. Pleas which are meant to challenge Chigurh to alter his course, to reconsider, to deliberate. To choose a different path.

There is no other path. There is this path.

But you have the power to move elsewhere. To do something else.

No. This is how the world is. This is reality.

Nuh uh.

Yeah huh.



I want to side-step the metaphysics here. Messy, those. I want to instead focus attention on this unwavering view of the actual world as it actually exists. Who among us possesses the ability to take this view, this absolutist stance?

It would be ludicrous, gentle reader, to tackle the idea of defining reality in this tiny little blog. So let us consider the moral toughness, the grit that is required to look upon your life, to set down all the things that you wish were there, that you had expected to be there, that ought to be there, and see what actually is. What kind of discipline does that take? What kind of self-effacing humor? What kind of potential shame?

Chigurh is a psychopath. But the method to his madness allows me to examine my own fortitude, my level of stick-to-it-ness, under the most extreme literary microscope, and from a safe distance. I can put the book down at any time, and Chigurh isn't killing real people. But his commitment is real. To his Ideal. To Himself. To a true, unbiased, uncomplicated version of his World.

Good advice from a bad guy? I'll say yes. With the qualifier that I want to better apply such an absolutist view to the world. Sing walls says Beowulf to Grendel as he plows his head into the wall. Sing of the hardness of walls. The walls exist. And they are hard. And I want to be able to acknowledge both whether I am Beowulf or Grendel. Whether they help me or hurt me. Whether I want to or not.

Virtue exists in such moments.

Don't Criticize Aunt Emily

"She lived in an attic."

"Yeah, she was the whacky cat-lady."

"Didn't she wear all white all the time?"

"She never left her room."

"She was crazy."

Why, gentle reader? Why do we react this way? Why is this the all-the-time response to being presented with Emily Dickinson poetry? Is it merely because no one else lived the way she did? Or that we know so little about all the other poets? Is it something deeper, some humanly natural urge to cast down those things that are not like ourselves, feeling safer inside of our criticism? She's a weirdo, I am not; therefore, I feel good.

Why is Emily Dickinson reduced to her lowest common denominator?

We side-step her with incriminating notions about her craziness. Dickinson lived in her attic, she had a lot of cats, she never got out. Dickinson used a lot of hyphens, too many hyphens.

Too many hyphens??!! Since when did any of us care at all about the number of hyphens used by poets??? Come on, she must be kind of important, sort of regarded. After all, she is one of the seven revolving screen-savers on my Kindle. That must count for something.

Let us not devolve, gentle reader. Let us breathe in:

The Brain—is wider than the Sky—
For—put them side by side—
The one the other will contain
With ease—and You—beside—

The Brain is deeper than the sea—
For—hold them—Blue to Blue—
The one the other will absorb—
As Sponges—Buckets—do—

The Brain is just the weight of God—
For—Heft them—Pound for Pound—
And they will differ—if they do—
As Syllable from Sound—       

 

 

Do you smell the wisdom? Can you taste the nuance? Don't you sense the truth?

 

I don't get it either. (All right, maybe I do. At least, perhaps, better than the first-time reader) But "getting it" is not the endgame. We are asking the wrong question when we read a poem and say "So what's it about?"

 

Because poetry isn't "about" things; instead, let us consider poetry to be a way of things.

 

A way of seeing, a way of hearing, a way of knowing, of experiencing, of imagining.

 

Dickinson's assertion in the final stanza that the Brain and God "differ if they do as Syllable from Sound" implies very little difference at all. The difference between the raw, naturalness of sound and its definable segment, the syllable. It is the distance between a thing and itself again, before and just after being named, or categorized, or defined. By us. Our brains have infinite capacity, like God, to contain and absorb and also to define and label. We can allow for unrestrained rawness and in the same breath call it so.

 

But which is bigger, the Brain or God? Which is better?

 

I don't know either. Not according to this poem, and not for myself. (All right, maybe I do for myself, but to hint at it here would be to potentially influence your own reading, and that is not what non-doers do) But if I read this again. And maybe again.

 

And I start to get a sense of things.