Recently I had lunch with Bob Sullivan at Mom’s, a pleasant little diner on the Forest Park side of Harlem Avenue, with a lovely view of the Mohr Cement yard. I always sit facing the windows. Bob has more important business to attend to. On this day it was reading from — and lending me — possibly his most treasured book, the lives and times of archy & mehitabelby Don Marquis, a long-ago and little-remembered columnist for the New York Sun back in the teens. The 19-teens. I only know of him because of Bob.
Marquis also wrote poetry and plays and penned lines like, “A fierce unrest seethes at the core of all existing things” and “My heart has followed all my days something I cannot name.” Both of these capture Bob Sullivan, truth-seeker and word lover, who refuses to go through life untormented.
But he’s been happier of late and is always a delight to be with. When he speaks, he chooses words as if they were important. Whatever is on his mind is what I want to talk about because it comes from him only at the end of internal wrestling and intentional deliberation.
Marquis, who is one of his heroes, wrote a popular column called the Sun Dial, and in 1916, that column took an interesting turn. His literary conceit involved a cockroach named Archy, a reincarnated free verse poet, who would leave messages for his “boss” each morning by spending a good portion of the previous night diving headfirst onto the keys (no easy task with manual typewriters). Because he could not operate the shift key, his poems used no capital letters (or punctuation).
His first message began:
expression is the need of my soul
i was once a vers libre bard
but i died and my soul went into the body of a cockroach
it has given me a new outlook upon life
i see things from the underside now
Mehitabel is an alley cat friend and frequent subject of his missives. As one would expect of a cockroach, Archy is anything but sentimental. Back in 1916, Marquis’ darkly comic voice connected with his readers. But he still connects with readers today, judging by the last entry in this book-length collection, demonstrating that he was way ahead of his time. Titled “what the ants are saying,” the final column concerns the ants’ prediction about the future of the Earth.
it won’t be long now it won’t be long
man is making deserts of the earth
it won’t be long now before man will have used it up
so that nothing but ants and centipedes and scorpions
can find a living on it …
what man calls civilization always results in deserts
man is never on the square
he uses up the fat and greenery of the earth
each generation wastes a little more of the future with greed and lust for riches …
America was once a paradise of timberland and stream
but it is dying because of the greed and money lust of a thousand little kings
who slashed the timber all to hell and would not be controlled
and changed the climate
and stole the rainfall from posterity
and it wont be long now it wont be long
till everything is desert from the alleghenies to the rockies …
men talk of money and industry
of hard times and recoveries
of finance and economics
but the ants wait and the scorpions wait
for while men talk they are making deserts all the time
getting the world ready for the conquering ant
drought and erosion and desert because men cannot learn
rainfall passing off in flood and freshet and carrying good soil with it
because there are no longer forests to withhold the water
in the billion meticulations of the roots
it wont be long now it wont be long
till earth is barren as the moon and sapless as a mumbled bone
dear boss i relay this information
without any fear that humanity will take warning and reform
Not bad forecasting. Written between the mid-teens and mid-’30s, Marquis was already talking about “changing the climate,” soil erosion from deforestation, and rainfall stolen from posterity. While the land from the Alleghenies to the Rockies is not yet desert, water shortages are a huge issue in the West, particularly in California and now up the West Coast.
And he’s onto the causes: “each generation wastes a little more of the future with greed and lust for riches … the money lust of a thousand little kings (think Trump and his ilk) … of hard times and recoveries, of finance and economics.” Sound familiar? We’re dealing with the same issues today — the rape of the planet in the unchecked pursuit of wealth and economic prosperity for the few.
His dark ending is hard to dispute. Will humanity heed the warnings and reform, or will the ants and cockroaches inherit the Earth? Asking tough questions is what it takes to look at life from “the underside.”
But there was another side to Marquis, who was more than doom and gloom, more than just unrest.
A fierce unrest seethes at the core of all existing things:
It was the eager wish to soar that gave the gods their wings.
The fierce unrest at our core, which makes expression the need of our souls and leads us all our days to follow with our heart something we cannot name, characterizes more than Don Marquis and Bob Sullivan.
It’s in all of us.
May those wings lift us above the self-destructive patterns of our past.