[stylist] Big Weepy Slob" - an Essay

[William L Houts]

Here's a little essay I wrote some time ago.  Just found it languishing 
in my hard drive's jumble.  Presented here for your delectation or scorn.


--Bill


---


I saw David Lynch's movie, "The Elephant Man", when I was in sixth 
grade, during its first theatrical release. Being a weepy sensitive 
liberal even then,

I was deeply affected by the film. I hated Joseph Merrick's sadistic 
exhibitor, played by the wonderful character actor Freddie Jones. I felt 
anguish as

Dr. Frederick Treves (Anthony Hopkins) wrestled with his conscience. Was 
the good doctor only exploiting the deformed man more gently than the 
freak show

boss had done? I cried when the evil side show people broke into 
Merrick's comfortable hospital apartments and spirited him away, back to 
the side show

misery from which he had been rescued. And of course I cried at the end, 
when Merrick dies, having laid his deformed heavy head down to sleep 
like an undeformed

child.

I was so moved that I wrote a passionately phrased poem the next day, in 
the journal I kept for Mr. Zeigler's sixth grade class. The poem wasn't 
very good,

but it was deeply felt by the author. It was full of phrases like "I am 
human! I am alive!" --echoing, of course, John Hurt's famous 
declaration: "I am

not an animal! I am a human being!" Although I don't remember his exact 
comments, I do remember their general timbre and the fact that they were 
written

in lucid green ink. Mr. Zeigler knew he had a live one, and he nurtured 
the sensitivity of that kid with gentle praise, and a wish that 
everybody could

be so free with such urgent calls for compassion.

Today, many years later, I'm still affected by movies like "The Elephant 
Man" and am in fact a big weepy slob, as the poet Howard Nemerov once 
described

himself. I am grateful to Mr. Zeigler for helping me to grow into one, 
when the world could so clearly use more of them, instead of fat racist 
blowhards

like Rush limbnaugh, self-serving propagandists like Bill O'Riley or 
evil harpies like Ann Colter. And I am proud to say that I was THAT kind 
of kid, the

little queer boy who railed mightily against the hardness of the world 
in a passionate loopy blue hand.

Today, after wars and wicked presidents, poverty and disease, after 
twenty years of watching lovers die and blindness descend like an iron 
curtain, I am

still a poet and a gleaner of noble things. You don't have to get hard, 
you don't have to despair. Remember that boy, that girl who wept and 
remember why.

Honor that weird little kid in you, the the weeper, that loopy kid, the 
poet.








-- 


"Oh, Sophie!  Whyfore have you eated all de cheeldren?"