from the archives, a Doctor Who introduction

I have just finished watching, over the course of a week, the 2005 season of “Dr. Who.” I  didn’t do this voluntarily, of course. At least, not at first. I was cajoled, coerced and cornered into watching it. I was guilted into watching it. And by the time I sat down to watch the first episode I’d heard so much about it I’d stopped listening to what my daughter was saying. But it was when she said, “It’s just so sad because I don’t have anyone around me who will talk to me about Dr. Who!” that I caved. It was that appeal to help allay her existential sadness that put me over the edge.

The first episode is called “Rose.” Rose Tyler

Rose Tyler

is about twenty, given to wearing jeans, pink hoodies, Union flag tee shirts and substituting ‘f’s for ‘th’s. She lives with her mother in a council estate in a dodgy part of London and she sells clothes at a toney Harrods’ styled store near Trafalgar Square. At least she does for the first part of the first episode until she is accosted by mannequins who come to life and try to kill her.

Rescue comes in the form of a humanoid alien called The Doctor. He saves Rose, blows up the clothing store and tracks her down at her apartment to pick up the arm of the mannequin  he had broken off as they two of them were fleeing the advancing pack.

He tries to explain to Rose about the  war that’s going on, the intergalactic battle aimed at destroying the human race, but he knows she won’t believe him. He knows what humans are like: “You lot,” he says, “All you do is eat chips, go to bed and watch the telly while all the time underneath you there’s a war going on.”

  

Then he enters his blue Police Public Call Box, Rose hears some strange cranking kind of sound and the Call Box disappears. End of The Doctor. For the moment.

Because the human race really is under attack and the Nesting Consciousness located in the subterranean tunnel under the London Eye is set to activate the signal that will animate every plastic mannequin in Britain for all-out human destruction.

In a stunning act of diplomacy and bravery, The Doctor, aided by some gymnastics from Rose, defeats the Nesting Consciousness, deactivating the mannequins, saving Britain and the world.

Rose's mother, Jackie Tyler

Does this sound compelling to you? Credible?

Can you believe that Rose, leaving mother and boyfriend behind, decides to travel with The Doctor in his Police Public Call Box which is not really that at all, but a TARDIS time machine, bigger by far on the inside than on the outside?

Can you believe that Doctor Who is the longest-running science fiction series in the world and that next year it will celebrate its fiftieth anniversary? Can you believe how much I laughed during the thirteen episodes I watched? Can you believe I much I cried during the thirteen episodes I watched?

My daughter was right to cajol and coerce me into watching the show. And not just because it has a cult following to rival the Grateful Dead and a whole line of Doctor Who-related merchandise. (I gave Linnea a TARDIS cookie jar with special sound effects for Christmas.

It’s that this series, for all of its campy theme music, absurd special effects, stock war-of-the-world plotlines, is chiefly about two things: the love that human beings share with one another and our need to hope that disaster will be and can be averted. You might be able to say that same thing about Star Trek, but Doctor Who takes the time to develop relationships that themselves change and deepen . And because The Doctor periodically has to go through ‘regeneration’ (which is why eleven different actors have played The Doctor throughout the years), the theme and knowledge of impending loss is always a part of how we come to know and care about The Doctor. He won’t be ours just as he is forever

We pretty much know how every episode will end: The Doctor makes it better. But along the way there is a very real, very believable development of characters you come to truly care about because they remind you of the people in your own life, the people you love best, the people you’d want most to be protected.

the Beautiful Pauses and the Beautiful Changes

JEH McDonald, Autumn Leaves, Batchwana Woods, Algoma, 1919

Okay, that post title sounds like an episode from Doctor Who. Or do I just create opportunities to allude to Doctor Who? Worse, am I using Doctor Who to lure unsuspecting  readers into reading poetry?
Of course not.

So, I found a great book at a good house sale on Saturday. All those college/grad school poets under one cover: Hopkins and Frost, Auden and Eliot, cummings and Roethke. The modern poets. Well, they had been.

Here's a poem by May Sarton I wish I'd written. I found it last summer, hand-lettered and framed, at a bookstore in Gloucester, Massachusetts, too pricey for me to buy. But it moved me so much that I scoured around for her collected poems and sent it out as my 2011 Christmas letter. But since she'd written it during October, it makes good sense to read now. 

Good advice: Read it slowly. (And at least twice.) That's how we do.

The Beautiful Pauses

                        --May Sarton from A Private Mythology (1961-1966)

Angels, beautiful pauses in the whirlwind,

Be with us through the seasons of unease;

Within the clamorous traffic of the mind,

Through all these clouded and tumultuous days,

Remind us of your great, unclouded ways.

It is the wink of time, crude repetition,

That whirls us round and blurs our anxious vision,

But centered in its beam, your own nunc stans

Still pivots and sets free the sacred dance.

And suddenly we are there: the light turns red,

The cars are stopped in Heaven, motors idle,

While all around green amplitude is spread—

Those grassy slopes of dream—and whirling will

Rests on a deeper pulse, and we are still.

Only a golf course, but the sudden change

From light to light opens a further range;

Surprised by angels, we are free for once

To move and rest within the sacred dance.

Or suddenly we are there: in a hotel room,

The rumor of a city-hive below,

And the world falls away before this bloom,

This pause, high up, affecting us like snow.

Time’s tick is gone; softly we come and go,

Barefoot on carpets, all joyfully suspended,

And there, before the open morning’s ended,

The beautiful pause, the sudden lucky chance

Opens the way into the sacred dance.

I write this in October on a windless morning.

The leaves float down on air as clear as flame,

Their course a spiral, turning and returning;

They dance the slow pavane that gives its name

To a whole season, never quite the same.

Angels, who can surprise us with a lucky chance,

Be with us in this year; give us to dance

Time’s tick away, and in our whirling flight

Poetry center the long fall through light.

There's another "beautiful" poem I wish I'd written. It's by Richard Wilbur and it's called "The Beautiful Changes." I can't put it up here because of copyright restrictions. But you can Google it. It just might make you happy.