Frazier Again

The idea is that the figure in the show is primordial. Of any earlier time. I am interested in old stories that are repeated. It is, as if they lie in us and come out to play every hundred or thousand years or so.

He emits hope and joy in us, that someone can be that dumb and good and be alive. He is dumb and good. Only dumb is not stupid, but a combination of naive and kind.

The key thing he is, is gentle, because he does not go at anything. He simply waits. Everything comes to, or at him. The motion is always him being moved toward, by some force, usually one that is nasty and alien. And Frazier counters the force, neutralizes it and goes on to have a good life, until another force attaches itself to him. That is why it is a kind of dance that is going on and the producers simply stage it with shadow, light and careening car.

We have here another god figure, a superman, a barbie, a kermit, a goodie type who will lead us out of the wilderness. Some sort of Moses. He is a god. A god is but a good person, who personifies a larger value, goodness or justice or athletic ability. He is in most ways, a passive form. The metaphor is of the shepherd, tending the flock. Silent, vigilant, independent. The most impressive thing is his being independent. Now hear Henry Miller on page 92 of "Colossus of Maroussi," the incomparable one. The incomparable. He is in love with Greece and describes the shepherd.

"He moves leisurely in the amplitude of forgotten time." There in, is the key. He is a timeless figure in a timeless universe. An art piece, a painting or a poem, or as Mary Van Deusen has taught me, a tv show for god's sake, that is of great value, an art piece that is of great value with a timelessness to it. This is the case with a Charles Burchfield painting of a set of old houses in upstate New York. It is true of the best of George Seferi's poems. It is true of your more heavily contested NFL games, contests with enormous grunts and cruelties of three hundred pound gladiators given identity with Nike's swoosh symbol. World wide now, every fall Sunday from dawn to darkness, repeating the battles of the ancient times in Mesopotamia, Celtic and Visigoth time.

Oh, Frazier, you archetype, you quiet shepherd, standing on a lonely hillside tending the flock of innocent and rather stupid sheep, if the truth be known. Evil will find you. Civilization will attempt to corrupt you. The form of woman will come and hover over you and offer you comfort and some pains of pleasure and after will try to mold you and get you to raise kids in the suburbs. Imagine Most Eminent Mountie Benton Frazier going out for a happy meal at the fast food joint and then trucking over to Walmart's to pick up some decorations for Halloween and a pair of five and a half sneakers.

Oh, the injustice of life that we humans have to stoop so low, when we, too, are formed as part god and part human. Only most of us succcumb and go human. Frazier does not.

Here is a little Miller, a god form himself, albeit one with a foul vocabulary and mindset in his tropic of Cancer and Capricorn books, that came out of Paris in the thirties and were, alas,named pornography and banned, over the known religious world, including the U.S. Please to listen to our very own American, Henry the wordmagic Miller. On the subject of the everpresent shepherd and his curly charges.

"He is moving amidst the still bodies of the dead, their fingers clasped in the short grass. He stops to talk to them, to stroke their beards." He has been doing this a long time now. The shepherd, too, like Miller, is a trickster, like all genuine gods, in that he gives off some contradictory and confusing signals, just to have some fun with the hapless humans down there in the sleeping village. That village, where they're mostly asleep, most of the time.

Only the shepherd knows to do real time. The poet, the representative of those down there in their downy beds, lying on stomachs full of puffy white bread, from the local baker, just doesn't get it. The poet is their puny representative. He speaks the thoughts and confusions of village folk. He or she talks of past time. Speaks of old achievement. While the shepherd skates on the edge of eternity by living in a constant present. In his mode, the dead in the ground, live. As they do for Frazier when he converses with dad. Further he corrals nature as I will argue because he sees through the eyes of a wolf. Thus he uses tradition and nature to bind his vision together and tell a rather interesting and old story.

Miller has a charming and intensely direct way to say it. So we silly humans will not get confused. "The poet would say 'there was....they were.' But the shepherd says 'he lives, he is, he does....' The poet is always a thousand years too late-and blind to boot. The shepherd is eternal, an earth-bound spirit, a renunciator."

I don't really understand the renunciator role the shepherd has, but I do know that the best of our heroic types live in an everlasting present that repeats itself all the time in known history. Thus gets made the fairy story, the soap opera, the text for the commercial for Clairol and the Budweiser frog. The story is the same, it is endless. It rises from a sleepy hillside every day, as the sheep tinkle with the bells under their neck and they shake the night and begin to forage. Go near a hillside early in the day and you hear the bells around the sheep as they toll in another day in paradise, the earthly one. The one we occupy. Isn't it strange that religions promise us later what we now have if we will see it?

Well, Frazier is a living god, is all. That is what he is, and he is here to guide us to godhood. Only we just think it is a story and turn the thing off at night and worry if we need to eat another cracker or Dorito to pass a little moment before we turn the light off to go to sleep.

Miller again. "On these hillsides forever and ever there will be the shepherd with his flock; he will survive everything, including the tradition of all there was."

Quite simply we have among us the gods at all times to remind us of important things. But we don't see them. Not clearly at least, until we analyze and apply some strict reason to shows that are like the one called "Due South." In Miller's terms, we have forgotten the sight of the gods.

Frazier is a god. He is set up that way by the creators and producers of the story. What we like is his vulnerability. One can marvel at his uncanny ability to overcome all obstacle. He solves problems with equanimity and grace. He never loses it, although sometimes he is strained a bit. He is only human after all, isn't he? Well, not really, but you get the drift. He is a god with his feet on the ground. Has seen it all before and will see it again as long as he has life and sight. And then he will pass into the shadow world with his father and shoot guns that go pop but don't penetrate anything, as happens in an episode where dad urges son to fire the gun at his assassin, but it just does blanks. So much for dead dad's power.

Frazier is funny, ridiculous, naive and all sorts of things one says about a good person who just isn't with it. Yet he ends each show winning the lottery so to say, and we can rest certain he will be alright 'till next week when we will sit back again and watch him get hit by bullets and cars, get seduced by lovely maids and maidens and come out pure and whole once more. Gods have the capacity to bounce back.

We obviously need dreams to get by. Our daily lives are a litany of suffering. And release in song, or advertisement, or tv show is what we need. A crutch to get through the day until we may decide to be gods. It is in our power. Miller made it. He became a kind of spavined god, as did Larry Durrell, his talented sidekick. Both great writers. So often our hero-figures get to a special status. As does Paul Gross in his world of tv. Very few avoid the clutches of society, any society, and its inexorable pull.

Only the special have the capacity and the will to be above temptation. Frazier is clearly one. Hear Miller and now I go to clean picture windows from the outside on the eight foot ladder at my house in Dover.

And to Damoulas shopping supermarket and Bobby Briggs for the cow's milk at Shady Oaks. And maybe Bill Phillips, the farmer, will be out front to sell me some of the best tomatoes. The frost of the last two days may have killed things that grow for this season but maybe he has a few more tomatoes.

Any way on page 96, in the book, "Colossus of Maroussi," it is right there for all to know. "When you spot anything true and clear you are at Zero. Zero is Greek for PURE VISION." One can argue that Frazier is in that domain of the large donut. The mega circle, zero.

Further one can see in Miller's definition below, of the essential Greece that the little nation of rugged mainland and sacred isle is itself a symbol. It is possessed of "this unappeasable lust for BEAUTY, PASSION, LOVE."

The words are never anything but words, until we recognize them deeply and decide to take them literally as if they were real. Thinking about Frazier, these three words say a bit about the central issues he deals with weekly.