At the end of Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” Jim finally tells Huck the dead man in the house they encountered earlier floating down the river was Huck’s father, and Huck, now aware and free of family, and now bored with his friend Tom Sawyer’s boyish ways, decides it’s time to cut out:
“…and so there ain’t nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I’d a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn’t a tackled it, and ain’t a-going to no more. But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.”
I’m with Huck, though it’s too late for me to pretend I can uncivilize myself, or maybe I was never civilized enough to begin with; in any case, I can at least decide I’ll write no more books. Eight is enough, and they are a big trouble, and troubling, and hard to take down. Civilization is a form of living that includes books, but one can live happily without being a reader or a writer.
I’ve never put much stock in ancestry. My mother said her maiden name, though spelled differently, came from Anne Boleyn, the beheaded queen. That would make for an interesting answer on a medical form to the question, how did your ancestor die? Today’s medical forms often ask for information related to questions of genetics, presumably to help with diagnosis, but what’s wrong is still often just a guess, but lots of afflictions do carry useful genetic information. At the same time, some consideration might be given to mutations and the idea that at the cellular level some form of intelligence or at least some form of communication between or among cells, in plants and animals, informs protective changes.
In the military, forms, identified by letters and numbers, such as the popular “DD Form 214” (DD for Department of Defense), carry orders, instructions, information. An Army is a form of military organization, and etymologically, the word army suggests to form, fit together, join, as one makes and makes use of tools.
In high school, we learned to fill out forms. A popular question on those forms was “Father’s Occupation.” This might have been a precursor to the genetic questions on today’s medical forms. It might also help explain my being predisposed against interest in ancestry – though I would respond differently to such forms and questions today than I did when in high school. High school is a form of education, but in time the content wears thin, grows obsolete, while the form calcifies one’s entire being.
Of history, Joyce in “Ulysses” has Stephen tell his principal, Mr. Deasy, it’s “a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” Many of us might say the same of high school – a nightmare from which we are still trying to awake. Stephen, in conversation with Deasy:
—History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
From the playfield the boys raised a shout. A whirring whistle: goal. What if that nightmare gave you a back kick?
—The ways of the Creator are not our ways, Mr Deasy said. All human history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God.
Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying:
—That is God.
Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee!
—What? Mr Deasy asked.
—A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders.
We’re still in episode two, “Nestor,” when Stephen makes the joke about a pier being “a disappointed bridge.” His students don’t seem to understand. Stephen is thinking of forms:
It must be a movement then, an actuality of the possible as possible. Aristotle’s phrase formed itself within the gabbled verses and floated out into the studious silence of the library of Saint Genevieve where he had read, sheltered from the sin of Paris, night by night. By his elbow a delicate Siamese conned a handbook of strategy. Fed and feeding brains about me: under glowlamps, impaled, with faintly beating feelers: and in my mind’s darkness a sloth of the underworld, reluctant, shy of brightness, shifting her dragon scaly folds. Thought is the thought of thought. Tranquil brightness. The soul is in a manner all that is: the soul is the form of forms. Tranquility sudden, vast, candescent: form of forms.
Cuneiform, Uniform, Reformatory.
We might find something a bit morbid in recalling the ancient forms. No, I’m not too interested in ancestry, but somewhat (so. me. so. what). But to call out some ghost you don’t really know, yet a relation, still: from referre ‘bring back’ – see relate: couple with.
—Pooh! Buck Mulligan said. We have grown out of Wilde and paradoxes. It’s quite simple. He proves by algebra that Hamlet’s grandson is Shakespeare’s grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father.
Joyce’s Buck Mulligan is in some form more interesting and certainly more fun than his Stephen Dedalus, even as Stephen is stand-in for Joyce himself. Stephen might be too given over to thinking about forms, while Buck more given to thinking about the form of suds atop his pint. Then again, Stephen is not Joyce, but an interesting form of.
I was still in high school when my father was buried in an under-road big pipe project cave-in. The forms used to shore the walls of the deep ditch gave way, and he was pinned under a dump of dirt and against the cement pipe. He was rescued with seven broken ribs and some skin abrasions, a form of occupational hazard.
The Coming of the Toads 