In Praise of August

By Roger Rosenblatt

It's the sound, don't you think? The low whir that could be a breeze on a hedge, until you realize that there is no breeze and that you live in a high-rise. So it must be a generator someplace, or an old fan with rubber blades. The sound Definitely. Maybe it's the light: the way it slants like a guillotine on a dark wall, or fills the moon so that it glows meekly like a pale bruise on the night. Of course. The light. Or is it the heat? Could be the heat too; dead-quiet heat, seems to arise from inside your head, which feels funny these days, wobbles a bit, like a loose chrysanthemum. Or the empty space: streets wide as runways, houses flat against the white sky. Where did everybody go? It's the space, don't you think?

It's the month. Weird August. Hallucinatory August. The month that the world escapes from. Not coming in like a lion. Not known for its showers. Not known for its flowers. Not busting out all over. Not. There is no August Song, and if there were one, it would be sung by Yma Sumac in an altitudinous register no one could hear but a dozing dog, who would cock not an ear, stir not a bone. Not. These are dog days, after all, in which the mind, suddenly deserted, goes nuts and nowhere.

Think that nothing of importance ever happened in August? That's how much you know. The first execution by electrocution was performed in August 1890. Judge Crater disappeared in August, plumb vanished from the middle of Manhattan. Britain's Great Train Robbery was pulled on Aug. 8, 1963, and Trotsky was murdered on Aug. 20, 1940. The month is famous for violent acts. In August 1914 Germany got World War I going by declaring war on everybody, and in August 1792 a Parisian mob stormed the Tuileries Palace. (That was before everybody started leaving Paris in August.) In August 1907 the first motorized taxicab made its appearance on the streets of New York; more violence still. The Kellogg-Briand Pact was signed on Aug. 27, 1928, without which there would be no world peace. Tony Bennett was born on Aug. 13, 1926, without which there would be no Tony Bennett.

Think that nothing is happening in August this summer? Hold onto your hat. For starters there is the Missouri State Fair, which opened in Sedalia expecting to attract 300,000 people, largely because of Jonny Rivers' Aquatic Mules. The act consists of a trio of mules that jump from a 30-ft. platform into a 6-ft. pool of water. "Believe it or not, it's a pretty good show," says Diane Larkin, the fair's publicity director.

At the state fair in Iowa, which is expected to draw as many as 600,000 people, an artist, Duffy Lyon, created a sculpture of Hansel, Gretel and their gingerbread house, entirely out of butter. This broke a long-standing tradition in Iowa. In past years the fair featured only one butter sculpture: a cow contained in a refrigerated case. Of course, a cow carved out of butter has a material integrity that Hansel and Gretel lack, but the new work is in flesh-tone colors. Lyon reports that the crowds "stand there with their mouths open. They've never seen colored butter before."

In Tennessee, August is the occasion of the Elvis International Tribute, a week in which 15,000 Presley fans convene to watch a competition among Elvis impersonators, to participate in an Elvis trivia contest and to pay homage. Crowds also flock to the Wild and Wacky Raft Race in Miami, the bathtub race in San Diego and the equally exciting Hermit Crab Races in Ocean City, N.J. In Illinois' state fair there is both a hog-calling and a husband-calling contest, in which a woman calls for her husband, who has been calling hogs. First prize was taken by Kathy Lingren of Beason, whose winning cry was "Kenneeeee, the sows are in heat, and I can't get the boar out of the mudhole."

August's local and national holidays include Lizzie Borden Liberation Day, celebrated in Sault Ste. Marie, Mich,; Big Band Sunday, in Cornwall, Pa.; Wausau's Funday and Possum Festival in Chipley, Fla.; National Smile Week in San Antonio; the International Zucchini Festival in Harrisville, N.H.; as well as the Army Nurses Pay Raise Anniversary and the birthday of Joseph Justus Scaliger, described by loyalists as "the founder of scientific chronology."

Not that this is a month of relentless gaiety. News events of August include the collapse of 330-lb. William ("the Refrigerator") Perry at the Chicago Bears football training camp; the Bears' defensive coach called the overstuffed Refrigerator, who has a four-year contract worth $1.3 million, "a wasted draft choice and a waste of money." Other news: road repairs in Duluth, Minn.; the annual reunion of the 450-member Robinson family in Cleveland; the opening of a shopping center in St. Louis, where a time capsule received contributions of old draft cards, snapshots of pet dogs, and a jar of Vaseline. Birds died from botulism in Oregon, and a 90-lb. baby boy was born to Radha, a rhinoceros living in Los Angeles, after a 515-day pregnancy (August has been good to Radha).

In the world of politics, Bob Heleringer, a mayoral candidate in Louisville, has been debating himself on an apple crate; a federal judge in Virginia may retire soon, or he may not; and George Bush paid a social call on the Reagans at the ranch.

If some of these activities sound a bit odd, it is not due to the peculiarities of Iowans, Missourians, Kentuckians, Floridians or Tennesseans. Not even the Californians, who are conducting a licorice-eating contest in Burbank, may be said to behave any odder in August than in January. It is the quality of the oddness that is different, the ghostly spirit that affects the mind in August, so that while one is actually entertained by watching three mules dive into a 6-ft. pool, still a part of the same mind retains its distance, goes off on a private reverie in which collapsing football players shaped like refrigerators, poisoned birds, butter cows and Judge Crater, too, disappear, and one is left with what is suddenly a happy mind, a relaxed and contemplative mind--best of all, an alone mind.

Even thinking has its seasons. In October the mind is snappy as a soldier, alert, quickstepping; it plans to storm the battlements. In February it concentrates upon itself, shrinks and grows depressed. In May it rouses itself, gets wild ideas and is suddenly persuaded that it is young again. In July it knows better, and starts to trouble itself with questions of who it really is, where it is really going, what really happened to that play it was going to write.

But in August the mind calms down, becomes receptive, even creative, enjoys the nothing that is there. If it takes a holiday, it is glad to worry about the kinds of problems that arise on holidays: compost heaps, car washes, the location of a fruit stand, fennel. If it stays home, it is glad for the silence, glad for the spiders walking like aerialists between the posts on the porch fence, glad to walk in the city on a Sunday evening, when the windows of the office buildings glow rose-gold in sheets, and the traffic lights wink where there is no traffic.

The mind takes things in; August is its haying season. It becomes an eager observer. It seeks balance, like an artist. It finds pleasure in orderly things: mystery books and baseball games. It pays attention to the children. It likes to talk with friends, unurgently. The mind actually begins to like itself in August. After it makes all the obligatory jokes about psychiatrists leaving town, it feels pretty good, almost sound.

Which may in a way explain the bathtub race and Lizzie Borden Liberation Day and all the other otherworldly activities that go to make up the month. Only a people truly comfortable with themselves would behave that foolishly. Somewhere meeting in the mind these days is a convention, not of Elvis fans, but of all the good and gentle moments, the dreamy conversations, the hushed confidences, the hours before months and seasons were named, and we had ourselves to ourselves. Good old porch. Good old spiders. It's the sound, don't you think? Or the light, or the heat, or the space. --By Roger Rosenblatt. Reported by Jack E. White/Chicago and Richard Woodbury/Los Angeles

With reporting by Reported by Jack E. White/Chicago, Richard Woodbury/Los Angeles