Toujours gai: Or, What to do in Hard Times

Donald Robert Perry Marquis was born on this day, the 29th of July, in 1878.

In his long career he was at one time or another a newspaper columnist, a playwright, novelist, and a poet. Today he is mostly remembered as the creator of Archy and Mehitabel.

According to Wikipedia, Archy was a “cockroach (developed as a character during 1916) who had been a free-verse poet in a previous life, and who supposedly left poems on Marquis’s typewriter by jumping on the keys. Archy usually typed only lower-case letters, without punctuation, because he could not operate the shift key. His verses were a type of social satire, and were used by Marquis in his newspaper columns titled “archy and mehitabel”; mehitabel was an alley cat, occasional companion of archy and the subject of some of archy’s verses. The archy and mehitabel pieces were illustrated by cartoonist George Herriman, better known to posterity as the author of the newspaper comic Krazy Kat.”

Me, I especially love the connection to Herriman.

But, here I want to hold up one of Marquis’ poems. It comes to us in Archy’s voice, written in 1927.

These are hard times. I suspect rather than riding a handcart on our way to perdition we’re more likely on that garbage scow on that journey down the sound. I can smell it…

And.

There is a teaching for us all in this poem.

Of who we are. Of what we might be. And, most of all, how we can meet this moment.

Mehitabel’s story is ours, yours and mine. Mehitable dreams of past lives – but lives in this one. Her motto is “tojours gai,” which she translates roughly as “wotthehell.” Let me hold her up as a model of a possible western Tao, our own Western way.

Throwing heart wide and living full, “i once was an innocent kit/wotthehell wotthehell/with a ribbon my neck to fit/and bells tied onto it/o wotthehell wotthehell/but a maltese cat came by/with a come hither look in his eye/and a song that soared to the sky/and wotthehell wotthehell/and i followed adown the street/the pad of his rhythmical feet/o permit me again to repeat/wotthehell wotthehell.”

Now, I don’t find this calling us to some libertine life. There’s enormous power in all this life of ours, and constraint and respect are enormous parts of the deal.

That said, this little poem calls us to living full.

Full lives. No lights off in the closet.

Mehitabel frames the whole thing deliciously. “i know that i am bound/for a journey down the sound/in the midst of a refuse mound/but wotthehell wotthehell/oh i should worry and fret/death and i will coquette/there s a dance in the old dame yet/toujours gai toujours gai.”

On our way, I am suggesting, we need to bring it all together.

As we ride down the sound on that garbage barge, toward some unknown fate, the terrible and the beautiful are all brought together. Or can be. And as we bring mind and heart together, as we bring body and heart together, a dance does emerge, something beautiful to behold.

Toujours gai.
Toujours gai…