Why Dunbar?

So today my lifting partner and good friend asked me where the name Dunbar came from. Well, sadly, there is no real story here. I guess I became aware of the name from the 19th century African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar.

According to Wikipedia, “Dunbar was born in Dayton, Ohio to parents who had escaped from slavery in Kentucky; his father was a veteran of the American Civil War … Dunbar's work is known for its colorful language and use of dialect, and a conversational tone, with a brilliant rhetorical structure.”  

Here, if you like poetry, is what some consider to be his most important poem:

ODE TO ETHIOPIA

O Mother Race! to thee I bring
This pledge of faith unwavering,
This tribute to thy glory.
I know the pangs which thou didst feel,
When Slavery crushed thee with its heel,
With thy dear blood all gory.

Sad days were those—ah, sad indeed!
But through the land the fruitful seed
of better times was growing.
The plant of freedom upward sprung,
And spred its leaves so fresh and young—
Its blossoms now are blowing.

On every hand in this fair land,
Proud Ethiope's swarthy children stand
Beside their fairer neighbour;
The forests flee before their stroke,
Their hammers ring their forges smoke,
They sit in honest labour.

They tread the fields where honour calls;
Their voices sound through senate halls
In majesty and power.
To right they cling; the hymns they sing
Up to the skies in beauty ring,
And bolder grow each hour.

Be proud, my race, in mind and soul;
Thy name is writ on Glory's scroll
In characters of fire.
High 'mid the clouds of Fame's bright sky
Thy banner's blazoned folds now fly,
And truth shall lift them higher.

Thou hast the right to noble pride,
Whose spotless robes were purified
By blood's severe baptism.
Upon thy brow the cross was laid,
And labour's painful sweat-beads made
A consecrating chrism.

No other race, or white or black,
When bound as thou wert, to the rack,
So seldom stooped to grieving;
No other race, when free again,
Forgot the past and proved them men
So noble in forgiving.

Go on and up! Our souls and eyes
Shall follow thy continuous rise;
Our ears shall list thy story
From bards who from thy root shall spring,
and proudly tune their lyres to sing
Of Ethiopia's glory.
 
So with all this said, let me tell you that I am not really referencing Paul Laurence Dunbar through the name, I am simply speculating on how the word Dunbar entered my psyche. I must have studied him in some literature class and remembered the name.

So upon further searching Wikipedia, I now know there is also something called Dunbar’s Number. Wikipedia reports:

Dunbar's number is a theoretical … limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person. Proponents assert that numbers larger than [Dunbar’s number] generally require more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group … Dunbar's number has been proposed to lie between 100 and 230, with a commonly used value of 150. Dunbar's number states the number of people one keeps social contact with, and it does not include the number of people known [in the past], a number which might be much higher and likely depends on long-term memory size.
 
I’m not so sure I can manage 230 people in a stable social relationship. In fact, I’m not sure I even know what a stable social relationship means. My wife will tell you that I can barely remember the way my immediate family is related to one another. On the other hand, she is remarkably good at relating how some tangential acquaintance is socially connected to us and where said person grew up, how many siblings they have, the major and minor joys and disappointments of said person’s life, and sometimes even detailed information about said person’s extended family. Amazing to me, but second nature to her. Even though much of what she can do is technically excluded from the system, maybe she should be called “Dunbar.” Her number is way above 230; my number is about 12 I think. But this too is not the answer to “Why Dunbar?”

The answer is that a few years ago I was a passenger in my wife’s car and, as I sometimes do, I was acting silly with the kids. Out of the blue I pronounced that they could no longer refer to me as Dad or by any other name. That from that point forward I would only recognize Dunbar as my name. When they asked why, I simply said, “Because I’m Dunbar.” So this is the origin. If you want to ask, and for those who have asked, the response remains the same, “Because I’m Dunbar.”

The story goes that when readers asked William Faulkner for further explanation of his works, he would tell them reread, that all the explanation is in the work. After all discussing art risks making the art banal: Discussing Dunbar risks making Dunbar banal.

Kenny Rogers redux

I know I’m risking driving away whoever might be reading “Day Two” of “random Dunbar,” but if you’re going to follow my blog, you are going to have to be patient with me.  Over the next several weeks I plan on blogging about random stuff and occasionally posting poems and stories that I have written in the recent past and in the not so recent past.  But one thing you readers should know is that I am what some call a completist (if that is even a word).  When I was in seventh grade, this teacher said to me that I should never start a book and not finish it.  He said that doing so would lead to a lifetime of bad habits and incomplete jobs.  I was a rather impressionable seventh grader and since have finished just about every book I’ve ever started (including Marcel Proust’s seven volume novel Remembrance of Things Past which is substantially different from J. K. Rowling’s seven volume story, but this is fodder for a later blog).  I tell this because now I am going to return to my discussion of Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler.” 

When I first decided to write about this song, I though I would only be writing about the chorus, but yesterday’s blog found me lured into the first two stanzas.  So let’s look at stanza three as a way to ease us back into the water and then hit that ever so perplexing chorus.

So I handed him my bottle and he drank down my last swallow.

Then he bummed a cigarette and asked me for a light.

And the night got deathly quiet, and his face lost all expression.

Said, "If you're gonna play the game, boy, ya gotta learn to play it right.

Here is that sacrifice we looked at yesterday.  The speaker freely offers payment for the advice.  It is his choice.  The gambler makes him pay not by simply finishing off the bottle, but by demanding additional payment.  Once the gambler is sure the story-teller wants the advice, the mood grow solemn, we lean in, and boom, we get no advice at all.  We get some cryptic message about playing it right.  Hey, I’m upset.  This is a coach telling the player to play better but not offering any instruction.  This is not what I, or the story-teller, want.  We want clear guidelines, a checklist to follow that will guarantee happiness, fulfillment, and success.  But like I asked you to do with my blog, I will be patient and see if there is more specific advice in the chorus.

You got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em,

Know when to walk away and know when to run.

You never count your money when you're sittin' at the table.

There'll be time enough for countin' when the dealin's done.

So there really is no concrete advice.  Frustrating?  Maybe.  Or maybe it’s wisdom and that old existential notion pushing through once again.  The gambler knows that no one life is like another other than that each of us will make a series of choices that will ultimately shape the outcomes of our lives.  When to hold on to our core beliefs, our shattered loves, our investment holding, and when to cash them in and move on is such a crucial individual decision that no one can make it for us.  All the gambler can say is figure out what works for you, but take it seriously and think about it.  Strive to learn what is valuable and hold on to it and to learn when your choices are so untenable that you need to cut your losses and move on.  He cannot, should not, and will not, try to teach this skill.  Like the existential Christian, the gambler values freedom and does not want a higher power to dictate rules, even though this vagueness is clearly more difficult. 

Learning when to walk away and when to run is more of the same idea.  Again, the gambler is not instructing us on when to do this, just emphasizing that we have to figure it out for ourselves.  In fact the only somewhat concrete advice he offers is about when to count the money.  He knows that life is not over at 10 or 20 or 30….  Life is over when you die.  At that time, someone, if he cares to, can look over your existence and examine what you've earned.  The danger is in sitting back and counting our accomplishments while we are still alive.  We are not only failing to focus on the game, we are also allowing pride into life.  And as every gambler (and every baseball player for that matter) knows, life is ultimately a humbling experience.

So here are the last two stanzas.

Now Ev'ry gambler knows that the secret to survivin'

Is knowin' what to throw away and knowing what to keep.

'Cause ev'ry hand's a winner and ev'ry hand's a loser,

And the best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep."

So when he'd finished speakin', he turned back towards the window,

Crushed out his cigarette and faded off to sleep.

And somewhere in the darkness the gambler, he broke even.

But in his final words I found an ace that I could keep.

The gambler reminds us that every wise person (gambler) knows that learning this skill is essential; knows that every life has potential for great success and horrible tragedy; knows that most likely we will have both; knows that in the end, the absolute best we can hope for is to die peacefully.  We cannot hope to take accomplishments and possessions to the grave.  We also, thankfully, leave our failures and moments of shame here when we leave.  No matter what, we break even.  We come into the world with nothing, and we leave with nothing.  We just hope to be at peace with this knowledge when our time comes.  And that’s the ace the story-teller found that he could keep. 

The song is full of clichés and perhaps a corny gospel-like group of back-ground singers at the end, but the lyrics are actually pretty relevant and rather existential.  Interesting that the song enjoyed such success.  Maybe we actually agree that others cannot make our choices for us.