A friend sent me a link to a 1978 BBC documentary about a working-class hero in England. I had never heard of Fred Dibnah, practitioner of a trade I didn’t know was still extant: steeplejack. In the words of the OED: “a person who climbs steeples or tall chimneys to repair them.” My friend didn’t know that word. Dibnah tells the interviewer he started out as a ”joiner,” which I learned thanks to James Joyce and Ulysses: “Joseph the Joiner.” Neither word is used much in American English.
Watching
Dibnah at work triggered an ever-latent condition in me: acrophobia. I had to
look away from scenes that emphasized the heights at which Dibnah was so
casually working. The steeplejack comes off as smart, articulate and not
particularly impressed with himself. He reminded me of advice I received as a
young newspaper reporter: to get people talking ask them, in this order, about
1.) their family; 2.) their work.
The friend
who sent me the video link is an artist and doesn’t normally read much poetry,
though he once acquired a rather fancy edition of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” more for the book’s design than its text. I told him Dibnah’s
profession reminded me of Turner Cassity’s collection Steeplejacks in Babel (David R. Godine, 1973) There’s no poem with
that title, though one of his epigraphs is Genesis 11: 1-4. The word does show
up in “By the Waters of Lexington Avenue”:
“Their rivet
guns the noise of lily gilding,
Steeplejacks
top out the Chrysler Building,
Which is
height, and the idea height.
Tongue
unconfused and the begun complete,
“It will
evoke us still that pride which beckons
And the sky
it arrogates . . .”
I talked up
Cassity to my friend and he ordered a copy.
2 comments:
I didn't know you were a fellow acrophobe. I became one after riding a ladder down the side of a factory building while doing some touch-up painting under the eaves, working a summer job more than 40 years ago. You should have seen me hugging the hillside while climbing out of the Grand Canyon a few years back.
Stout-hearted Fred!
Lovely Lanky accent and turns of phrase.
"You're dicing with death with a rotten old top on the chimney."
The steamroller was a "death do us part" hobby.
"I used to be afraid of heights, but now I'm afraid of widths."-Steven Wright
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