Tyger, tyger burning bright

It's sad to watch Tiger Woods making his car crash situation worse by his own refusal to make a statement to police. I suspect what happened is the only thing that really makes sense to me to explain why he is peeling away from home at 230 in the morning: a fight with the wife. Whatever happened, Woods' choice to be silent only fuels more and meaner rumors. He should have put this to rest with the truth from the start.

The title. from a Blake poem, reminds me of a passage in my recent novella, Baumholder 1961.

“Tiger, tiger, burning bright,” Sullivan would begin, his blonde hair short but long enough to comb, which really meant long enough to look uncombed because Sullivan always had the shaggy look of an absent-minded professor, and as he began the poem, his hand would sweep the hair from his forehead in a theatrical gesture, “in the forests of the night, what immortal hand or eye, could frame thy fearful symmetry?” Here Sullivan would look positively baffled by the question, as if it had cosmic significance. “What the hammer?” he asked next. “What the chain? In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil?” – and at this precise moment Sullivan would scrunch his ruddy face into an expression of speechless horror and bewilderment, as if the questions were too great for the contemplation of mere mortals, hanging in the air like painful reminders of human ignorance and insignificance – and after holding the moment for all it was worth, and perhaps making yet another theatrical sweep of his hand to brush hair from his forehead, Sullivan would shout with an exuberance that never failed to set the first-time listener aback, “What the fuck!? WHAT THE FUCK!?”

This is one of many moments in the story based on fact. An Army buddy did this very recital when he got drunk. It was spectacular.