Optimism in the Face of the Blizzard

 

Out courtyard looked like this today at 1:10PM . Notice the drifts over the benches!

 

The prompt for today's Daily Post was:  How do you fuel the fires of optimism?

 

 

 

I took this from my window at 8AM today.  It is now 3:47 PM, and much more snow has fallen.   The weather people predict two to three feet, and with the wind, the drifts are already that high. I am by nature an optimistic person, assuming good will of everyone to the point of foolishness and gullibility.  I have lived with some suspicious, negative women ( yes, even in the convent they dwell!) and they have made me even more determined to be optimistic. Right now we are having a crisis between the faculty and administration at my university which has spilled out in leaked emails to the national media, and some of my friends are sending me outraged emails and phone calls.  I think they’ve gone off the deep end in emotional reactions; I think everything will turn out alright in the end.  But as I look out the window at the blizzard provided by nature, I can’t help feeling inundated by the blizzard of rage and blame.  I’m only a bystander in this, but I feel the raging snowstorm. It’s hard for me to be my optimistic self this afternoon. So here’s a poem I wrote a long time ago, during the blizzard of 1979:   Blizzard   The deaf snow speaks in sign like a prophet. His fingers remark the landscape swiftly, stolidly. They say This time I am serious. He cups his thick hand on the birdsnest, he levels the driveways, leans on the trees, pulls the sky down to the earth – nebulae swirl by the second story windows. This time I am serious. This time you will hear me.
photo of our courtyard taken in our last blizzard, five years ago.  I think this one is worse.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reason to Believe

 

Today's Prompt from The Daily Post:   In Reason to Believe, Bruce Springsteen sings, “At the end of every hard-earned day / people find some reason to believe.” What’s your reason to believe?

 

Bruce Springsteen isn’t the only one to write a song with that title.
Tim Hardin wrote this one in about 1965:

Reason to Believe

                                             by  Tim Hardin

If I listen long enough to you
I’d find a way to believe that it’s all true
Knowing, that you lied, straight-faced
While I cried
But still I’d look to find a reason to believe
Someone like you makes it hard to live
Without, somebody else
Someone like you, makes it easy to give
Never think of myself
If I gave you time to change my mind
I’d find a way to leave the past behind
Knowing that you lied, straight-faced
While I cried

But still I’d look to find a reason to believe
(Instrumental)
If I listen long enough to you
I’d find a way to believe it’s all true
Knowing that you lied, straight-faced
While I cried
Still I’d look to find a reason to believe.

Rod Stewart recorded it, too, but the one I like best was recorded by Ian and Sylvia:

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dozauoU4Rbk

 

 

To answer the original question,  I have many reasons to believe.

Here’s one:  a Daylily named “Reason to Believe”   !

I believe that God is present and active in my life and in the world.

To me, the evidence in favor of this belief outweighs all the evidence to the contrary.

When Breath Becomes Air

 

 

 

A book by Paul Kalanithi -  He’s a very successful neurosurgeon and at 36 is diagnosed with terminal cancer.

 

Today I’m reading about this book in Brain Pickings Weekly – a wonderful blog by Maria Popova.  Each week she posts this compendium of really thought-provoking excerpts .

 

Today, this, commenting on Kalanithi’s book:

“Like the book itself, the anecdote speaks to something larger and far more powerful than the particular story — in this case, our cultural attitude toward what we consider the failings of our bodies: pain and, in the ultimate extreme, death. We try to dictate the terms on which these perceived failings may occur; to make them conform to wished-for realities; to subvert them by will and witless denial. All this we do because, at bottom, we deem them impermissible — in ourselves and in each other. “

And  this:

 

“Punctuating Kalanithi’s story are vignettes of those small yet enormous moments in which destinies pivot and the elaborate universe of priorities we’ve spent a lifetime constructing combusts into stardust. In those moments, there is a violent slamming shut of chapters we had naïvely thought would go on and on, leading to Happily Ever After and yet somehow not really ending there, for the endings we imagine for ourselves aren’t really endings. An ending is devastating and unsatisfying in its finitude, and the endings we imagine for ourselves are permanent states of ongoing, infinite satisfaction. “

That image – the violent slamming shut of chapters we had naively thought would go on and on –

That made me think of chapters in my life that shut but didn’t slam, but that shut nonetheless.

Simple doors that shut:  I have closed the door on riding a bicycle, on swimming, on eating nuts and fresh fruit.  To quote Elizabeth Bishop, I’ll miss these things, but it isn’t a disaster.  But it is a closing out of physical activities I took for granted.

 

 

I focus on the things I still can do:  bake and garden and watch birds and read and teach and walk and sing and drive a car… so many things. So many doors still open to me.

Three Wrenching Deaths

Probably I’m not answering this prompt in the way it was intended, but I can’ help myself.
In the space of a week, three people MY AGE, who were excellent artists and beloved, have died.
First, the musician: Davie Bowie,  age 69

Then, the American poet, C.D.Wright, aged 67

Then, the marvelous actor, Alan Rickman, age 69.
Never met any of them, but I feel a personal loss in their deaths.

If I Could Go Back

The photo is of myself in 1971, one year out of college and freewheeling around Baltimore.
Today’s Daily Prompt:
If you could return to the past to relive a part of your life, either to experience the wonderful bits again, or to do something over, which part of your life would you return to?


I’d return to those first six years of my twenties: the first two in college, the next three or four out on my own. Why? Because I loved those last two years of college, and because I wasted those following four. I spent them like a handful of change. So much I could have done during those years that I wish I could return to and do.
I thought I had all the time in the world. I wasted my time in a job I hated, and not writing, and not travelling as much as I could have, and not going back to school soon enough, and not placing myself where I could have met many other people , one of whom I might have loved and married. But of course this is all wasted energy. If I had spent those years in any other way than the way I did, I wouldn’t have the life I have now, which is a life I love.
I think it was the poet Shelley who said

“We look before and after, and pine for what is not…”

I have always loved a Tom Paxton song called “One Time Only”, especially the first stanza:

I spent my hungry young years running wild;
There was so much for me to do.
And I spent cities like a handful of change,
But I never quit looking for you.

And then there’s this Christine Lavin song:
“The Kind Of Love You Never Recover From”
I know a couple; she sits in a rocking chair
Working puzzles; he watches TV upstairs.
She’s got a secret she has never let out;
A man she thinks he never knew about.
She hasn’t seen him in thirty years.
The mention of his name doesn’t bring on tears.
If you ask her, “Are there any regrets?”

It was the kind of love you never recover from.
Even though she found another one
To take his place, She never will escape the truth.
At times like this when the moon is right,
When the air is foggy like it is tonight,
She’ll think about what might have been
If she had just held on to him.

( the next stanzas go on in the same vein, about other people)

I know a man who has done it all; He has sailed the oceans; climbed the mountains of Nepal. He lives high upon the avenue With a beautiful wife, lovely children, too. But there’s a woman he still dreams about; Certain things he has learned to live without. If you ask him, “Are there any regrets?” He’ll tell you, “No,” but he never forgets. It was the kind of love you never recover from. Even though he found another one To take her place, He never will escape the truth. At times like this when the moon is right, When the air is foggy like it is tonight,He’ll think about what might have been If he had not let her slip away from him.
I read about a woman who said she never regretted anything she’d ever done. Such arrogant words always seem to be spoken by those who then die young. So here am I looking at you. Oh, tell me, what are we gonna do? Am I destined to be your regret? Are you that one I’ll never forget? Years from now, will we curse the day You let me let you walk away? Isn’t this too dear a price to pay For the freedom of going separate ways? This is the kind of love you never recover from. Don’t tell me that I’m gonna find another one To take your place, I never will escape the truth.
For the freedom of going separate ways? This is the kind of love you never recover from. Don’t tell me that I’m gonna find another one To take your place, I never will escape the truth. At times like this when the moon is right, When the air is foggy like it is tonight, I’ll think how sweet life could be If you would stay with me, oh stay with me. This is the kind of love you never recover from. Don’t tell me that I’m gonna find another one To take your place, And try to face the truth. Let me hold you close tonight. The fog has lifted, the moon is so bright. Think how sweet life could be If you would stay with me, oh, stay with me. This is the kind of love you never recover from.

All of this is the stuff of song and the poetry of regret and yearning.

This next crazy poem, by Carl Dennis in his collection Practical Gods
imagines God regretting that the speaker’s life didn’t turn out better. In the end, the speaker concedes that God doesn’t work that way, and that he shouldn’t, either:

The God Who Loves You
 
It must be troubling for the god who loves you
To ponder how much happier you’d be today
Had you been able to glimpse your many futures.
It must be painful for him to watch you on Friday evenings
Driving home from the office, content with your week–
Three fine houses sold to deserving families–
Knowing as he does exactly what would have happened
Had you gone to your second choice for college,
Knowing the roommate you’d have been allotted
Whose ardent opinions on painting and music
Would have kindled in you a lifelong passion.
A life thirty points above the life you’re living
On any scale of satisfaction. And every point
A thorn in the side of the god who loves you.
You don’t want that, a large-souled man like you
Who tries to withhold from your wife the day’s disappointments
So she can save her empathy for the children.


With the woman you were destined to meet on the other campus?
It hurts you to think of him ranking the conversation
You’d have enjoyed over there higher in insight
Than the conversation you’re used to.
And think how this loving god would feel
Knowing that the man next in line for your wife
Would have pleased her more than you ever will
Even on your best days, when you really try.
Can you sleep at night believing a god like that
Is pacing his cloudy bedroom, harassed by alternatives
You’re spared by ignorance? The difference between what is
And what could have been will remain alive for him
Even after you cease existing, after you catch a chill
Running out in the snow for the morning paper,
Losing eleven years that the god who loves you
Will feel compelled to imagine scene by scene
Unless you come to the rescue by imagining him
No wiser than you are, no god at all, only a friend
No closer than the actual friend you made at college,
The one you haven’t written in months. Sit down tonight
And write him about the life you can talk about
With a claim to authority, the life you’ve witnessed,
Which for all you know is the life you’ve chosen.

 by Carl Dennis  

Hearing "Yesterday"

Paul McCartney

The Daily Post's prompt for today:

Who did you idolize as a teenager? Did you go crazy for the Beatles? Ga-ga over Duran Duran? In love with Justin Bieber? Did you think Elvis was the livin’ end?


While the world is grieving over the death of David Bowie, I express my sorrow at his loss, but my teenage years were filled with the Beatles and their music.

I loved them all, and loved all their music, but my favorite was Paul McCartney. And my favorite composition of his was “Yesterday.”

Several years ago I wrote this poem about hearing “Yesterday” for the first time:

Hearing Yesterday

Hearing “Yesterday” the first time – 1964-
my bedroom in the house on Everhart Street,
I was fifteen.
February night.
At night my radio could tune into Boston.
When I turned it on, the song was just beginning –
Three syllables down the scale,
cello droning behind them.
Throat tightened, legs loosened.
My favorite song forever.

Forty-five years later,
troubles not so far away .
One long lost love called in 1971
better to laugh in the desert
than cry by the creek,
but I could not move to the desert.

Today I live by that creek again –
cornered by circumstance,
shedding my escape fantasies,
singing with Ringo
No no no no I don’t smoke it no more…

By the creek,
today tenuous as a spider web,
unpredictable as fire.

I believe in yesterday,
which does not change,
where John Lennon still walks
unaware
out the door of the Dakota.

Another song says don’t stop thinking about tomorrow.
But I believe in yesterday.
Another song says the landslide brought me down…
and I’m getting older, too,
so I believe in yesterday.
 

Where They Found Amusement

Scots soldier , reading in the trenches, World War 1

Another installment on Modernity, or on what came before Modernity.

A note on my diminished eyesight: 13 years ago I lost the central vision in my left eye as a result of a Macular Hole (look that one up on Google). I was already very nearsighted and wearing trifocals. My right eye is fine, and I can drive the car and read the computer without any problem; however, I have trouble with double vision when I’m reading a book. That’s why I confine my book reading to “school stuff” and listen to police procedurals and murder mysteries on my iPod.
Sooo…

I’m still reading The Great War and Modern Memory. It’s very dense and British, and the pages are yellowed (a 1975 paperback from Amazon) and the print is small.

I have to read it with my glasses off, the book lying on top of the closed laptop, and directly under the desk lamp, and moving the bookmark down the text.

One chapter is called “Oh what a literary war.”   I was so struck by Fussell’s observation that the soldiers of all levels of education and social status knew and quoted poetry.

 

He also said

“In 1914 there was virtually no cinema; there was no radio at all; and there was certainly no television. Except for sex and drinking, amusement was largely found in language formally arranged, either in books and periodicals or at the theater and music hall, or in one’s own or one’s friends’ anecdotes, rumors. Or clever structuring of words. It is hard for us to recover imaginatively such a world, but we must imagine it if we are to understand the way “literature” dominated the war from beginning to end…”

St. Giles Fair - Oxford

 

 

And yet… I remember myself and my friends away in college in 1966, and that paragraph could still be applied to us, just fifty years ago. Our college was out in the country, most of us had no car, and though we did have radios, stereos, and one television in the "smoker" at the end of the hall, we entertained ourselves with conversation and "the clever structuring of words."

 

Fussell did not think much of American literary culture in 1914, and says that ordinary Americans of that time didn't value "self-improvement by reading" the way the ordinary Brit did.

Also, Fussell wrote his book about World War 1 in 1975; what would he say about our world in 2016?

 

The Weightless Air

The spider Arabella,1973


Yesterday I came across this article on the Smithsonian website:

Arabella and Anita had the right stuff–namely, silk for spinning webs. These two ordinary spiders were NASA’s first eight-legged astronauts! Anita and Arabella got their mission because a high-school student named Judy Miles wondered if spiders could spin webs in a weightless environment. She suggested sending spiders into space to find out. NASA space scientists liked her proposal and went to work designing special cages, lights, and cameras.
In 1973, Arabella and Anita blasted off into space for the Skylab 3 mission. On her first day in orbit, Arabella didn’t do well. She spun sloppy webs and obviously felt the effects of weightlessness. However, by her third day in space, she was spinning just as though she were back at home. Her webs were finer in space, which was expected. But the pattern remained the same. She proved that spiders can spin earthly webs in space.
Though Arabella and Anita have both died, their bodies remain at the Smithsonian, memorialized for their small, vital part in increasing our knowledge of space.

The source of this story is the book Odd Tales from the Smithsonian (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1986), written by Peggy Thomson and Edwards Park.


Years before I read this article, I had a conversation with Josephine Jacobsen, a great poet and my mentor, in which she talked about the spider in space.   She wrote this poem about it. It was called “Arachne, Astonished:”


In our porch rafters spiders spin
ig webs that reach and tremble,
often with flies and sometimes moths hung in
the crosshatch of their dewy cables.

I cannot guarantee that friends will not die
or children put into practice what each learns;
but I thought that webs were a community
of architecture as unreconstructed as the fern’s.

Space’s amazed spider in her cage
is weightless. Fairly, one might expect her
to sulk in a daze, paw the air in arachnean rage
that good gravity monstrously should reject her.

Well, there are situations which ape
that of weightlessness; without guide-
lines,demand that thread from the guts take formal shape
while the cruelly uninflected voice says, “Improvise!”

O weightless, astonished Arachne, such
original alterations, situational spinning
of constructions! You frighten me very much.
Am I to understand, then, there is no end, none, to beginning?

But Josephine thought the spider died in space, and according to this Smithsonian article, it didn’t.
Josephine died in 2003.  I wrote this poem about here shortly after her death.  When you read it, you’ll see why I put it here:

One word singing
 
Poetry is one word singing one word singing
In the middle of the night.
Poetry sings what no one cries.
Poetry slips in between the covers of the facts. 

Josephine told me
The astronauts did
Take a spider with them.
She died there
In the spaceship.
Her net wouldn’t hold
In the weightless air.
 
Josephine told me
From her hospital bed
When she could not read or walk.
 
But she still sang poems
In the middle of the night.
Sang between the covers
Of her body
Retreating
To the weightless air.

spider web: painting by Cyrille Jubert

A Satire of Circumstances

toward the semester

In two weeks I’ll be back at school.

Right now I am nursing a nasty round of bronchitis, and while I wait for a return of good health, I have been working on my syllabus.

In this coming semester I am only teaching one section of one course. The department chair asked me to teach two, but I declined.  Teaching just one will give me more preparation time as well as more time for a seminar paper for a conference in June.

This course is called Modernity in Literature.  It’s a modification of a course I taught for about four years called MOD CIV: Civilization in the West.  The Core Curriculum has been modified, and MOD CIV is gone, replaced by this course.

What is Modernity?   Here are two helpful graphics:

first, the satiric one:

 

Then, the word-collage one:

 

I like it because I get to teach more literature and less history. The history is fascinating, but I won’t have to go into the details of dates and battles and treaties this time around.

I finished the syllabus today, and have begun the work and joy of reading and thinking about the world of Europe and Britain as it was from, say, 1900 to 2001.

I’m expecting that the blog posts for the next months will have that as my subject matter – not in broad strokes, but in flashes of understanding that come upon me in my reading and reflection.

I’ve begun to read a book called The Great War and Modern Memory   by British author Paul Fussell.

 

Already, in the first chapter, he's talking about Thomas Hardy, that late-Victorian novelist and poet. Hardy's late poems are filled with irony, considering what was coming just 14 years into the 20th century.  Apparantely, the soldiers in the trenches were reading his work, including the poem "Ah, Are you Digging on my grave?" in which the departed speaks, and his dog replies.  It's his dog who has been digging on his grave, not out of grief, but to bury a bone. 

 

Here is a photo of Hardy and his dog:

 

 

 

 

It’s dense, and the print is fine… hard on my sixty-something eyes. But it’s worth the struggle; I can tell that from the first few pages of the first chapter.

He’s talking about writers and the war. The first chapter is titled “A Satire of Circumstances.”

More to come…

New Year's Morning

Here's a poem by Kenneth Patchen:

 

At the New Year   

 

In the shape of this night, in the still fall

        of snow, Father

In all that is cold and tiny, these little birds

        and children

In everything that moves tonight, the trolleys

        and the lovers, Father

In the great hush of country, in the ugly noise

        of our cities

In this deep throw of stars, in those trenches

        where the dead are, Father

In all the wide land waiting, and in the liners

        out on the black water

In all that has been said bravely, in all that is

        mean anywhere in the world, Father

In all that is good and lovely, in every house

        where sham and hatred are

In the name of those who wait, in the sound

        of angry voices, Father

Before the bells ring, before this little point in time

        has rushed us on

Before this clean moment has gone, before this night

        turns to face tomorrow, Father

There is this high singing in the air

Forever this sorrowful human face in eternity’s window

And there are other bells that we would ring, Father

Other bells that we would ring.