Saturday, May 27, 2023
In bed at 10:40 and up at 6:10 from a dream involving surviving a plane crash on the way to Paris with Mike Hogan, Janine Geske, et al. We had Lilly with us and had to protect her from a feral canine of some sort. Mike and Janine were tending a baby, derived from the baby in A Man Called Otto. 46℉, high of 66℉, sunny first ½ of the day, cloudy thereafter, the wind almost calm, 1 mph to 8 mph today, gusts up to 12. The sun rose at 5:17 and will set at 8:29, 15+2.
A Man Called Otto starring Tom Hanks and produced by his wife was our television choice last night. The storyline centered on Otto Anderson played unconvincingly by Hanks, who was miscast in the role of chronically unhappy crabby misanthrope embittered by the loss of his wife to cancer and the earlier loss of his child in utero in a bus crash. The teaching of the film is solid, i.e., that personal misery and profound loneliness are overcome only by helping others deal with their challenges, their misfortunes, and their miseries. I need to keep this in mind when I throw an occasional pity party for myself in old age, especially after Kitty died, and now Tom. Otto needed a Kitty in his life to tell him to SNAP OUT OF IT as Loretta Castorini shouted as she slapped Ronny Cammareri in the great Moonstruck. Otto's Kitty/Loretta was his across-the-street neighbor Marisol. The film was produced by Tom Hanks' wife Rita Wilson and I suspect it was a labor of love for both of them because of its message/teaching but it surely would have been a better production with someone other than the pretty lovable Tom Hanks as the protagonist.
Damoclesian Debt Default continues to loom overhead. After watching the movie last night I turn, ed into MSNBC and CNN to catch the news about debt negotiations. Joe Biden had said earlier in the evening that he expected some good news before midnight which gave me a little but not a whole lot of optimism. Wrong. Neither Lawrence O'Donnell's time slot nor CNN's carried a news program. Lawrence was replaced by a rerun of Nicolle Wallace's show from 6 hours earlier and CNN had a special report on Uvalde and school shootings by Anderson Cooper. A check of the headlines in this morning's NYT and WaPo revealed there is still no agreement, probably because Janet Yellin after the securities market closed extended the X-Day from June 1 to June 5.
Poetry ain't beanbag. I wish I had been more exposed to poetry as a child, not doggerel stuff - roses are red, violets are blue - but real poetry. Perhaps this is a foolish thought. Perhaps children, precisely because they are children, are just too inexperienced in life to experience poetry, the kind of art that touches your heart, that lifts you up or punches you in the belly. I think of Walt Whitman's Come Up From the Fields, Father and Maggie Smith's Good Bones, but also of inspirational poems like St. Francis' Prayer and the classic Serenity Prayer and 'easy' poems like some by Robert Frost. I suppose the same thing is true of great literature generally. Poems like novels and short stories mean different things to us on different readings; 'meaning' changes with the age and the life experiences of the reader. I suspect it wasn't until I went off to college that I started getting into poetry, perhaps from John Pick's histrionic English Lit classes, (Ode to a Grecian Urn, the importance of language: c'est bon vs. das ist gut and the projectile hocker) or Roger Parr's Chaucer class, or Father Bruckner's class on the English Catholic Literary Revivalclass and my introduction to the Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins. 'Glory be to God for dappled things / For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow . . ." How and when would one begin to try to inculcate develop an appreciation of poetry in a child? I suppose the same question obtains with respect to developing an appreciation of the study of history and philosophy and religion, subjects that involve judgment, a sensitive understanding informed by expereince(s), something more than the 3 Rs of 'reading, 'riting', and 'rithmatic.' In my elementary, high school, and undergraduate education we were exposed to the 4th R, religion, or as it was styled at Marquette, theology. As to that R, the verb I eschewed above, 'inculcate', was the appropriate one, implantation by repetition or brain-washing. "We are tattooed in our cradles . . ." and "You can take the boy out of the church but . . ." But I'm rambling.
I came across a short poem by Walt Whitman some time ago and tried to compose a knockoff of it as follows:
Queries to My Seventieth Year by Walt Whitman died at 72
Approaching, nearing, curious,
Thou dim, uncertain spectre - bringest thou life or death?
Strength, weakness, blindness, more paralysis & heavier?
Or placid skies and sun? Wilt stir the waters yet?
Or haply cut me short for good? Or leave me here as now,
Dull, parrot-like and old, with cracked voice harping, screeching?
Queries past my Eightieth Year by Chuck Clausen died at . .
Approaching, nearing, inescapable,
The clear and certain spectre - diminished life and death.
Touch, taste, hearing, sight, and smell abate.
Mobility, memory, and sense of self dull and fail
And surely cut me short. I cannot stay as now.
Amyloid, plaque, or neoplasm sure to see to that.
Working on composing that knockoff was a very interesting experience which I relived when I found the notebook page on which I worked, full of alternative words and phrases, me trying to get just the right and accurate expression of a thought. It was challenging and reminded me of the challenge always facing poets doing poetry, finding the precise word to express the precise thought, the precise memory, the precise emotion. This morning I came across another person's knockoff of a more famous poem.
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Interpretation of a Poem by Frost
A young black girl stopped by the woods,
so young she knew only one man: Jim Crow
but she wasn’t allowed to call him Mister.
The woods were his and she respected his boundaries
even in the absence of fence.
Of course she delighted in the filling up
of his woods, she so accustomed to emptiness,
to being taken at face value.
This face, her face eternally the brown
of declining autumn, watches snow inter the grass,
cling to bark making it seem indecisive
about race preference, a fast-to-melt idealism.
With the grass covered, black and white are the only options,
polarity is the only reality; corners aren’t neutral
but are on edge.
She shakes off snow, defiance wasted
on the limited audience of horse.
The snow does not hypnotize her as it wants to,
as the blond sun does in making too many prefer daylight.
She has promises to keep,
the promise that she bear Jim no bastards,
the promise that she ride the horse only as long
as it is willing to accept riders,
the promise that she bear Jim no bastards,
the promise to her face that it not be mistaken as shadow,
and miles to go, more than the distance from Africa to Andover,
more than the distance from black to white
before she sleeps with Jim.
A Memory of Lake Como Triggered Under Patio Chair.
Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower - but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Sunny Saturday Afternoon Drive in the Country. I was blessed today by being able to take a leisurely drive through northern Ozaukee County and southern Sheboygan County. I had thought I would drive up to Waldo but got only as far north as Random Lake and the environs east (Six Mile Road) and west (Waubeka). I drove through the main road into Port Washington and admired, as I always do, the beautiful Painted Ladies, the big Victorian homes. The beauty found in those rural areas inevitably almost takes my breath away. It thrills and elates me, hokey as it sounds. Acres and acres of rich farmland, some lying fallow, some already producing what I'm guessing is a first crop of alfalfa or perhaps even soybeans. No sign of corn yet., except for last year's stubble in many fields. Many stands of deciduous and evergreen trees in full leaf, thousands and thousands of lush green trees and hundreds of dead trees, most probably ashes, more noticeable now against the living green trees than they were before the living trees leafed out. Also occasional clusters of Dame's Rocket invasive wildflowers and wild poppies alongside the country roads., I drove past two large farms bearing the family names of former students of mine at the law school, the Depies Farm on Jay Road (Kathy Depies, Law 1994?) and the Opitz Dairy Farm on County I and Shady Lane Road, due west of our former home on Deerfield Drive in the Town of Saukville. When the wind was westerly after Farmer Opitz manured his fields, we were visited by the fragrance of the fertilized fields, a matter of pleasure to me and of displeasure to Geri. Charlie Opitz was a student of mine in the 1970s and my main recollection of him was my being insulted by his brazen reading of a newspaper during one of my classes. He was admitted to the bar in 1975 and disbarred in 1990 by the Wisconsin supreme court for multiple serious incidents of professional misconduct. In any event, on the drive I enjoyed seeing farmhouses, barns, sheds, silos, tractors, tillers, cultivators, seeders, etc., and most of all the gorgeous gently rolling farmland. some green, some brown.
I felt some sadness on this excursion, as I always do, remembering how my father and I enjoyed going for rides in the Wisconsin countryside, just enjoying the beautiful farmhouses, outbuildings, and fields. He and I were the only ones who derived deep pleasure from a simple drive in the country. Now he is gone of course and if I suggest a ride in the country to anyone, I get a pleasant 'no thanks' but with an unspoken subtext of "Are you kidding me?." I felt a bit of grief too when I drove past The Bog Golf Club west of Grafton on CTH I where Tom St. John took me golfing as his guest many years ago. I have misplaced a favorite framed snapshot of Tom deep in some heavily-vegetated recess where he had hooked his drive, about to stroke one of his famous recovery strokes. I looked for the photo when I prepared my eulogy for his funeral but couldn't find it. In any case, the memories of Tom and me at The Bog and my Dad and me on the back country roads were bittersweet.
I was also struck, again as I always am on my country drives, by the deep gulf between the folks who live in the rural and small-town areas and the people like me who live in cities and nearby suburbs. Two different and very separate worlds, much of the separation based on race, especially the Black-White divide, but also on population density and the need for regulations.. Is the divide bridgeable? I don't think so. I suspect it will get more unbridgeable as cities become more the home of Blacks and Browns and immigrants and younger people and the country and small towns stay Whiter and older. Urban liberals like me need to get into their cars and out into the country roads where rural and small towns live within an hour or so of their urban roots to see and sense what is so radically different about how the countryfolk live. Of course, the converse is true: rural and small-town folks ought to drive through the cities to gain a sense of what conditions there require in terms of active government intervention to make life sustainable in an elbow-to-elbow environment. Can the two sets of Americans find common ground on which to fashion an effective government governing the whole diverse polity? I don't think so. Alas.
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