7/31/23

Monday, July 31, 2023

In bed at 11, up at 6:03, body all achin' and racked wid' pain.  62℉, high of 78, sunny, AQI=35, Good, wind NW at 5 mph, 2-9/14 mph, dps 54-58.  Sunrise at 5:42 at 64 degrees E, sunset at 8:14,14+33.

Dinner with old friends was terrific, as always.  Pip reminded me that we have been gathering regularly for about 25 years now, which sort of astounds me.  I'm the old man of the group, about 12 years older than David and Pip, and 17 years older than Caren and Dan.  Again there was talk of dealing with old parents, clearing out their residences as they have moved to 'assisted living', reminding me that I am closer in age to those old surviving parents than I am to my friends, their children.  What to keep, what to sell, what to toss?  My Pandora's boxes, Manhattan Project papers.  There were also discussions about children and grandchildren, including an upcoming wedding,  I'm glad we didn't discuss the dire situation in Israel, where both Caren and David have deep ties and where all 4 of them visited a few years ago.  Nor did we talk about American politics, with its own menacing aspects.  It looks like D&P's new home outside Tucson will be ready in September, maybe October, with their relocation thereafter.  Our quarterly gatherings will undoubtedly be affected.

Max Boot in this morning's WaPo: "[W]hile I retain affection for Israel, I often feel as if I do not recognize what it has become. This is a familiar feeling for me since I am similarly befuddled by modern America: How did we turn into a land of book banners and covid deniers? Both Israel and the United States have been disfigured by the rise of populist rabble-rousers who have tapped into ugly and unsavory prejudices."  Amen and amen.

The Marshes of Glynn.  In December of 1963, I completed 6 months of training at the Officers Basic School in Quantico, VA, and received orders for Air Defense Control training at Naval Air Station, Glynnco, GA, a former dirigible station in Glynn County, GA, just outside Brunswick, midway between Jacksonville, FL, and Savannah on Highway 17.  Just east of the city, between the northbound and southbound lanes of the highway was a large, old live oak tree, called Sydney Lanier's Oak.  Legend had it that he wrote his most famous poem The Marshes of Glynn sitting under that tree, or more likely he was simply inspired to write it while resting under the tree and looking out on the expansive salt marshes between the city and the barrier sea islands.  There is a historical marker at the site.  In this morning's NYT there is a story of another commemorative marker, a multi-part sculpture by Beverly Buchanan:  "A Vanishing Masterpiece in the Georgia Marshes." 

For the most part, I enjoyed my stay in Glynn County.  I loved spending most of my non-working hours on Sea Island, St. Simon's Island, or Little St. Simon's Island.  I had a good, if temporary, friend there, Andy Furlong, a Navy ensign, and memories shared with him, an aborted trip to the Okefenokee Swamp and Waycross, GA, and favorite waitress Susie Shoney at the Big Boy restaurant ("I smoked it, I'll drink it."  But Brunswick and Glynn County became identified with Deep South racism and murder with the hunting down and killing of Ahmaud Arbery in February 2020.

Today I'm enjoying my memories of the islands and Andy Furlong and Lanier's poem, which I have liked since first reading it down in Glynn County.  It's erotic, even its rhythms suggesting sex.  " Sinuous southward and sinuous northward the shimmering band  / Of the sand-beach fastens the fringe of the marsh to the folds of the land. / Inward and outward to northward and southward the beach-lines linger and curl / As a silver-wrought garment that clings to and follows / the firm sweet limbs of a girl."  And this -

And the sea lends large, as the marsh: lo, out of his plenty the sea 

Pours fast: full soon the time of the flood-tide must be: 

Look how the grace of the sea doth go 

About and about through the intricate channels that flow 

        Here and there, 

                        Everywhere, 

Till his waters have flooded the uttermost creeks and the low-lying lanes, 

And the marsh is meshed with a million veins, 

That like as with rosy and silvery essences flow 

  In the rose-and-silver evening glow. 

                        Farewell, my lord Sun! 

The creeks overflow: a thousand rivulets run 

'Twixt the roots of the sod; the blades of the marsh-grass stir; 

Passeth a hurrying sound of wings that westward whirr; 

Passeth, and all is still; and the currents cease to run; 

And the sea and the marsh are one. 

How still the plains of the waters be! 

The tide is in his ecstasy. 

The tide is at his highest height: 

                        And it is night. 

And now from the Vast of the Lord will the waters of sleep 

Roll in on the souls of men.

Lanier wrote of an uniting with God, but the reader gets a sense of a more carnal coupling.  The great song Ebb Tide creates the same impression by much the same means.  

Lanier was a native Georgian and fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War.  He composed The Marshes of Glynn in the mid-1870s, as Reconstruction was ending and Jim Crow was beginning.  He was rhapsodic about the natural beauty of those marshes.  Beverly Buchanan's Marsh Ruins is situated near the site of an Ibo slave insurrection (and suicides) and seems anything but rhapsodic. but it bespeaks strength on the one hand and both endurance and transience on the other.  That is to say, its meaning is hardly clear but, as Picasso is said to have remarked to a questioner who asked him what a piece of his art 'meant', "What does a bird's song 'mean'?"