NTuesday, October 24, 2023
In bed by 9:30, up at 4:30. 57°, high of 73°, partly cloudy morning & sunny afternoon ahead, another windy day. Wind SSW at 12 mph, 4-16/29, DPs 46-60°. Sunrise at 7:16 at 105°, sunset at 5:55, 254°, 10+39, solar noon at 12:35, elevation 35°. Summery days ahead.
Call the VA rehab doc, Dr. Chang late yesterday. He said the x-rays confirmed that I have pretty severe arthritis in two sectors of my back and degenerative disc disease. No surprise. He recommended frequently stretching by back by bending way forward while seated. I'm also supposed to do frequent 'opening umbrella' stretching for the CPP but I can't do it when I'm experiencing the pain and forget to do it and/or am undisciplined when I"m not in pain. Not good.
Lilly came out to be let out at about 4:45. I'm always a bit anxious about letting her out in the dark because of neighborhood coyotes. I don't think a single coyote would attack her, but I worry about a pair or a larger group. Our neighbors in the Blustien house told Geri that their doorbell camera picked up a single coyote on their front lawn at 10:30 two nights ago. I appreciate the elegant white-tailed deer and the hardy wild turkeys as neighbors but can't say the same for the coyotes.
I caught the mouse in a trap I set two days ago. He probably got into the house through the garage door. I hate to kill them but they drive Geri nuts and I guess I don't want to have a bunch of them scurrying around the house but just the same . . .
'm truly sorry Man's dominion
Has broken Nature's social union,
An' justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle,
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An' fellow-mortal!
Thou saw the fields laid bare an' wast,
An' weary Winter comin fast,
An' cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell,
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro' thy cell.
But Mousie, thou are no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men,
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!
Still, thou art blest, compar'd wi' me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e'e,
On prospects drear!
An' forward, tho' I canna see,
I guess an' fear!
Such a great poem. (And a reminder that the Scots are not English, just as the Irish and Welsh are not English. Of the Unionists in Ulster I speak not.)
Again I wonder: why keep a journal/chronicle? I have thought at different times that I do it just to leave some tangible evidence that on certain dates I was alive; that I filled some space on this earth and had some thoughts, and did some activities. "Kilroy was here." It's only the printed copy of the journal/chronicle that is tangible, not the Blogspot blog, and maybe that's why I print off each day's musings.
I read an interview of Joyce Carol Oates by David Marchese in the 7/16/2023 online edition of the NYT Magazine in which Oates seemed to hit on a similar point:
Thinking of my early married life, my husband was a professor, and we talked about books all the time. Though we talked and talked for years, I don’t really remember that dialogue. I don’t remember the students I was teaching, whom I loved. It’s 2023, and I have to concede that I don’t remember those students. All I have left of all that happiness is my writing of that time. A book or two, some stories. I think that’s a profound fact. It’s a kind of devastating fact. Everything that you think is solid is actually fleeting and ephemeral. The only thing that is quasi-permanent would be a book or work of art or photographs or something. Anything you create that transcends time is in some ways more real than the actual reality of your life. If you set your hand on fire right now, it’s ephemeral. It would hurt, but Plato would say it’s not as real as something that transcends time. I am a person who was married, and was very happily married. Yet, that’s all gone now. Where is it?
People are seduced by the beauty of the close-at-hand, and they don’t have the discipline or the predilection or the talent, maybe, to say: “I’m not going to go out tonight. I’m not going to waste my time on Twitter. I’m going to have five hours and work on my novel.” If you did that every day, you’d have a novel. Many people say, “I’m going to pet my cat” or “I’m with my children.” There’s lots of reasons that people have for not doing things. Then the cats are gone, the children move away, the marriage breaks up or somebody dies, and you’re sort of there, like, “I don’t have anything.” A lot of things that had meaning are gone, and you have to start anew. But if you read Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” Ovid writes about how, if you’re reading this, I’m immortal. You see that theme in Shakespeare’s sonnets:You’re reading this, so I’m still alive. In fact, they’re not alive, they’re gone, but while they were alive, they did have that extra dimension of their lives. That is not nothing.
I know I'm not immortal. I know that it is unlikely that anyone will read a single word I write. Neither of my children nor my wife read the memoir I wrote and I suspect my sister only read a part of it because it brought back some awful memories. I suppose most personal writing is a vain, futile, empty exercise for the writer, thousands of diarists but rarely a Pepys, Boswell, or Anne Frank. Why write anything that no one will read? But still, writers write perhaps simply because, as Oates notes, it's "not nothing" whereas the rest of our life, once it passes, is gone and lost, perhaps a memory, perhaps not. It is MacBeth's 'tale told by an idiot, . . signifying nothing," Ecclesiastes' Vanitas, vanitatem, et omnia vanitas. Quid habet amplius homo de universo labore suo quo laborat sub sole? On the other hand, like Flannery O'Connor "I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don't know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it again.”
America dystopia: Active shooter shot and killed at Kennedy Middle School in Germantown yesterday. Near the same time that Geri was picking up Lizzie at Bayside Middle School, police were shooting to death a man, armed and acting erraticallly, at Kennedy Middle School in Germantown where Steve and Lan White, our mischpuche, live.
LTMW at 9 a.m. at a young mother with a white wearing a T-shirt and a white basketball cap pushing a stroller with her toddler in it. What especially caught my eye was the child's leg happily bouncing up and down in the stroller. I wondered whether he or she might be singing on this warm late October morning. The safflower seeds are almost entirely gone from the short tube feeder, which I will fill soon, but I won't replace the suet cake with such warm days ahead.
Children at the Middle School and Elementary School. I picked up Lizzie at the Middle School and drove her home to get her violin, the same one her Mom used to play, and then drove her to Stormonth Elementary School where she and some others were to play music at Stormonth's Fall Festival. I have such mixed feelings when I see all those children leaving the middle school to go home and enjoying the festivities at Stormonth, so bright looking, so beautiful, so full of energy, promise, and potential. I delight in watching them and have such fear of the world they are moving into. While waiting for Lizzie at the Middle School and then again at Stormonth, I listeded to my Audible edition of Isabel Wilkerson's Caste in which she describes so many individual acts and social and governmental policies of barbarism, cruelty, sadism and I have fresh in my mind what is happening in Israel and Gaza, Ukraine and Russia, the madness in the House of Representatives, the daily drama of the Trump trials played against the very real possibilty that he will regain the control of the government next year, and I think of those children. What a world we will leave them. What will they think of us that we weren't able or willing to make a better world for them? Was there a time when we really naively believed that we were making progress in the world? That the world was getting better?
Treadmill. Nor today, disappointed in myself.
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