11/18/23

 Saturday, November 18, 2023

In bed @ 9:15, up at 6, and a couple hours on lzb after mild GERD, and multiple pss.  Let Lilly out.  32°, high of 50°, sunny day ahead, wind WSW at 11, 4-14/26.  Sunrise at 6:48, sunset at 4:25, 9+37.

Treadmill; pain.  25:01  0.52 while watching a YouTube lecture analyzing Yeats' The Lake Isle of Innesfree:

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

The lecturer mentioned that Yeats wrote this in 1890 while living in London, then the largest city in the world and filthy with foul air and foul water, loaded with the poor crowded into filthy slums.  That's where he was when he was "stand[ing] on the roadway, or on the pavements gray" yearning for the lake isle of Innisfree.

Then I watched another YouTube lecture by Stephen Cheeke on Yeats' bizarre beliefs in faeries, theosophy the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, life after death, seances, 'automatic writing', reincarnation, and the occult: "The Wonderful and Frightening World of W. B. Yeats'" Bristol Lectures.  At the end of the lecture, the speaker referred to a paragraph in Yeats' prose work "Per Amica Silentia Lunae" that revealed to me where the 4th stanza of his poem "Vacillation" comes from.  From the poem:

My fiftieth year had come and gone, / I sat, a solitary man, / In a crowded London shop, / An open book and empty cup / On the marble table-top. / While on the shop and street I gazed / My body of a sudden blazed; / And twenty minutes more or less / It seemed, so great my happiness, / That I was blessed and could bless.

From "Per Amica":

At certain moments, always unforeseen, I become happy, most commonly when at hazard I have opened some book of verse.  Sometimes it is my own verse when, instead of discovering new technical flaws, I read with all the exitement of the first writing.  Perhaps I am sitting in some crowded restaurant, the open book beside me, or closed, my excitement having over-brimmed the page.  I look at the strangers near as if I had nown them all my life, and it seems strange that I cannot speak to them: everything fills me with affection.  I have no longer any fears or any needs; I do not even remember that this happy mood must come to an end.  It seems as if the vehicle had suddenly grown pure and far extended and so luminous that the images from Anima Mundi, embodied there and drunk with that sweetness would, like a country drunkard who has thrown a wisp into his own thatch, burn up time.  It may be an hour before the mood passes, but latterly I seem to understand that I enter upon it the moment I cease to hate.  I think the common condition of our life is hatred - I know this is so with me - irritation with public or private events or persons.

Shutterfly.  I wasted some time trying to order a coffee mug with the photo of Lilly in the dining room doorway.  I become increasingly incompetent in dealing with digital/computer stuff, including placing orders over the internet

Having a hard time writing today, thinking of Ukraine and Gaza . . . the human condition, human nature, homo hominis lupus, 'He's got a plan for each of us' and "He's got the whole world in His hands."  Daily text messages from Mike Johnson, the Christian nationalists, Ryan Zinke, Mike Pompeo, and assorted fascists.  Joe Biden, Donald Trump, The Big Lie vs. No Big Truth.  Is it really so hard to imagine the U.S. as a fascist nation, controlled by contemporary Confederates, neo-Nazis, homegrown SA, SS, and Gestapo?  Is it really so hard to understand why most Democrats want Joe Biden to get the hell out of the race, why his age, his negative charisma, his VP, his mumbling and bumbling scare the shit out of anti-Trumpers?  He turns 81 on Monday.  Can we even imagine what he will be like at age 82, 83, 84, 85, or 86?  I despair.

I think of the Gazans' holocaust and a Quantico  Basic School memory.

    We worked with and fired or exploded all the land-based weapons in the Marine Corps’ arsenal, other than napalm: M60 air-cooled machine guns that fired 7.62 mm rounds, water-cooled machine guns that fired the larger .50 caliber rounds, hand grenades, anti-tank and anti-personnel land mines, 60 mm and 81 mm mortars, 3.5 inch rocket launchers a/k/a “bazookas,” 106 mm recoilless rifles.  We conducted exercises with tanks, huge roaring monsters on tracks with 105 mm guns.  We fired 105 mm and 155 mm howitzers.  We were bused down to Little Creek to conduct an amphibious assault.  We were helo-lifted by H34 helicopters, the workhouse of the early Vietnam War, in vertical assault and other exercises. We studied nuclear, chemical and biological warfare and endured exposure to tear gas.

In the fall, we were ‘treated’ to “Hell Night.”  Francis Fukuyama, author of The End of History, commented during a recent interview on C-Span’s Book TV, “American troops are basically trained to blow things up and kill people.”  His observation was entirely correct, all of that ‘hearts and minds’ stuff notwithstanding.  Hell Night was a demonstration of the sights and sounds and the feel of blowing things up and killing people and of being blown up and killed.  Specifically, it was a demonstration of the defensive firepower employed along a ‘main line of resistance.’ It was conducted after sundown.  We were bused from the Basic School to a clearing in the woods where bleachers were set up.  The lieutenants were required to be present.  Wives were encouraged to be present and Anne attended.  As dusk turned to darkness, an introductory explanation of what we were about to see and hear and feel was given and then all hell broke loose.  Artillery barrages began, white phosphorous flares were lofted to illuminate the battlefield, mortars exploded, machine guns laid down interlocking fields of fire, recoilless rifle rounds hit salvage tanks made visible by the white phosphorous.  It was a relatively low-tech, 1963 version of the obscene 2003 Shock and Awe show that Bush and Rumsfeld and their military myrmidons put on in Baghdad, but it was terrifying to imagine oneself on the receiving end of the weaponry.  It was scary just to see the tracer rounds from the small arms and the flash and blast of the high explosive weapons, to hear the infernal noise, and to feel the concussions from the explosions.

I have two thoughts remembering that night in the woods.  First, I am reminded of what my father experienced on the beach of Iwo Jima.  He and the other Marines and hospital corpsmen had unimaginable firepower unleashed on them for days on end.  Japanese howitzers, rockets, mortars, mines and machine guns in front of them and the Navy’s 16 inch guns on the battleships, 8 inch guns on the cruisers, and 5 inch guns on the destroyers behind them.  An inferno, with dead and dying and wounded Marines – and parts of Marines’ bodies - all around.

I think too of the fact that Anne was there, that wives were encouraged to attend.  I wonder what the thinking was behind that.  To give spouses a clearer idea of the danger of combat?  To bring home the reality of what Marines do?  To scare them?  To make them more supportive of their husbands’ work at the risk of them becoming less supportive of their husbands’ work?  Marine Corps training is thoroughly thought-out; nothing is done without a specific set of objectives.  I wonder just what were the objectives of having the wives present.  I wonder about it more now than I did then.

Every time I see a news report showing explosions in Gaza I think of the fact that almost certainly civilians on the receiving end of the bomb or rocket are being killed, injured, maimed,  burned, broken apart, or crushed.  Men, women, children, young, old.  My Jewish friends would probably object to my use of the term 'holocaust' to describe what is being done in Gaza now, but in what sense is it not a holocaust?  Old men and women, disabled people, mothers and fathers with infants, toddlers, and children are targeted if not intentionally, at least knowingly.  Fish in a barrel.  "The horror, the horror."

Geri is off to the symphony with Micaela tonight.  Brahms 4th Symphony, Shostakovich Cello Concerto performed by Andrei Ioniƫa, Ruth Reinhardt conducting.  I would probably enjoy this concert more than Geri but (1) Caela invited Geri, and (2) the process of getting to the symphony hall and getting seated would not be an easy one for me,  and then there's the problem of pit stops.  Alas.