11/11/24

 Monday, November 11, 2024

D+6

1918, the Allied nations and Germany signed the armistice ending the fighting in the Great War, which had killed more than 15 million people

1939 Kate Smith first sang Irving Berlin's "God Bless America"

1961 "Catch-22" by Joseph Heller was published

2018 On the centenary of WWI Armistice Day French President Macron urged the world to reject Nationalism in a speech under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris

In bed by 9, awake at 4:24, and up at 4:30.  Lilly, sleeping on the carpet next to her mattress in the TV room, woke up at 4:40 and walked past me into the living room without realizing I was sitting in the recliner.  By 6:50, Lilly still hasn't awakened.  I have showered and put out the recycling.  I look out the kitchen window and see an elegant whitetail and her growing fawn standing silently and still under the berry tree.  She reaches down to the grass and gets some breakfast - berries? grass?  Lilly still hadn't asked to be let out by 7:15 when I left to meet Andy.

Prednisone, day 181, 10 mg., day 2/5.   My shoulders are a little sore this morning, full ROM but a little sore when moving.  Prednisone at 5:00.  Cottage cheese w/ blueberries at 5:30.   Morning meds at 7:05 before leaving to follow Andy to West Allis where the transmission on his Infiniti will be replaced.

My Heart Leaps Up  William Wordsworth  1770 – 1850

My heart leaps up when I behold 

   A rainbow in the sky:

So was it when my life began;

So is it now I am a man; 

So be it when I shall grow old, 

     Or let me die!

The Child is father of the Man; 

And I could wish my days to be

Bound each to each by natural piety.

I thought of this poem this morning while driving to meet Andy for our caravan down to the transmission shop.  I thought too of Wordsworth's definition of poetry as the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion recollected in tranquillity.  I noticed, as I have so often this autumn, how spectacularly gorgeous the sky was, loaded with voluminous white and blue and gray clouds with the pretty cerulean blue sky filling the spaces between the clouds.  When I reached Brown Deer Road the rising sun over Lake Michigan peeked through a hole in some of the clouds creating bright coronas around the edges of the clouds.  It almost took my breath away and I tried to snap a photo of it with my phone.  By the time I was able to position my phone, the moment was gone but 'the memory lingered on.' (lyric from The Song is Ended by Irving Berlin. More on Irving Berlin below.)

Emily Dickinson's Homage to Trump.  Dickinson's poems don't have titles, except perhaps their first lines.  One of her poems is often referred to by its first line: A narrow Fellow in the Grass.  It could be titled: An Homage to Trump.

A narrow Fellow in the Grass

Occasionally rides -

You may have met him? Did you not

His notice instant is -

    The Grass divides as with a Comb,

    A spotted Shaft is seen,

    And then it closes at your Feet

    And opens further on -

He likes a Boggy Acre -  

A Floor too cool for Corn -

But when a Boy and Barefoot

I more than once at Noon

    Have passed I thought a Whip Lash

    Unbraiding in the Sun

    When stooping to secure it

    It wrinkled And was gone -

Several of Nature’s People

I know, and they know me

I feel for them a transport

Of Cordiality

    But never met this Fellow

    Attended or alone

    Without a tighter Breathing

    And Zero at the Bone.

First Anniversary minnow: I remember Kate Smith from my childhood, not a 'glamourpuss' but a full-bodied woman with a lovely voice.   I especially remember her singing God Bless America.  I've long thought it would be a better national anthem than The Star-Spangled Banner with its references to war, "the rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air."  But I am noting this particular anniversary today because of its connection with Irving Berlin,(born Israel Beilin; Yiddish: ישראל ביילי)  It reminds me of his extraordinary contributions to American culture and life which reminds me in turn of what I wrote in 2018 after the Tree of Life murders:

I read that the Squirrel Hill terrorist wanted to "kill all Jews" even as he was wheeled into the ER at the hospital where the doctor and nurse who treated him were Jews.  In BadDreamLand, I had a vision of the murderer's wish being granted.  Suddenly his treating physician and attending nurse disappeared. Then all the Jewish doctors and nurses that treat and have treated me and my family through a long life disappeared.  Poof.  Then I recalled Itzhak Perlman on the Steven Colbert Show playing "Someone to Watch Over Me" and Itzhak disappeared as did the song's composer, Jacob Gershvin a/k/a George Gershwin,  and the beautiful song itself, along with Rhapsody in Blue and everything else that Jacob/George created to share with the world.  Poof.  Then I thought of Israel Beilin a/k/a Irving Berlin vanishing along with his gifts to the world: God Bless America, White Christmas, and hundreds of others.  Gone.  Then I hallucinated Robert Allen Zimmerman a/k/a Bob Dylan disappearing with Blowing in the Wind, The Times They Are A-Changin', and so much more.  Then Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, Sounds of Silence, Bridge Over Troubled Water, Billy Joel, Piano Man, My Life, Uptown Girl, Carole Joan Klein a/k/a Carole King,  So Far Away, It's Too Late, Tapestry,  Neil Diamond, Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show, Sweet Caroline, Barbra Streisand, People, The Way We Were. All gone the disappeared Felix Mendelssohn, Gustav Mahler. Aaron Copeland, Leonard Bernstein, Benny Goodman, Ziggy Elman, Herbie Mann, so many musicians, so much soul expanding music - gone. And all those humorists  who brought so much joy and laughter to my life - Gilda Radner, Gene Wilder, the Marx brothers, Mel Brooks, Madeline Kahn, Larry David, Billy Crystal, Jerry Seinfeld, Jack Benny, Mort Sahl,  Lenny Bruce, George Burns, and Al Franklin - so many humorists, so many smiles, chuckles, and belly laughs, taken away - poof.  And all those great scientists, like Abram Saperstein, a/k/a Albert Sabin who gave us oral polio vaccine, Jonas Salk and his polio vaccine, Paul Ehlich who developed the first cure for the worldwide scourge of syphilis and who helped cure diphtheria, Albert Einstein who showed us E=mc squared, relativity and black holes.  Then my frightening dream became even more nightmarish when I saw disappearing all the many Jews who have personally enriched my life with their friendship, those I worked with and those who share and have shared their homes and their hearts with me and my family, who have lovingly shared their wise counsel with me when I most needed it, who have shared their marriages, funerals, britot, b'nai and b'not mitzah, Shabbat services and seders and who have accepted me despite my faults and failings, my spiritual and emotional mishpuchah.  As my nightmare took all of them away from me I couldn't take it any more and woke up trembling and repeating don't go, don't go.  And though I'm not a pray-er, I found myself saying Please God - no, never.

Second Anniversary minnow.   I read Catch-22 sometime between 1961 when it was published and 1965 when I was in Vietnam, remembering it.  I was sitting in the Officers' Mess in an old French Army building.  It was nearing Christmas and I had walked into the mess hall alone to get a late lunch and found the head chaplain of the 1st Marine Air Wing, an O-6 Navy captain, hanging ornaments on an artificial Christmas tree.  He was an Episcopalian priest and he sang loudly to himself as he decorated the tree:  Christmas is a'coming and the goose is getting fat, please to put a penny in the old man's hat.  If you haven't got a penny then a ha'penny will do.  If you haven't got a ha'penny then God bless you.  I had been "in country" for 5 months by then, sensed that no good would come of the war and, as I sat alone eating my late lunch and listening to the chaplain belting out his carol, I thought of Catch-22.  I still vividly remember thinking that, when I read it, I believed the novel was fiction, but now I know it to be true, or at least based on fact.  All the crazy shit that Yossarian experienced in WWII, the absurdities and inanities,(Major Major Major Major, Milo Minderbinder, Chaplain Tappman)  that kind of stuff really happens!  Some memories stay with us forever.  The song is over, but the memory lingers on.

"And don't tell me God works in mysterious ways", Yossarian continued, hurtling over her objections. "There's nothing so mysterious about it. He's not working at all. He's playing or else He's forgotten all about us. That's the kind of God you people talk about – a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did he ever create pain? … Oh, He was really being charitable to us when He gave us pain! [to warn us of danger] Why couldn't He have used a doorbell instead to notify us, or one of His celestial choirs? Or a system of blue-and-red neon tubes right in the middle of each person's forehead. Any jukebox manufacturer worth his salt could have done that. Why couldn't He? … What a colossal, immortal blunderer! When you consider the opportunity and power He had to really do a job, and then look at the stupid, ugly little mess He made of it instead, His sheer incompetence is almost staggering. …"

Last Anniversary minnow.  Is there something ironic or even perverse about a French national leader urging a rejection of Nationalism under L'Arc de Triomphe celebrating Napoleon's many victories?  Allons enfants de la patrie, Le jour de gloire est arrivé ! . . .  Aux armes, citoyens ! Formez vos bataillons ! Marchons ! Marchons ! Qu'un sang impur Abreuve nos sillons ! . . . Let's go children of the fatherland,  The day of glory has arrived! Grab your weapons, citizens!  Form your battalions!  Let us march! Let us march!  May impure blood Water our fields!