Fra Lippo Lippi

A flâneur, a purposely lost rambler, is how I like to characterize myself. I know that I hadn’t always been such; once I had worn my clothes tight-fitting and my shoes stiff and highly polished. But I had experienced some wonderful moments when I knew what it felt like to wear my clothes loose. But it was an all too brief summer and when it ended, so, too, did my sauntering; I returned once more to my tight-fitting wardrobe and stiff shoes. Sometimes, even Thoreau would complain that “it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some work will run in my head and I am not where my body is—I am out of my senses.” That is, though his body is walking his mind is bound too tight. There had been, of course, those times when my walk was no saunter: I had felt too encumbered and unfree, and I would discuss with my therapist the unsatisfactory experience and the sources for my anxieties. I learned a few things and sauntered more, and during some walks there would occur transcendent moments when the world and me were transformed. Thoreau says he thinks “not much of the actual . . . It is a sort of vomit in which the unclean love to wallow.” Whew! But no, HDT doesn’t avoid the actual—in a sense it was where he always started—but at times he could not transcend it.  I hold with Robert Browning’s Fra Lippo Lippi who says, “This world’s no blot for us/Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good—/To find its meaning is my meat and drink.” In a way this was Thoreau’s method.

Fra Lippo Lippi struck out from the staid, cautious style then in vogue in the art communities and developed the realist manner of painting though not without harsh critique and chastisement of his work from his clerical superiors. They would have had him paint the soul so that the people would forget the physical, their hard labor, their oppression and their poverty. His superiors scolded,  

Your business is not to catch men with show,

With homage to the perishable clay,

But lift them over it, ignore it all,

Make them forget there’s such a thing as flesh.

Your business is to paint the souls of men—

Lippi stressed that if he painted the world about him it would lead people to the soul. To lose the physical world was not the purpose to which art aspired. Art, Lippi believed, returned the world to us. In a conversation with a guard who had apprehended Lippi as he returned to the monastery after a night of ribaldry Lippi responded: 

For don’t you mark? We’re made so that we love

First when we see them painted, things that we have passed 

Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;

And so they are better, painted—better to us

Which is the same thing. Art was given for that;

God gives us to help each other so,
Lending our minds out.

His art, Lippi asserted, should give people the world that they were too busy, too distracted or too oppressed to see. For Lippi art might be the invitation to saunter and to transcend. Art might be the impetus for the achievements of other freedoms as well, as Thoreau seemed to understand. Those who would so saunter would see the world’s meaning that they had not before been aware. They would find in the art what would scratch their itches and then come to apprehend soul. Indeed, Lippi’s art would provide them access to meaning and it would begin with the physical world. Art was not a distraction but a summons. Centuries later Bertold Brecht would hold that his theatre was meant to portray the world for his audience and not an opportunity to lose that world in the exhaustion of catharsis. He did not want his audiences to sit passively and forget themselves in a work’s story, Brecht wanted his plays to inspire his audience to think about and question the world they live in. 

Once I had believed that all I needed to know was that beauty was truth and truth beauty, but since then I had experienced and learned a great deal. I recognized that beauty was not an immanence within the object but appeared as an event. Beauty was a description of a feeling that arose in as a response to a relationship between the particular work of art, between anything experienced and the one experiencing it. And I considered that beauty occurred when an experienced tension in the work was felt, and beauty happened from the experience of the release of that felt tension. That release made possible moments of transcendence for the one experiencing the work. I have been listening for years to Leonard Bernstein’s recordings of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Beethoven’s symphony was one of the most beautiful works I have known, though I admit that I have experienced a great deal of beauty in my life. But every time I would hear that music he experienced beauty. He remembered Harvey Sachs’s description of the third movement of the Ninth that followed the difficult, turbulent, sometimes even violent images of the first two movements. He writes “ . . . the third [movement] tells us that we have both lost and won—that as aware human beings, we have no choice but to wade through the horror and anguish and then die, but that we are able, from time to time, to see beyond and soar above these facts and to understand just enough to be able to appreciate the beauty of being moral.” For me the third movement released the tensions that the first two movements had caused and it prepared for the magnificence of the final choral movement. Sachs’s words described transcendence, to recognize the tensions and to experience a resolution of them, to feel one’s itches and to scratch them. Then I knew beauty; then I had beauty. Yes, the experience of beauty scratched one’s itches. All experience of beauty in art—visual, aural, tactile, gastronomical, aromatical—what Lippi referred to as simple beauty, would be found in the quotidian and it was from there that transcendence would happen. 

I think I have searched in my life for beauty and now understand that its potential was present always with me. Walking down a dusty, noisy street today, I thought, yes, the experience of beauty and the source of transcendence comes from having faith in the seed. That within that seed there was a tree that would burst forth and in time flourish. Beauty was truth as Fra Lippo Lippi had asserted. “If you get simple beauty and naught else,” he says, “you get about the best thing God invents—/That’s somewhat; and you’ll find the soul you have missed/within yourself, when you return him thanks.” The awareness of the soul was not a permanent presence but a transitory happening in the experience of beauty. The soul was called into being by the experience of beauty. Transcendence he knew now was not to lose the world in abstraction; rather transcendence would be experienced when the world appeared with new perspective. The experience of beauty led him right back to the world, and he would give thanks by making available the experience of beauty for others. 

 

 

If it Were Up to Me

The latest obscene shooting at Annunciation School in Minneapolis is yet another violent and deadly occurrence in what is turning out as a horrible, horrible several years that has been filled with wars, mass shootings, assassinations, and among other things, a cruel, ugly, vindictive government headed by Trump and meekly followed by sycophantic (and terrified) Republicans. The latest shooting is another instanceof the callous disregard for human life displayed by opponents of gun control. The shooter, Robin Westman, wrote in her journal dated July 4, “Oh my God! I got it! I have a shotgun! It was not too difficult at all!” Exactly the problem! She added that a high-powered rifle was next on the shopping list. I read in the New York Times that earlier this year Ms. Westman wrote that she had been watching so many mass shooting videos online that she worried about being placed on a Federal Bureau of Investigation watch list. But in early July, her state-issued gun permit had arrived in the mail. Exactly the problem! 

            I will not rehash the obvious arguments for gun control in the United States. But I will angrily address stupid comments by people like J.D. Vance who said that the shooting suggested that more mental health care is necessary. Of course, the Republican cadre had already assented to cuts in Medicaid and Medicare, to health care fundings for mental health facilities. The hypocrisy is blatant and dangerous but will be almost certainly ignored by a deliberately blind, intellectually vacant and ethically compromising (and compromised) MAGA electorate. 

            Yes, I know that greater access to mental health ought to be made available; so, too, by the way, should medical care for the physical. The two are not disconnected. But first it must be acknowledged that if the guns weren’t so easily available then those suffering with psychological problems wouldn’t have access to them. No access, no mass shootings. I have heard statistics that there are more guns in the United States than people. For every 100 people there are 120 guns. There are 393 million guns in the United States.

            I watch a great many detective shows many of which are British: Inspector Morse, Lewis, Shetland, Vera, Grantchester, Endeavour, Brokenwood Mysteries, Foyle’s War, George Gently, Midsommer Murders. etc. etc. etc. Firearms in Great Britain are heavily controlled: one must show a very good reason for having one and then be subjected to a heavy vetting process. Pistols are banned. The detectives in these shows carry no weapons. Unless confrontation with and arrest of a suspect seems to be dangerous, guns are not issued to the police (the uniformed coppers!) including the detectives. Yes, the criminals sometimes do have weapons—guns—but the difficulty of obtaining them means that acquisition must have been difficult and for most criminals been y rarely successful. Most suspects do not have weapons, and the detectives chase after and arrest the bad ones without need of guns. Indeed, often the arresting detectives and uniformed police have to chase after the suspect; many discover they need to be in better shape.

So many problems might be resolved if guns were less available. Certainly a military presence in the cities of the United Sates would be unnecessary: but maybe Trump enjoys the military might he controls and strict gun control would render occupation by the National Guard unlikely.
With better access to health care so many troubled individuals might be helped before they went on a killing rage. I am weary of the days of prayer solution to the violence. The children were praying!! I have long believed that the skills to recognize and reject the hypocrisies of people like J.D. Vance ought to be developed in schools, newspapers and journals. 

As Cheryl Wheeler sings, there are many targets for blame for mass shootings, but “If it were up to me, I’d take away the guns!”

 

Plots and Stories

Time returns me to the blog. It is there that I begin to work out ideas that have their origin in my day and that compose the substance of my dreams. 

At the end of Canto IV of Dante’s Inferno I find these lines spoken by Virgil. He is at the moment in Limbo and there sees the great spirits of the past who, born before the Christ have not been baptized and cannot therefore enter Paradise: the Trojans, the Greeks and fabled figures of early Rome; then Virgil sees the philosophers, scientists, mathematicians and doctors, and the Moorish scholar, Averroës But Virgil bemoans that he “cannot enumerate them all fully;/my long theme so drives me on that many times/my words fall short of the facts.” That is, Virgil must abandon the telling of the facts so that he can narrate his story. The story exceeds the facts. In Daniel Kehlmann’s novel, Measuring the World, Alexander von Humboldt says “a renowned traveler was only renowned if he left good stories behind.” Though Humboldt believed that by his physical measurements the “cosmos would be understood, all difficulties pertaining to man’s beginnings, such as fear, war and exploitation, would sink into the past,” but he seems to be also aware that the measurements must be a source of the story in which the measurements are embedded. Outside of a story the measurements lack meaning. Isn’t this about what Virgil complains,that there are too many facts and he must continue the story. In Kehlmann’s novel Carl Gauss avers, that “the world could be calculated after a fashion, but that was a long way from understanding it.” The measurements were the facts that required a story to mean anything. And then the measurements fade into the story.

Maybe the measurements were simply the plot. In George Gissing’s New Grub Street, the novelist Edwin Reardon suffering from a version of writer’s block and trying desperately to produce something that he can sell for publishing complains that he must now “put aside his intellectual work and begin again once more the search for a ‘plot.’” That is, he would rather have a story and not a plot, the latter an ordered narrative of events that might drive forward what will become the story. Story explores the motives and consequences of the actions narrated by the plot. Yes, Joyce’s Ulysses plots the movement of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom through the streets of Dublin, but the story wonders about their character and the motives for their journeying and the thoughts and emotions that arise in their movements and charted meetings along the way. The story arises out of and includes the plot. The narrator of Orley Farm says the “I will not attempt to report the words that passed between [Lady Orme and Lady Mason] for the next half-hour, for they concerned a matter which I may not dare to handle too closely in such pages as these . . .” This narrator acknowledges that the plot might be in the words but that the story exists in the silence. And in Kehlman’s novel, Carl Gauss, when asked what science was responded “If such a man didn’t give up before he reached an understanding, that, perhaps was science.” Science was the story. I recall a statement by Neils Bohr, a physicist whose work helped develop the atomic bomb: “Science was the result of experiments and not reality.” The story arose out of the plot. 

I think I have spent a good part of my life in stories, both those that I have read and those that I have been told. I have narrated not a few stories myself; I am constantly in the process of storying my life. It is the only way I can know my life. I do act in the world throughout my days, measure it as it were, but those actions lack meaning outside of the story I can narrate about them. I sit writing since 6:30 am and paused only to go to the bathroom, but what and why I am writing, where does it all come from is the story. In James McBride’s novel, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, Newspaper, whose nickname is Paper, narrates the news to the community that cannot (or will not) read. But her listeners insist that she make the news be a story. Rusty, one of her listeners, says to Paper, “C’mon Paper . . . story it up like you know how. Put a little pop in it, a little scoop.” Why should she do so, Paper asks, and Rusty answers, “’Cause if you tell it any other way, it’ll sound like a lie.” Unless there is a story all that would exist would be the facts, and the facts are empty and meaningless outside the context from which they were first embedded and from which they are drawn. We demand context for sense, and the narration of that context provides the story. The Stage Manager in Wilder’s Our Town says, “In our town we like to know the facts about everybody,” and though the play displays the facts, that is not the story that the play depicts: it is the lives that Emily comes to understand that are imperfect without the story. Emily says, “They don’t understand much, do they? . . . That’s all human beings are!—Just blind people.” To see only the facts is to miss life. Thus, we narrate, and “story it up . . . put a little pop in it, a little scoop.” The story narrates our life. The narrator of José Saramajo’s novel, Blindness, says, “All stories are like those about the creation of the universe, no one was there, no one witnessed anything, yet everyone knows what happened.”  Nevertheless, we tell a story so that we might know what happened, and until we narrate the story, we don’t know what happened.

So, too, is that the idea in Ann Patchett’s novel Tom Lake. Patchett’s Emily narrates to her adult daughters the story of her summer affair with the television and movie star, Peter Duke, a passionate affair that had ended when Duke had taken up with the actor who had replaced Emily in the play and in life when Emily’s Achilles heel became torn. In modern parlance, Duke ghosted Emily: he stopped all communication with her. Hearing this story, Emily’s daughter, Maisie, responds with anger, but Emily says, “The rage dissipates along with the love, and all we’re left with is a story.” She is narrating that story to her daughters. At the end of the day (and even of a life) the story tells what it all felt like and even what it all might have meant. But, of course, it is only a story. In James McBride’s novel, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store “somebody’s up late and talking” at the livery stable. They are telling a story. All we ever have is the story. We define ourselves by the stories we tell. We know others from the stories they tell. Fatty, in McBride’s The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, had learned that the Nate Timblin he has come to known now was not the same Nate Timblin who had served time in prison. “Rather, he was a story, a wisp, a legend, a force, a fright.” I think the same might be said of us all: we are stories, and our storied lives are the stuff of our dreams.  

Thoreau complains in his journal that he prefers the company of wood nymphs or wood gods because the men “did not inspire me. One or another abused our ears with many words and a few thoughts which were not theirs.” Conversation here was all plot and there was no story. Perhaps we search the world not as did Demosthenes carrying a lantern in search for an honest person but as writers with their metaphorical pens looking for the story.

 

 

On Time in Time

In the essay “Walking” Thoreau writes, “I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least—and it is commonly more than that—sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements.” I have been wondering how Thoreau knew that it was four hours a day or more that he had been out walking. Did Thoreau wear a watch? Was there a clock in his cabin at Walden Pond? Sometimes he walked with a friend: did he then possess something to measure the time? I ask this because increasingly and annoyingly. Too often I complain about time’s controls on me; by time’s pronouncements and imperatives that are delivered and sealed on the multiple devices that ironically I seem incapable of leaving unwound or uncharged, and that I yet carry about and that unfailingly measure my life in minutes and miles.

I realize that I have allowed myself to be controlled by my devices and the announcements it sends to me of its measures and critiques of my life activities. For example, I allow my smart phone to announce the time of day, and to even note what day and month it is; The phone can inform me how many hours and minutes I have slept, can awaken me at the hour I have set for waking, and put me to sleep when at the hour I set. I think that my smart phone can now measure the quality of my sleep, as if I wouldn’t be aware of that character myself! On the phone I can use the timer function to set time-limits to my naps and to correctly time my coffee preparations. The phone measures my daily steps and keeps a record how today’s walk compares to that of yesterday’s amble, to that of last month’s walking, and to even those of the previous year, and then it has the audacity to chastise me if I have not walked as much today as I did yesterday or last month or last year! The phone announces how many calories I have expended for the day, month and year, and offers me a measure of my physical effort, of what it refers to as my METS(?). The only METS of which I am familiar or about which I even care is the baseball team for which I was a fanatical fan until they won the World Series in 1969. The phone tells me how many minutes I have stood (60 minutes), how many minutes I have exercised (74 minutes), and offers an assessment of my cardio fitness, though I don’t know to what the latter refers! I have refused the phone access to my heart rate and blood pressure though I possess a blood pressure machine that also counts the beats of my heart. There is even more recorded and stored on the smart phone but I have reached the end of my patience, technological expertise and ciuriosity. Nonetheless, when I return from my every walk I religiously check the steps report because the goal I have been cautioned is 10,000 steps and 45 minutes a day, and rule-bound that I seem to be I attempt daily to achieve that mark. And now I possess an Apple Watch because I was tricked into thinking that it was free but really I am paying for the line, though what line is meant I am not certain though I believe I have certainly crossed it. A very kind flight attendant showed my what else my Apple Watch can do but I soon lost interest. And while I depend on the devices to govern my enjoyment and measures of time, my mentor Thoreau had looked to the rooster as his measure of time. “Unless our philosophy hears the cock crow in every barn-yard within our horizon, it is belated. That sound commonly reminds us that we are growing rusty and antique in our employments and habits of thought.” Thoreau urges me to live in the present which is apparently all that concerns the cock in his crowing. I seem obsessed with Time and I seem to be focused on something quite apart from the present.

            Thoreau comments that we do not ride the railroad, but that it rides upon us. It is time to which he refers. The appearance of the railroad made an immediate awareness of and obedience to time essential. Trains ran on schedules and if you wanted to ride on one you had better be in the car when the train was leaving the station. Thus, one needed a watch or a well-wound clock. No cock crowing would serve. Factory work contributed to the tyranny of time as did punch cards that recorded the times for entry to and exits from the factory floor. I seem to be governed by my anxieties that causes time to be with me late and soon. I have consider that a mountain top retreat (but not Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain where everything is controlled by a strict time schedule) or a desert escape might be a means of releasing me from the imprisonment I feel regarding time, but I am afraid of being away from the grounding time’s offers and the distractions that all of my devices grant me. Thoreau writes, “It is true, we are but faint-hearted crusaders, even the walkers, nowadays, who undertake no persevering, never-ending enterprises. Our expeditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old hearth-side from which we set out. Half the walk is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return,—prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again,—if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man; then you are ready for a walk.” Alas, I do not think I am such a free man. As for the rooster: “Where he lives no fugitive slave laws are passed.” As for me, I check the news too often. 

Walking, and before that running, has served me as lucky charms: every day that I walked or ran I believed I would not die. At 78 years old I am still walking and still alive, so I think this incantatory practice to be thus far effective. But now the walking seems to count only if I approach the step goal. I often manage to come close and even at times reach ten thousand steps and even more, but the walk is not free. I pay with some peace and some distance from time’s term. Thoreau writes, “I, who cannot stay in my chamber for a single day without acquiring some rust, and when sometimes I have stolen forth for a walk at the eleventh hour, or four o’clock in the afternoon, too late to redeem the day, when the shades of night were already beginning to be mingled with the daylight, have felt as if I had committed some sin to be atoned for . . .” Thoreau, too, understands his walk as charm, but I observe how that his walk is also committed to time: he might achieve his freedom in a walk but it must be accomplished within a specific time. I find that I like to walk early and grow rust in the afternoons. 

There is a natural order to the measurement of time: the stages of the moon, the motion of the earth about the sun that defines a year, though the results of this movement vary according to geography. For example, New York experiences four regular seasons, but Costa Rica seems to enjoy only two: the rainy season and the non-rainy season. Minnesota in my experience has four irregular seasons: a long winter, a day of Spring, several months each of Summer and Fall. The tides are regular but it has been only since the invention of the time piece that this movement can be given a specificity in time.

I think à la Kant, that time is not something we enter or use but something we create though not in the sense as in “I can make time for that . . .” That suggests an already existing schedule into which a new activity can be made to fit. Time already exists in this formulation. To allow time to be defined outside of us restricts me to the prison world of the devices. I grow rusty and lose the present. I am always somewhere else and in another time. Simon and Garfunkel sing, “time, time, time, see what’s become of me,” Sandy Denny sings, “Who knows where the time goes?” Dylan sings, “time passes slowly up here in the mountains.” I am cautioned that “Time waits for no one!” In these thoughts time is external to me and we enter into it: time precedes me. But to ignore time is not to make it disappear as if it was something external to us. Rather, to ignore time is to live in the present: Thoreau writes of the cock’s crow: “He has not fallen astern; he has got up early and kept up early, and to be where he is, is to be in season, in the foremost rank of time.” That is, to be ever in the present and therefore, unconcerned with time.

 

 

 

 

On The Shoemaker and the Elves

For reasons not immediately relevant here, I having been thinking abut the Grimm’s tale “The Shoemaker and the Elves” though I don’t recall where I first learned it. In that story a poor shoemaker laid out the leather for a pair of shoes that he intends to work on in the morning. These were his last pieces of leather and he is so poor that he will not have the means to buy any more leather to make shoes. But when he awoke the next morning and after having eaten his meagre breakfast, he moved to his worktable to begin sewing what seemed to be his final pair of shoes, but to his amazement the shoemaker found that the shoes had already been beautifully finished. He put the shoes in the window of his shop, and soon a wealthy man came into the shop, saw the newly fashioned shoes and thinking them beautiful, and offered for them more money than the shoemaker would ever have thought to charge. With the money he had received the shoemaker purchased leather for another pair of shoes. During the day he cut the leather and laid the leather pieces out on the table expecting to begin work in the morning, but when he awoke in the morning, and having eaten his meagre breakfast prepared by his wife, he moved quickly to his worktable only to again discover a pair of shoes beautifully made. He again placed the shoes in the window and another wealthy man saw them in the window and was so enamored of the pair that, he offered far more money for than them. than the shoemaker would normally have charged for them.

The shoemaker’s reputation grew. Each night he would cut the leather out at night and then retire to bed, and early the next morning when he was about to set to work he found that the shoes had been already made. For a number of nights this continued: the shoemaker would cut the leather for the sewing in the morning, but over night the shoes were beautifully prepared. The shoemaker did not wonder how these shoes were prepared; he only knew that they were beautifully constructed and that he would be offered more money for each pair than he would have have charged for his own work.. But one evening after the man had been cutting out the leather for more shoes, he said to his wife before going to bed, "What do you think if we were to stay up to-night to see who it is that lends us this helping hand?" After dark and at bedtime, the wife lit a candle, and then they hid themselves in a corner of the room behind some clothes which were hanging up there to dry and they watched. At midnight, two handsome little naked men came, sat down at the shoemaker's table, took all the leathers which the shoemaker had cut out for next day’s shoes, and began to stitch, and sew, and hammer so skillfully and so quickly with their little fingers that the shoemaker could not turn away his eyes in amazement. The elves did not stop until all was done, and when they were finished they stood the completed shoes on the table and ran quickly out of the door. For several nights the shoemaker and his wife spied on the elves at work and the next day put the shoes in the window where they were quickly sold. The shoemaker and his wife were no longer poor. One day the shoemaker’s wife said that she thought that it would be kind of her to make clothes for the naked elves and for him to make for them tiny boots. Her husband agreed, and so one night she laid out what they had prepared and before they began work the elves donned the apparel, then prepared the shoes and danced happily out of the workshop fully adorned. And then they never returned. But the man’s shoes had now become so popular that he had more customers than he ever before, and he and his wife became rich.

So what would I say the elves were doing there in the shoemaker’s studio while he and his wife were asleep. How did they find their way into the workshop? And why? I don’t believe that the elves sought to teach the shoemaker his craft, he was asleep while they worked. And besides, he had been making shoes for years. Perhaps the shoemaker might have seen in the quality of the elves’ work techniques the shoemaker could employ to enhance his product’s excellence. Maybe the shoemaker had studied the exceptional quality in the construction sewn into the shoes by the elves and he marveled at a technique with which he was not already familiar but certainly which he could adopt in his practice. I did wonder what the shoemaker imagine was occurring in his workshop every night while he and his wife slept? He was certainly aware that somehow his leather was being crafted into fine shoes ready for sale. Why did he wait so long to find out what occurred in his workshop while he slept that left beautiful crafter shoes. Finally, one day he suggested to his wife that perhaps they hide themselves to see what was happening in the workshop while they slept. And so that night the two lit a candle and hid behind a curtain and waited. They were soon surprised to discover two naked elves dance in and set to work making shoes from the leather the shoemaking had cut and left out on the table. His wife suggested that they make clothes and shoes for the elves who had been so helpful to them, and the man agreed that this would be a wonderful act. Maybe the elves meant in their work to teach the couple the importance of generosity and kindness because once the man and woman made the elves shoes and clothes they never returned.

Now, after the elves had left the shoemaker continued to make and sell shoes. But I wondered why the rich men hadn’t entered his establishment before, paying a greater sum for the shoes than he asked. Was the shoemaker undervaluing his work or was his work not excellent? I wondered how had he and his wife survived prior to the arrival of the elves? Why did the elves need to teach him kindness and generosity. And then I pondered, why him, why did the elves appear to this shoemaker at this time? There must have been other poor shoemakers who might have benefitted from the work of the elves. 

Now, to answer these questions would be the work of midrash, the Jewish scholarly practice of asking questions in the text’s openings and then telling stories with pop and scoop to answer those questions., Out of those stories principles of ethics and manners come to be derived. Midrash is fun. And I suspect there is no end to the answers to the questions a work of art might inspire. Midrash is how stories occur: answering question from the gaps.

 

 

 

Howdy Doody

When I was a child (how many reminiscences start with that phrase!) when someone did something that angered me, I would face my opponent, scrunch up my reddened visage and scream, “You’re a doody-head.” And then I would take back my ball and go home. Now, I don’t think that this indictment referred to the television puppet Howdy Doody, whose show was hosted by Buffalo Bob alongside with Clarabelle, the clown and the eponymous wooden character. I did watch the show with childlike avidity and delight, and even recall begging my parents to enroll me in the seated audience gallery filled with children of my age group, but alas, my enjoyment was to continue seated on the floor before the black and white Philco television set in the family living room. Nor did the barb doody-head refer to the cheerful greeting, howdy doody! employed by my nana, Rose, who exclaimed as I walked through the door into her apartment, “Well, Howdy doody!” as she ushered me into her kitchen and sat me down with a piece of her home-made cake and a glass of milk.. No, my use of the taunt, doody-head, referred to the occasion of my enemy’s head become human excrement. As I got older the insult transformed into the phrase, “You’ve got your head up your ass!”

I recalled this connection with regard to the more recent childish retort rising from the potty mouth of Trump, though certainly not at all an isolated incident in the public discourse of this man. He has been too long at the fair. A Federal judge had ruled against the administration’s actions of deporting Venezuelans against court orders. Trump replied, “This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges I am forced to appear before should be IMPEACHED.” Trump continued, describing Judge James Boasberg as a “Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator who was sadly appointed by Barack Hussein Obama.” In essence and in his frustration Trump was calling Judge James Boasberg a doody-head! And this seems to be Trump’s sole strategy when he experiences any opposition to his plans. The Red Queen would call out, “Off with their heads,” but even Trump cannot (so far) organize the execution of his perceived enemies, though he has thus far fired a large contingent of government workers. But who knows what he intends as we head into the reign of this wannabe autocrat . . . But to my mind, Trump’s rage mirrored that of a six-year-old child who had been frustratingly resisted by somebody. You’re a doody-head, he screamed. Except he is 78 years old and the President of a nation founded on the premise of division of powers in the branches of a democratic government!
            Enough. I’ve wasted a good hour of my time thinking about Trump. I’ve got to step out of the muck and engage in something lovely.

Lotus Eaters

   

  I think frequently here about the lotus eaters. We have been living for the past four weeks in lotus land—Puntarenas Province, Costa Rica. We stayed here last year for seven weeks and the year prior for seven weeks in Guanacaste Province. We traveled a bit about the country, at least on the country’s Pacific coast: walked the rain forest in Monteverde and the coffee and chocolate plantations there; there we hiked a mountainous trail at El Tigre where we suffered serious fatigue and where one of us almost collapsed. She was transported to a safe place via zip line bicycle! The other one was left to complete the walk alone and walking the last 350 meters sludging through the mud and brambles feared suffering a heart attack and hoped that in that event he might be found. To celebrate our survival we dined that evening in a restaurant in the trees and enjoyed a very lovely meal. We have visited Manuel Antonio National Park, spent a few days in the city of La Fortuna and stayed there in a hotel whose window overlooked the Arenal Volcano. In the late 1960s the Arenal erupted and destroyed the town of La Fortuna, but the volcano has been quiescent in the years since and the city has been reconstructed; we spent a day on the beach at Tortuga Island; we hiked the park surrounding Rincon de la Viejo and in the area experienced a volcanic mud bath and natural hot springs. We drove All Terrain Vehicles all three years, and we have stayed in the capital city of San Jose and toured the Pos Volcano.

We have not been completely sedentary; indeed, it almost could appear that we have been very active, but actually for the majority of the time during our weeks-long stays, we lie about amid the lotus blossoms. Twice a day we walk to the beach carrying our beach chairs and water bottles and sit comfortably in the sun and sand for 90-120 minutes. I have slobbered my face and body with SPF-50 sun screen, though I never am not worried about skin cancer, a result of a careless and vain youth on the beaches of Long Island and some bad genes: my legs are splotched with what the dermatologist refers to as ‘wisdom spots’ but which know as blemishes. Sometimes we head into the ocean, she for play and me for a cooling, and then we return to the chairs where we sit until we gather the energy to retread our steps and return to the casa where we will we shower and have a(nother) lie down. We read and write, enjoy a quiet cocktail hour, dine in or out and retire early for the evening. And then on the next day we push repeat. And regardless of our forays out, we remain for the most part sedentary, and it seems to me that with every new day our lethargies increase. 

                I have been thinking about the lotus eaters. In Homer’s The Odyssey Ulysses and his men go ashore on the island and having eaten of the lotus plants they become languid and lose their desire to raise themselves from their lethargic comfort and continue their voyage home. Homer writes that Ulysses’s men went ashore “and went about among the Lotus-eaters, who did them no hurt, but gave them to eat of the lotus, which was so delicious that those who ate of it left off caring about home, and did not even want to go back and say what had happened to them.” They would go no more to roaming. 

Alfred Lloyd Tennyson addresses the same topic in his poem, “The Lotos-Eaters.” In Tennyson’s work Ulysses’s crew having arrived at the island of the lotus blossoms the sailors want to abandon their world-weariness and live forever eating of the blossoms. They say, 

Death is the end of life; ah, why 

Should life all labour be? 

Let us alone. Time driveth onward fast, 

And in a little while our lips are dumb. 

Let us alone. What is it that will last? 

All things are taken from us, and become 

Portions and parcels of the dreadful past. 

Let us alone. What pleasure can we have 

To war with evil? Is there any peace 

In ever climbing up the climbing wave? 

All things have rest, and ripen toward the grave 

In silence; ripen, fall and cease: 

Give us long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful ease.

Weary of war and strife, with the constant effort that a life of responsibility demands, of inevitable pain and loss only to be doomed to die, the sailors beg to be left alone. Three times in the stanza they make this demand: they would go no more to roaming. In these times I appreciate their wish to withdraw from the difficulties life means.

The presence of the lotus eaters appears continuously in literature. Chapter 5 of James Joyce’s Ulysses addresses Homer’s episode of the Lotus Eaters as Leopold Bloom wanders seemingly aimlessly about Dublin before attending to Digby’s funeral. Bloom is to keep away from his home where his wife Molly will be meeting for a sexual tryst with her manager, Boylan. Joyce refers to this episode as “The Lotus Eaters." In the chapter Bloom's daylong journey through Dublin begins with thoughts concerning drugs and other strategies for avoiding reality. 

            In another literary reference, in Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain an implicit reference is made to the lotus eaters by Ludovico Settembrini, the Italian humanist intellectual, a patient/client of the sanitorium being treated along with other sufferers for tuberculosis. Settembrini says, “Analysis as an instrument of enlightenment and civilization is good in so far as it shatters absurd convictions, acts as a solvent upon natural prejudices, and undermines authority; good, in other words, in that it sets free, refines, humanizes, makes slaves ripe for freedom. But it is bad, very bad, in so far as it stands in the way of action, cannot shape the vital forces, maims life at its roots. Analysis can be a very unappetizing affair, as much so as death, with which it may well belong—allied to the grave and its unsavory anatomy.” He argues that music, too, lulls the listener and leads to torpidity. Settembrini is arguing that analysis can act as the flower of the lotus plant: a narcotic that depletes one of the desire to act. There are critics of postmodernism who might agree with Settembrini. And it was Bertoldt Brecht who argued that catharsis as the result of experiencing theatrical tragedy also serves as a lotus flower draining the desire to act as the emotionally drained audience exits the play. Brecht believed that theater should inspire committed action.

            However, in his poem “Ulysses” Tennyson has offered an alternative to the lethargy of the sailors who eat of the lotus blossoms. Ulysses exhorts his comrades, 

Come, my friends,

'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

This is the opposite of quietism, of torpidity, of lotus eating. Ulysses’ invitation is to action, to risk, to discovery, and to exploration. There would be no time for indolence, says Ulysses. We must go a-roaming. 

I think the urge to eat of the lotus blossom and forget all cares and responsibility is ever-present. Life is hard here out of the garden. In Costa Rica it is so simple to lay about, to do little, to eat of the lotus blossom. To amble to the beach and then amble home, not to rest from a weariness of doing but to continue to do nothing. Like Ulysses, I have not the strength which in old days moved earth and heaven, if ever I had that strength and the inclination to lie-about is strong and alluring. But I have much sympathy with Ulysses’ call to action, an acceptance that we are what we are, creatures with will and longings to move out and explore and even to suffer. Yes, life might be hard and death our end, but though weakened with toil and age we still possess the strengths to struggle, to explore and discover new worlds. Lying amongst the lotus blossoms there is no energy to set sail still, and it takes a great exercise of will to put away the lotus blossoms and to set sail again. 

But sometimes I just don't have the will.