Social Distancing

Social distancing, as opposed to self-quarantining, is an interesting concept. It promises company but denies the possibility of relationship. Across the way from me now, in the condo complex beyond my deck, an older couple (well, perhaps close to my age, but then who is my age really?) having brought out their patio furniture sit drinking red wine and reading (their phones or iPads), sometimes commenting to each other but having an intimate moment. I sit on my first-floor deck having disinfected my furniture and sip a glass (or two) of white wine,. I am (now) writing this blog post having first glanced through my New York Review of Books, and I am eating potato chips (a much greater quantity than the recommended daily portion) and listening to Folk Alley. From the couple across the way I am fifty- or sixty-feet distant—a safe space given the onset of the coronavirus in our time. Were this not a moment of self-distancing I could call out and offer an invitation (that likely would be politely refused because their environment has greater sun) but maybe they would offer me a chair at their cocktail hour and we might establish the beginnings of some relationship that would continue through the blossoming Spring and extend into the Midwest summer and even into Fall months. Next winter we might sit before our respective fireplaces bemoaning or celebrating the season. But now is a time for outdoor cocktail hours, and in this time of pandemic the social time has been given the designation, quaran-tail hour. Ah, now I see that another obviously couple has joined the first—they brought their own cooler and glasses!), but they are sitting at appropriate social distance limits. It looks odd. And in the absence of my blue-tooth speaker playing the radio I could hear every word they speak.

     Of course, self-quarantining would refuse all potential nearness. Hence the developing ubiquity of the on-line quaran-tail hour.
     I am considering that social distancing was created by Henry David Thoreau. He writes, “If we would enjoy the most intimate society with that in each of us which is without, or above, being spoken to, we must not only be silent, but commonly so far apart bodily that we cannot possible hear each other’s voice in any case.” On the one hand ,Thoreau suggests that our sentences need enough space to roll out to their full length, but on the other hand sometimes he means that our thoughts just ought to remain within us to ensure their purity. Hence, we remain silent. Interestingly, D.W. Winnicott in the next century suggested that the existence of what he refers to as the True Self requires that the individual person know that it must never be communicated with or be influenced by external reality. “Each individual,” Winnicott writes, “is an isolate, permanently non-communicating, permanently unknown, in fact, unfound.” Paradoxically, though that self remains hidden it would be found. Wendy Leeser refers to this paradox as “hiding in plain sight,” where the artist in her work produces something that communicates but that protects the privacy of the completely subjective relationship the individual enjoys with objects without really having to attend to reality. Winnicott says, “I suggest that in health there is a core to the personality that corresponds to the self of the split personality. I suggest that the core never communicates with the world of perceived objects, and that the individual person knows that it must never be communicated with or be influenced by external reality.” Rather, that private self’s voice, defended by what Winnicott calls a false self, might be heard in the creative work of the individual as s/he enjoys the materials of the world because they are there to be found.  Social distancing par excellence!

This Morning . . .

The title of James Baldwin’s short story “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon,” references the traditional folk song “Tell Old Bill” that recounts the lynching of a black man who didn’t heed the warning to “Leave those downtown women alone.” Bill’s body is brought back slung on unceremoniously on a wagon. Those women against he was warned were colored white! Baldwin’s story recounts the last night in Paris of a Jazz singer returning with his son, Paul, to the United States for a contracted nightclub engagement. I suppose the line in the song refers to Bill’s setting out in the morning and coming home in the evening . . . and his violent death so, so soon. Returning to the United States returns the narrator too soon to the environment where the reality of lynching and race hatred exists as part of the air he breathes. Baldwin’s story concerns at least the freedom that the narrator has felt in Paris and the transition to America that would return him and his son this morning, this evening so soon to prejudice. The narrator says, “I always feel that I don’t exist there, except in someone else’s—usually dirty—mind.” Though he is returning with his son, the narrator also states that he doesn’t want to raise his son in the United States and under those conditions.
     There is more complexity in the story than I want to offer here: Baldwin’s insight into history, into the culture of America and its race relations is profound, but I don’t mean this post as another exegetical study of a beautiful short story, “This Morning, This Evening, So Soo.” But in my never-ending study that there is nothing new under the sun, I offer this. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ takes the title of his book, Between the World and Me, from Richard Wright’s poem published in Partisan Review in the 1935 July/August issue. The poet comes upon the scene of a lynching and the evidence of the crime sets him apart from this physical and emotional world:

And one morning while in the woods I stumbled
    suddenly upon the thing,
Stumbled upon it in a grassy clearing guarded by scaly
    oaks and elms
And the sooty details of the scene rose, thrusting
    themselves between the world and me....

  

The poem narrates the scene and the pain of the tortured Black victim. Coates’ book, written as a letter to his son describes his own separation from the world that becomes epitomized in the senseless but unpunished murder of Prince Jones by the police. For Coates, Jones’ murder is another iteration of the lynching of a Black man by rabid White racists. But then I read in Baldwin’s short story published in the Summer, 1960 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, a description of a moment when he stood in Paris on the Port Royal Bridge with his white wife, Harriet. And the narrator says, “Never, in all my life, until that moment, had I been alone with anyone. The world has always been with us, between us, defeating the quarrel we could not achieve, and making love impossible.” What is acknowledged here is the existential barrier that in the United States prevents honest relations between him and everyone else. “During all the years of my life, until that moment, I had carried the menacing, the hostile, killing world with me everywhere. Not matter what I was doing or saying or feeling, one eye had always been on the world—the world I had learned to distrust almost as soon as I learned my name . . . the white man’s world.” But on that bridge at that moment on the bridge in Paris he experienced for the first time a freedom from that world that had forever threatened him and any honest relationship he could establish with a woman and by implication with any man as well. Standing with Harriet on the bridge the narrator experiences a moment of absolute intimacy: “For the first time, the first time, felt that the woman was not, in her own eyes or in the eyes of the world, degraded by my presence.”
     The insight Baldwin offers here and elsewhere in his writings into race relations in the United States is profound. He understood not only how they existed then but how they would continue to play out in the future. Baldwin prefigures the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Philandro Castile, Terrance Franklin and others. It interests me that Coates does not make reference to James Baldwin whose prescience about the United States continues to astonish me. He knew then what has since becomes reality on the streets in the cities of this country. 

The Mary Ellen Carter Rise Again

In these difficult times I think of the Mary Ellen Carter. In Stan Rogers’ song the Mary Ellen Carter, the craft piloted by a drunken captain and smashed first mate runs aground in a gale and sinks below. The owners of the Mary Ellen Carter announce that they are done with the wreck, collect the insurance monies, and laugh derisively at those who loved the Mary Ellen Carter who pleaded with them to raise and recover the ship. Refusing to do, the owners cast out them out of the office. But the friends loved that boat that often saved them through a gale, and they vow to raise the Mary Ellen Carter again.
     Well, the Mary Ellen Carter might be a sunken boat, it serves also as a vital and potent symbol of resistance to power and of loyalty to community. Refusing to accept her defeat, the friends of the Mary Ellen Carter spend the Spring months preparing the submerged boat to surface again despite the difficulties that confront them in that task “Three dives a day in hard hat suit and twice I've had the bends./Thank God it's only sixty feet and the currents here are slow/Or I'd never have the strength to go below./But we've patched her rents, stopped her vents, dogged hatch and porthole down./Put cables to her, 'fore and aft and girded her around.” The work was arduous and dangerous and painful, but the Mary Ellen Carter had been their strength over the years and now they would work to save the ship even with an awareness that it would no longer head out onto the seas but would rather do service at the dock: a restaurant, a coffee house, a place of community, quiet and rest. She must not be forgotten!
     The Mary Ellen Carter, abandoned as useless junk by “the laughing, drunken rats who left her to a sorry grave” had to be recovered not for its future service on the seas but for her places in the hearts and minds of those who loved her. They could not let her suffer ignominious defeat. Nor would they allow themselves to be beaten. Rogers sings:
     And you, to whom adversity has dealt the final blow
     With smiling bastards lying to you everywhere you go
     Turn to,and put out all your strength of arm and heart and brain
     And like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again.

I gain strength and hope every time I hear that song, and for more than thirty years I have listened to Stan Rogers sing it. Today I sit in social isolation in the attempt to arrest the spread of Covid-19. The world has come to almost a complete halt and the economies of nations are near collapse. I wonder what the world will be like when this iteration of the plague will end. Oh, it will end eventually one way or another and we will again return to the streets and the coffee houses; to doctor and dentist offices; to supermarkets and clothes stores; to hair salons and barbershops. “But what does that mean—'plague’? Just life, no more than that,” says Dr. Rieux in Camus’s novel The Plague. Even before the Mary Ellen Carter, there was the plague of Oran, and Dr. Rieux’s chronicle of it “could not be one of a final victory. It could be only the record of what had had to e done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts, despite their personal afflictions, but all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers.”
     Rise again, rise again - though your heart it be broken
     And life about to end
     No matter what you've lost, be it a home, a love, a friend.
     Like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again.
I don’t know to what extent I can have the strength still to go below and patch her rents and stop her vents . . . I wonder what strength I have yet to raise the Mary Ellen Carter. But I am weary of the smiling bastards lying to me everywhere I go: in the newspapers, on the televisions and radios. As Father Paneloux urges,  I must choose to at least be the one who stays, whatever that could now mean, and despite adversity and lying bastards, do what I can to raise the Mary Ellen Carter. 

The Corona Virus

Of course, I am worried about Covid-19, the culprit in the pandemic. I am over 60 years of age and aside from real physical ailments like lower back pain I suffer from a hypochondria. One would think that as a hypochondriac a new virus would inspire me, but really, at my back I always hear time’s winged chariot . . . so at my side today rests a thermometer and a hand sanitizer. As usual, my temperature remains at 97.9 degrees but who knows . . . it might rise to 98 degrees. 

     The impact of the virus is staggering: newspapers report the consequences to the airlines, the sports arenas, the conferences, Disneyland and Broadway, etc., and I worry about the economic impact these cancellations will have on the entire population that actually serves and services those venues The hardships will run very deep and no one will not experience suffering from the economic fall- out of the pandemic.  The entire global economy is interconnected and what troubles one sector ripples through to many other segments and levels. The shelves at the supermarket today were becoming bare, and hand sanitizers are as precious today as diamonds. And equally as rare: some stores are backordered until next week. My local pharmacies laughed when I asked if they had any in stock.

     But thankfully the Fox News idiots have declared the whole virus scare a hoax and that in fact there is no worry. One absurd woman on Fox news actually claimed without shame remarkably, that the clamor regarding the corona virus only served as a second attempt to impeach Trump and was all a hoax. If only it were so! Of course, news of the big deception is not much comfort to those who have already died from the virus or to the 100,000 people (a number that hourly rises) who are infected with the virus. HOW DAMN STUPID DO THESE PEOPLE HAVE TO BE BEFORE OTHER PEOPLE STOP PAYING ATTENTION TO THEM. HOW IGNORANT DO PEOPLE HAVE TO BE TO CONTINUE TO ACCEPT THESE ABSURD STORIES?  Colin Burrow in the London Review of Books perceptively argues that liars succeed by addressing the beliefs of those to whom they lie. The Trump base actually want to believe that all of Trump’s problems stem from (at the minimum) an animus against him. His base stands with him and the ideologies he espouses: xenophobia, misogyny, racism, anti-Semitism, and virulent nationalism. His base, Republicans and neo-Fascists mostly, cannot acknowledge that the man suffers from a disquieting narcissistic behavioral disorder that borders on the paranoid. Or that his knowledge of affairs that concern the nation as a whole is very, very limited and organized by his own narcissistic beliefs. He knows everything and cannot err about anything, he claims. 

     His lies speak from an anti-intellectualism that avers that no one can tell anyone anything because everyone is already an authority on everything. This sounds remarkably like the Puritan belief that the individual needs no priest to mediate a connection with God; each individual has the capacity to enter into a personal relationship with the Redeemer. I think we’ve learned a bit about redeemers of late. 

     But this analysis gives too much credit to Trump, I think, however, because for at least the three plus years of his presidency he has not ever acknowledged that he might ever have erred, he admits to no doubt about anything he thinks or does, requires absolutely no assistance in his decision making, and knows more than any expert about everything. The Puritans at least admitted to wrongdoing and sin, but Trump remains without sin and without fault. This stance is already sinful! He is dangerous and the response he has organized to the pandemic is emblematic of his incompetence and defining characterological narcissism. And his minions have proven themselves cowardly and immoral.

Mendocino

I awoke to the McGarrigle Sisters singing “Talk to Me of Mendocino,” a heartbreakingly beautiful expression of longing. I think it was this evening’s sleep soundtrack. It would seem in the song that she means to head west back to Mendocino from the state of old New York where she has been residing contentedly since first she started roaming. Suddenly, however, she has become homesick and wants to head back west. 

     But I began to wonder: Why does she ask her companion to talk of Mendocino. Does she need to be convinced to undertake the journey by verbal images of the place? She apparently possesses clear images of Mendocino. Or do the images require speech to have some actuality? Is it talk that is necessary to inspire her journeying? Or will the talk substitute for the travel? And I wonder why does she ask “Must I wait, must I follow”? The song suggested that she has been the initiator of the travel and so I wonder why she seems troubled by a compulsion to follow? Or is it the other who wants to wait but she is anxious to set out for Mendocino and the talk will inspire the other to join in the return? The paradoxical nature of her questions, whether she must wait or follow suggests a kind of emotional paralysis. Does she want to go back to Mendocino or just to be talked to about it? If I punctuate the line “Won’t you say come with me?” with a comma after ‘say,’ then she asks a question; but if there is no comma then she makes a statement and requests that her companion invite her to join the journey back to Mendocino. In either case, however, she requires invitation.

     Perhaps longing exists in the tension between gojng and staying. And this travel need not be merely a physical journeying but can be embedded in feeling. She desires to go but must be convinced; she wishes to stay but feels compelled to go. The images of home (and not the home away from home!) draw her to Mendocino, but there is an underlying lethargy despite her Desire. I wonder: if she had come of age in New York, then does she head back to Mendocino to enter an adulthood or does she imagine a return to childhood. Her return Mendocino will be permanent: even as she anticipates the sun rising over the redwoods she asserts that she will not rise to leave Mendocino again. 

     And so it would seem that it is she who talks of Mendocino. Talk substitutes for action. I do wonder what she really wants to hear. 

Earworm "Dead Flowers"

Earworms are song tunes that repeat in the mind even when the music has not been played or has long ceased to play on any device. Often I awaken with a song in my mind that tends to play and replay throughout my morning ablutions and coffee preparations. Sometimes the song plays even at the beginnings of my writing day. I attribute the presence of the earworm to its situation as the sound track to my dreaming.  I have been thinking (!) that I might track the particular worm and see what it might say about my dream and my life
     Last night’s worm was the song “Dead Flowers” from the Rolling Stones album Sticky Fingers. This is not a happy song: Susie is a seemingly upper-class woman sitting in her silk upholstered chair conversing with rich folk while the narrator hangs out with his “ragged company.” Susie rides in her rose-pink Cadillac on Kentucky Derby day while the narrator shoots up heroin in a basement room. Yet he demands that Susie take him down, and I am wondering where ‘down’ might be here:

Take me down little Susie, take me down
I know you think you're the queen of the underground
And you can send me dead flowers every morning
Send me dead flowers by the mail
Send me dead flowers to my wedding
And I won't forget to put roses on your grave

     To the fellow getting high in the basement, Susie is a phony: she thinks she is the queen of the underground—of the denizens of the underworld--but it is really he who is the one in the underground basement while she parades in luxury up on the street. At the moment he is the lord of the underground. And this earworm reminds me of Miss Lonely in Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone:” Once upon a time you dressed so fine/You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?/People’d call, say, ‘Beware doll, you’re bound to fall’/You thought they were all kiddin’ you.” She was once haughty and contemptuous, and now she has fallen low, even perhaps into the underground. In “Dead Flowers” “down’ appears to means “up:” the narrator asks to be raised up to respectability by this phony queen of the underground. He asks that she send him dead flowers, once that were beautiful but now dear are meaningless, ugly and lifeless. I suspect those dead flowers would come from her home where the flowers have since died. I think that his request is meant as an insult. But he will put roses on her grave: despite his drug addiction he will survive, but her . . . well it would seem not!
     So I’m wondering why this earworm occupied my dream world. I wonder if the appearance in the dream of a long-time friend who suddenly broke off communication with me without explanation accounts for the worm. The song defines the end of our relationship and my feelings concerning the break-up. There is anger in the charge to “Take me down,” and in the biting condescension explicit in the promise that despite Susie’s stature it is the narrator who will marry and thrive enough to send roses for her grave. The anger in the vow to put flowers on her grave is palpable. Sometimes I have considered that anger serves as a mask for fear, but as sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, so sometimes anger is just anger.
     And Susie’s affectedness and insincerity remind me of the politicians who espouse their love for democracy as they strive to destroy it. They people my nightmares nightly. They can send us dead flowers every day by the US Mail and deliver dead flowers at our weddings, but finally we will celebrate their demise and with contempt put roses on their graves!