Things . . .

Things that I am concerned about today:

1. My sourdough rye bread, though excellent tasting, isn’t sour enough and so I went on-line to learn how to sour-up. Of course, that is revealing that I ended Passover a bit early. Maybe my sourdough starter is paying the price for my apostasy. When my children were growing up in Menomonie I baked all the bread, muffins, etc. in the house. I awoke every morning, wrote for a while and then prepared either scones, muffins, pancakes or waffles. I baked breads of all sorts, pizzas and calzones, and had all the equipment and implements of construction necessary to pretend to be a skilled baker. When I moved to an apartment and the children were no longer at home I gave up the practice and equipment, but with the past several months—even before COVID-19—I decided to return to baking—Now it appears the rest of the country has followed suit and I am having trouble getting yeast and white flours, and daily in the New York Times there are articles about baking bread, etc. 
2. It is April 14 and it has snowed too frequently over the past two weeks. Of course, the snow doesn’t last very long because the temperature has warmed the sidewalks. And so a 5”-6” snow on Sunday is gone by Tuesday, and so the current precipitation is merely Nature asserting its primacy. Since I have been in the Midwest (30 years) there has always been a heavy Spring snow, once a storm of 12” as late as May 5.
3. I was doing my yoga here this morning and I wondered what the protocol for practice is regarding farting. Of course, in a class with other people it would be a frowned upon practice, but here I am all by myself and I don’t really mind. But still . . .
4. My younger daughter turns 26 years old on Saturday. Her birthday has usually fallen during Passover and so she never had a party on her birthday. This year her birthday is post-Passover and she can’t even have a party. She will nevertheless turn 26 anyway. For her birthday she requested a subscription to the New York Review of Books. Score one for my influence.
5. John Prine’s death depressed me greatly. One thing it means is that my world has grown that much smaller. They have been featuring his music since his death on the radio programs to which I listen: his irony runs deep. I have enjoyed especially listening again to “Come Back to Us Barbara Lewis Hare Krishna Beauregard.” When I have heard contemporary music (99% of which I really don’t like or appreciate) I don’t hear the irony I love in Prine’s work. Dylan too writes with an ironic sense: from the very beginning and “John Birch Blues.” Slowly my generation is leaving. I remember when my mother died at the age of 90 years old there was nobody left to attend her funeral except us. Especially now I feel the isolation that results from the deaths all about. For years I have suffered the deaths of so many performers in the world of music in which I grew up: Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, Jim Croce, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Tim Hardin, Nick Drake, Sandy Denny, Elvis Presley, Tim Buckley . . . the list from those days is so long. These deaths always made me sad. But I was myself young, and the reality of mortality was not part of my thinking. Then the world continued to expand; music played a significant part in that expansion and it kept on coming. Now, mortality closes in on me, and the way of life that Prine represented—one suffused with irony, with sympathy, with humor and humility—has with his death become reduced. With his death I have lost yet another voice with which I grew up, a voice which sustained me despite the deaths of so many others.
6. I don’t own a scale. I used to use the professional one at the gym but it is now closed. I can’t imagine how heavy I am becoming. I have resisted bringing ice cream into the house but the quantity of bread, then matzah and macaroons and now bread and cookies again threatens to move me in the direction of 350 pounds. Not exactly accurate—but except for walks twice a day now and yoga I sit around and eat.
7. Rereading Camus’s The Plague. Depressing on so many levels, but the main one right now concerns how prescient Camus was concerning the various responses to plague. I have been disappointed in other books I have picked up: The Man Who Saw Everything, Deborah Levy; Normal People, Sally Rooney. I did start reading and am still reading Don Quixote which I am enjoying but it is so long and heavy. Not a book to take to bed. I purchased for some reason that eludes me now a novel by George Gissing, a name I probably recognized from my undergraduate days in Victorian literature class but whose work I have never read. I am getting desperate—but I do like 19^th century novels—really like Anthony Trollope despite his anti-Semitism. But who wasn’t and isn’t anti-Semitic?
8. Wanting to get to #10!
9. Wisconsin voters elected a Democrat to the Supreme Court in an upset victory. This portends well for November. Maybe people are getting angry at Republicans for their stupidities, their anti-democratic actions, their lies. Well, I can hope! And now people are getting angry at the shut down and the right wing organizes protest demonstrations. Dr. Rieux the narrator of The Plague says, “The evil that is in the world always come of ignorance . . . the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill . . .”  Enough said.
10. Finally, #10.

Blue Ribbons

Let us see where we are at present. I think this is week four of the shut down and the imperative for social distancing. The global economy has ground to a halt though I know that it will finally rebound again, but its decline reminds me how fragile our comforts are. The restaurants, the bookstores, the shoe stores, the hair stylists and barber shops; the coffee houses, the health clubs, religious institutions; schools and universities, all, all have been shuttered.. Many educational organizations have turned to on-line delivery systems and I fear that what might be learned from these methodologies is how much money can now be saved and therefore, accumulated by eliminating the actual classrooms. The teaching profession will be decimated and though all children will experience deprivation, children with the greatest need with also suffer the greatest loss. Bookrooms will become obsolete, supplies of paper and writing utensils will disappear; on-line access will be available to only those with the available financial resources; laboratory experiences will be lost; and conversations will be negotiated through heavily mediated programs that will compromise spontaneity and trial and error talk. The losses are without number.The definitions of education will require change.
     And more: restaurants now offer curb-side pick-up, and there is the suspicion that rather than open for customers when the pandemic ends they will continue serving only curbside take-out and another workplace and social setting will be lost. Bookstores also have begun to offer curbside pick-up, and the joyous experience of browsing and discovering a new book will cease to offer pleasure and surprise delight to the population. New and not best-selling authors will become invisible and unread.
     The streets here have become eerily empty: Ford Parkway, where I live, a street that is usually traffic heavy is now devoid of cars and trucks. I should not touch the walk button without gloves or with a disinfectant wipe, but then there is no cause to wait for the light to change: there is no vehicle coming in either direction. Pedestrians are few in number though children on their bicycles or in small groups stand I think too close together. But isn’t that always the way with children . . . mostly they remain oblivious or unconcerned of mortality.  The retailers, except for the pharmacy, the supermarkets and liquor store (thank goodness) are closed, and the latter also offers curb-side pick-up. In the irregular and carefully choreographed trips to the supermarkets, my fellow shoppers and I are only adults. Of course, I shop during the first hour reserved for older folks, but I suspect that few would carry their young children into such an environment even in more convenient daylight hours. We move about in the aisles cautiously, wary of each other. About half of us are masked but our eyes flash about in suspicion. “Is she sick? Does he have it?” “Keep a safe distance of six feet! We recently viewed the 1978 version of Invasion of the body Snatchers.” That is our reality now: people may look normal but they may not be so.
     What our condition now seems pointedly described in Camus’s novel The Plague.” There, the narrator describes the experience of forced isolation—what we have described as self-quarantine and self-sheltering—as exile. Of the many deprivations the pandemic has caused, exile seems to be the most serious. The townspeople came to know “the incorrigible sorry of all prisoners in exile, which is to live in company with a memory that serves no purpose.” Memory holds us to a past that is now gone, and memory should anticipate for us a future. But our present situation means that the future can’t have much if anything to do with the past. As exiles, then, we are condemned to the present that now (an irony term itself) exists wholly out of time. I think the situation is worse than it was for Tantalus: we cannot be even tempted . . . we feel hopeless.
     But maybe this need not be ultimately so. Ironically there might be something interesting to observe here. In the chapter “Where I Lived and What I Lived For” Thoreau writes, “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.” During this time of shuttered doors and social distancing, we are learning what may be essential and what is no longer for our lives. I must consider what I really do need and of what can I let go? Thoreau also remarked that “The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” For the sake of our lives in these times we have forgone many things, decided that our lives should not be exchanged for them, and again, perhaps, have learned a different life. When the epidemic ends, we should be different folks. I think we might be learning the cost of things right now.
     Through my mind I have been listening to lines from Paul Siebel’s song, “Then Came the Children.” He sings, “We can teach them nothing nothing/ but survival in a desert bare,/ But they can teach us how to love,/ And live and tie bright ribbons in our hair.” I think that we should learn to do those things; we have need of bright ribbons, but today I miss the children.

Just sayin' . . .

On April 29, 1962 President John F. Kennedy hosted a dinner for Nobel Prize winners of the Western Hemisphere. In his introductory talk he said, “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” He was referring to his guests and not himself.

     On April 4, 1968, upon hearing of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy then campaigning in Indianapolis said, “My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote: "In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God. What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.”

     On June 26, 2015 President Barack Obama sang “Amazing Grace” during the eulogy at the memorial service for Congresswoman Clementa Pickney who was murdered in a Church in South Carolina by racist Dylan Storm Roof.    
     And every day I feel assaulted and demoralized by the lies of a President who suffers from a serious narcissistic personality disorder, lies that have led to the deaths of too many people in the United States. A President who I suppose has never read Aeschylus and perhaps cannot pronounce his name; one who certainly would never surround himself by Nobel Prize winners whose presence would expose the fact that his self-declared genius is hardly that; a President whose racism has worked to exacerbate an already troubled and fractured society; and whose language would keep him from the altar of most religious institutions. 

I’m just saying . . . 

Week Three

Having read about plague for years—Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, Camus’ The Plague, several historical accounts in books and articles concerning the Black Plague in Europe, even one more recently in The London Review of Books recounting the experience of the plague in Florence, Italy; I am more than a bit surprised to discover myself living through a plague-like pandemic (a redundancy?)  that has basically shuttered the world. Economies have collapsed, stores are shuttered, places of congregating have been rendered empty. The shelves of supermarkets are often spare and the often masked shoppers keep six feet distant and look warily about wondering “Who has it?” We watched the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers last week and I considered that we are now living it. And you who philosophize, disgrace . . . Trump belatedly acknowledges the enormity of the crisis but assumes absolutely no responsibility for the government’s lethargic and unwilling response to the threat!

     I contacted my health care providers not because I was ill but because I was concerned about their healths. Both responded that despite the strain they remained in good health and both doctors expressed hope that either Jehovah or the Lord (depending on their particular faiths) would help us through this crisis. I thought it an odd response, frankly. They hoped some God would bring some relief without considering that the God on whom they looked for succor from the plague was the same God who had the power to inflict the plague on the Earth. Their God was only the God of healing and health and never the God of plague and destruction. Despite Walt Whitman, I don’t think the contradiction is viable. Rather, I turn to Emmanuel Levinas’ thoughts in “To Love the Torah More than God.” He writes “The condition in which victims find themselves in a disordered world that is to say, in a world where goodness does not succeed in being victorious, is suffering. This reveals a God who, while refusing to manifest Himself in any way as a help, directs His appeal to the full maturity of the integrally responsible person.” Their work as doctors will help us through this plague. Ours is certainly a disordered world exacerbated all the more so at this horrific moment of plague, and certainly if there is a God then that God does not reveal itself. And if I believed in a god then it would be an invisible one that could only manifest itself in the face of the Other. But I am no longer convinced . . .

     This is the third week of social distancing and isolation and thoughts turn more morbid than merry.