Mid-Fall musings

It isn’t a big apartment—not even 1300 square feet. A kitchen, small dining area, living room, two bedrooms and bathrooms. Oh, and a small but enclosed laundry area. The whole apartment is carpeted with a beige-hued wool. And that carpet is carpeted with editions of the New York Review of Books and London Review of Books that extend back months! In whatever room I settle I have the option of a past issue of either journal. And there are also stacks of books—novels, today some memoirs for a course in at the U in which I am enrolled, memoirs at present but at other times the several surfaces have been littered with other genres. On the dining room table lays the daily New York Times and on a coffee table is the current Nation. And I am comforted by the silent company. There is no shortage of ready reading material. My floor to ceiling bookshelves sag under the weight of scholarly and frivolous tomes. And I must not forget the iPhone and the iPad, the former which I carry about and the latter always near at hand. In every room is a smart speaker that plays my music and holds back the silence. 

            But what I also seem to be saying is that I often feel that I am trying to fill the space with voices so as not to be alone or to be caught doing nothing in particular. To be just sitting and being still. To enjoy my comfort in being just solitary. As if to do so is somehow reprehensible. Emerson cautions that a thinking man is always alone and I think of myself as a thinking man. I believe that often my thoughts bud best when I am by myself, but it often occurs that I am alone when in the midst of a crowd and then I feel alive with the thoughts that circulate in and through me. Like even now as I write this seeming rambling post. Thoreau comments that “What do we want most to dwell near to  . . . but to the perennial source of our life, whence in all our experience we have found that to issue. This will vary with different natures, but this is the place where a wise man will dig his cellar.” I have no cellar, but I have dug my cellar well and. At times I clear off the cellar’s door, put some of the older journals into the recycling bin and undertake to replenish the soils with other materials and matters.

            Tonight is Halloween. It has been many years since any child came trick or treating at my door., For years we lived in a rural environment and there were no witches and goblins ringing the front door bell. Many, many years. My own children were driven to neighborhoods to fill their bags. Sweetly we ate for a few days. Tonight again no one will ring my doorbell. Perhaps I will read a frightening story like Poe’s “The Tell-tale Heart” or the front pages of today’s newspapers.

And then it will be November, and I will gather from out of doors my things and add too many of them onto the already doubly carpeted apartment floors. I will renew my subscriptions and settle into the reading chair and await the first snow. 

It Was the Old World Yet

I’m thinking now of Housman’s poem “Terence, This is Stupid Stuff” Terence is the poet, A.E. Housman, and in the poem his friends berate him for the dolorous, depressing views of life expressed in his poetry: “It gives a chap a belly-ache” they moan! Pipe us a tune to dance to, Terence, and give up singing these dismal bits of poetry that are so sad that they even killed the cow to whom these poems were first chanted! But Terence responds: If it is good cheer you want, friends, there are sources more appropriate than poetry; liquor seems to Terence the most effective antidote to depression and despair. 

Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink
For fellows whom it hurts to think:
Look into the pewter pot
To see the world as the world’s not.

Inebriated beyond consciousness, fallen drunk into a stupor, the world appears pleasant and hospitable until, alas, one rouses in the ditch into which he has fallen in his drunken stupor and realizes that the happy tale was all a lie: “The world, it was the old world yet,/I was I, my things were wet . . .” And so would begin another day. Some years later Samuel Beckett will have Pozzo pronounce something similar: “But¾but behind this veil of gentleness and peace night is charging and will burst upon us pop! Like that! just when we least expect it. That’s how it is on this bitch of an earth.” We live in troubled times. I am frequently anxious.

Terence offered a very guarded and even oxymoronic cynical optimism. In response to his friends’ complaint concerning his poetry, he advises them that though the world contains much good, there is, in fact, much less good than ill, and that his friends would do well to live their life expecting and preparing for that ill rather than hoping for and awaiting the good. Of his poetry he cautions his friends, “Tis true, the stuff I bring for sale/Is not so brisk a brew as ale . . . If the smack is sour, The better for the embittered hour.” We toughen ourselves with small doses of the bitter that we would be not destroyed by it when it powerfully and inevitably assails us! There was a king in the East, Terence says, who knew how easy it was to poison the food upon which he would feast, and so each day with each meal the king would add a small portion of “all that springs to birth/From the many-venomed earth.” And as “they” added arsenic to his meat and poured strychnine into his wine, his would-be assassins sat aghast at the failure of their poisons to affect any harm. They “shook to see him drink it up.” But the king had made himself immune to the poisons by imbibing a bit of them every day. “I will tell the tale I’m told,” Terence says, “Mithridates, he died old.” I guess that that is one answer. I remember also Housman’s poem, “To an Athlete Dying Young,” in which the poet suggests that there is benefit to dying before the athlete’s renown is forgotten and his medals rusted and decayed. I suppose that is another answer.

Every day I am appalled by the behavior of Republicans who continue to promote the lie that the election of Joe Biden to the Presidency was rigged; who refuse to advocate for vaccination to manage the Coronavirus epidemic; who vote against the voting rights bills that ensure that the people can go freely to the polls; who deny climate change and will not spend monies to address the serious problem now facing the globe; who continue to support the repulsive behaviors and obscene talk from Trump and who continue to advocate for his agenda. Last night I watched Matt Gaetz, himself now under suspicion for immoral behavior with a minor, sound like a Fook as he refused to answer questions from Jonah Raskin about his advocacy of the Big Lie. Every morning I awake to the old world yet and I am I and my things are wet. And what dose of the poison shall I brace myself with today?

 

 

 

Ritual and Routine

And then there is another thing about Thoreau’s walking. He 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 world engagements.” For Thoreau, this sauntering is not routine but ritual. He does not walk today because he has walked yesterday: he walks today because he must or his life would be amiss. For many years I ran long distances. Every day regardless of the season or weather conditions, I looked forward to donning my appropriate running gear and lacing up my running shoes. I kept two pair at the time in case one set became water-logged from the previous day’s rainstorm. I regularly anticipated heading out on the various trails and streets and leaving behind conflict and worry. I am in this sense reminded of Ishmael’s acknowledgement that when he is down with what he refers to as his “hypos” he heads out to sea to cure them. As for Thoreau’s saunterings, my running was a spiritual and therefore ritual experience as much as it was a simple physical activity. Running gave me time and space to think and to understand something about my life in my family, my study and my classrooms. Ritual is about engagement. Spinoza says that adequate ideas are the understanding of how things are and how they could be no other way. This understanding served often as the content of my runs and was agenda of Thoreau’s sauntering. Of course, we never do achieve complete understanding but the effort to attain it is emancipating, and there is always the next day’s run which I could anticipate. We engage in ritual as the practice of our daily lives, and we engage in rituals as if we are summoned. Dylan writes that sometimes he turns around and there is someone there; but at times there was only him and he is alone! Running was ritual and it brought me closer to my life. Rituals are our activities based in our adequate ideas. Ritual is connection, an active relationship with others and with the world. Ritual is also the active responses to the demands of the world that is always filled with Others. I am myself an Other. When I engage in ritual I can be immediately present though I am often distracted. In the participation of ritual, we achieve freedom as we choose willfully to participate in the world.

But lately I have been troubled when I consider that my walks and my yoga practice have become routine and burdensome. I engage in them because the practices have become unchanging, tedious, humdrum, more obsessive habits than extraordinary participation, more ordinary than exceptional. I am in them
not so much called as driven. Routine is engagement in the world without understanding. Routine walks on the treadmill and there is no relief from the monotony of it; routine is not to saunter. Routine is to do today because it was done yesterday and the day before yesterday. It is not choice but compulsion. Routine is to engage tomorrow because I engaged today: it is gratuitous activity. Routine is unconscious engagement.

 

 

Journal of the Plague Year 14

The streets and sidewalks where I walk are becoming littered with falling leaves. Many of the trees are still green-leafed but within a few weeks they will become bare and with a sigh I will anticipate the incoming winter. There will be snow and life will freeze with the plunging temperature. I will enter my winter hibernation.
          The pandemic isn’t quite over. Camus’s old man acknowledges that “What is plague? It’s life and that’s all!” Conceptualized this way plague never goes away; I would gladly dispose of my supply of masks, but alas, that event does not seem possible in this moment. I have heard that the Moderna vaccine booster will become available in November and I will get the shot, and hope for good health. But I am aware every day that the world has indeed for me changed. I cannot at this moment think about entering a movie theater, once my happy place; I am yet loath to get on an airplane; I do not leave my house without a mask, carried when outdoors and worn whenever I enter any establishment. I have grown accustomed to seeing children at school bus stops wearing their masks. How strange it must be for them and yet how normal. 
            Defoe’s narrator, H.F., in A Journal of the Plague Year, complains that as the plague began to wane the people began to celebrate irresponsibly. He writes, “”The audacious creatures were so possess’d with the first Joy, and so surprize’d with the Satisfaction of seeing a vast decrease I the weekly Bills, that they were impenetrable by any new Terrors, and would not be persuaded, but that the Bitterness of Death was pass’d; and it was to no more purpose to talk to them, that to an East-wind; but they open’d Shops, went about Streets, did Business, and conversed with any Body that came in their Way to converse with, whether with Business, or without, neither inquiring of the Health, or so much as being Apprehensive of any Danger from them, tho’ they knew them not to be sound.” Of course, this recklessness led to an increase in incidence of plague and further unnecessary deaths. 
          Defoe’s description of London in 1665 reflects to me the situation in the United States today. Too many people walk about oblivious of the presence of plague and too many of them angrily resist cautions imposed in business establishments, harass those who wear masks and berate and physically attack those who insist that they too mask up. Too many (mostly Republican Trump supporters) refuse the efficacious vaccine and continue to occupy the ICU beds in overcrowded hospitals. H.F complains that “it must be acknowledg’d that the general Practice of the People was just as it was before, and very little Difference was to be seen.” I suppose it must be denial: this won’t happen to me, they might think. Or maintain some obstinate insistence that nothing should trouble the comfort they once enjoyed even though the world in which that comfort was enjoyed is gone! And then I read the news today, oh boy!

Measured Steps

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 world engagements.” In a sense Thoreau measures his walks by time—he devotes three, four or five hours sauntering. Now, sauntering as Thoreau etymologically invents, derives from “the people who roamed the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going à la Sainte Terre.” The saunterer was headed toward the holy land. Thoreau offers another derivation of the word. He says that saunter is said to refer to the traveler sans terre, or one without land or a home, as if, Thoreau comments, the saunterer is not homeless but may actually call his home everywhere. Thoreau’s “Walking” is a paean to the saunter and to the saunterer.
             When I was a runner, I measured my runs in distances: two, four, six, ten and twenty miles, and I would record the achievement into a running journal. I also kept record in my journal of the  minutes-per-mile at which I ran which and I would at times add a comment on the nature and quality of the run. I kept such measured and measuring records obsessively. Even my moods were measured.

 Now I don’t run but walk, and I measure my exercise in steps. The goal I seek is to finish about 10,000 steps a day though somewhere I read that 7700 steps is adequate. My number of steps is measured by my smart phone that originally I placed in my pocket so that I could listen to music on my Bluetooth ear buds (another issue I know, to be addressed at some point: the inability to be alone). The phone records my daily steps and tells me if I walked more today than I did yesterday; it tells me if I have walked more this week than I did last week; it tells me if I am walking more this month than I did last month, and if I am walking more this year than I did last year. I feel chastised by my phone when it notes that I seem to be walking less today than sometime in the past. Indeed, it seems lately that if the number of steps isn’t measured by the phone then it is as if I hadn’t walked at all!

Thoreau is a Walker, a Saunterer, but his walk is not mere exercise but becomes a step into freedom. “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.” His walks are measured in measures of psychological wellness; the physical benefits of his walking accompany those steps but are not the primary motive for them. “No wealth can buy the requisite leisure freedom, and independence which are the capital in this profession,”—of the Walker. Thoreau’s measure expresses an expansiveness; but my walks now are quantified by the number of steps! My world seems to be shrinking. I am not sauntering.

            I do not mean this post as a recap of Thoreau’s essay, nor even a paean to walking or running or any form of exercise be it indoors or outdoors. What I am interested in concerns the question of the measurement. Thoreau walks for hours until he achieves some peaceful state. In my runs I might once have achieved this condition, but what I religiously recorded was not what I saw but how far and fast I ran. Now I have now reduced my measurement to the number of steps I have taken. It is this shrinking that concerns me. During the pandemic the world has shrunk into the confines of my home; over the past several years our cinema screens have shrunk to sometimes no bigger than the six-inch screen of a smart phone. And as our screens have shrunk so too has the focus of our vision: in the theaters our vision widened but now our vision is telescoped. 

Like Prufrock I worry that I have begun to measure my life in coffee spoons.