Second time as farce, again

Sometimes the only way to calm my anxieties is to come to the computer and attempt to write something. Trump’s capture of the President of Venezuela and his claims that the United States will “run” that country until a proper transition (to what, I wonder, democracy as practiced by Trump and his minions? Ha!) has led me to the computer. I need a desert island to avoid him and Lotus land has not yet proved d sufficiently adequate. Or maybe it is I at fault here because I don’t able to cease doom-scrolling. I recognize that Trump’s braggadocio has stolen the script from the words of President Mckinley at the takeover of the Philippines at the end of the nineteenth century. President McKinley had then said, “That there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God's grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow-men (sic) for whom Christ also died. And then I went to bed, and went to sleep, and slept soundly, and the next morning I sent for the chief engineer of the War Department (our mapmaker), and I told him to put the Philippines on the map of the United States, and there they are, and there they will stay while I am President!” Trump said, “We're going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country." That it will be a Christian thing to do seems for this administration de rigeur. First time as tragedy, second time as farce. It is of course no accident that 20% of the world’s oil reserves are in Venezuela and with the take-over of the country the United States will be running Venezuela and its oil fields. Stephen Miller, ha said that the United States would now exploit Venezuela oil reserves. Trump’s friends I am certain will make a killing financially while Venezuela will suffer the killing more physically and spiritually. I learn that much of China’s oil comes from Venezuela. I wonder how that might play out on the world scene. Vladimir Putin will benefit from Trump’s aggression in Russia’s war against Ukraine. And will the Chinese leadership assume that militarily taking over Taiwan is now internationally sanctioned given Trump’s takeover of Venezuela?  Recent imperialistic interventions by American presidents in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan did not go well. For Trump to declare offensively that the Donroe doctrine, now renamed from the doctrine known as the Monroe Doctrine that declared that the United States controls the Western Hemisphere gives Trump permission to accomplish whatever he pleases to assert American imperial aims. As with his golf course, his business owns it: And the man puts his name on everything. He owns the world he  declares. America First? On the one hand Trump reminds me of the agenda of Charles Lindbergh who accepted medals from the Nazis and thought that the United States ought to control the world that he flew over. First time as tragedy, second time as farce. 

            These so-called leaders act out of an absolute ignorance of history and with a braggadocio and insensitivity that continues to appall me. That is, they choose to believe that their actions justifying this invasion are for the good of the nation invaded and will be beneficial to the country that has accomplished the invasion.  These leaders claim that their actions are not motivated by a grasp for greater or selfish aggrandizement of personal gains, but the reality offers a different picture. But I think that if there is anything personal to be gained from a political action then that action must be carefully scrutinized. No one but his henchmen were consulted. Congress was not consulted. And the effronteries continue. For example, Trump’s decision to abandon leases for public golf courses in Washington D.C. enhances his own private golfing enterprises. To justify this move he claims that the golf courses have not been carefully maintained, but what exactly are his criteria except his own series of private golf courses on which only wealthy people can play!  President Trump, who spends many weekends golfing, has floated the possibility of redoing the district's courses. "If we do them, we'll do it really beautifully," Trump said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. The Trump administration, it reports, “prides itself on getting the job done for the American people and partnering with others who share that same goal," said the Interior Department, which oversees the National Park Service.  But I think that privately owned golf courses can certainly be maintained up to the owners standards but those standards ought not to be applied to public courses where exorbitant member fees control access and diversity. If Trump has anything to gain personally by his actions he should not act.

            And so  ere dining at a restaurant. In walked a couple, the man looked certainly over 60 years of age. He was wearing shorts and a white t-shirt. On the back of the shirt screenprint was a map of the United States showing the red states that voted for Trump and the blue states that voted for Harris. Under the map the caption read, “We saved America.” Ha! The economy is in serious trouble, the threats of war increase, and as Trump boasts, he is not troubled by the concept of troops on the ground. Maybe the President has no children or grandchildren to sacrifice to the wars. For this past year of his reign, the rule of law has been ignored, Congress has been neutered, and the President acts as if governing the country is not so different from running his businesses and with the same intention: to grasp power for power’s sake and to make more money for him and his friends. Despite the man’s t-shirt, the man’s vote has not saved the country, but rather aligns with Trump’s bluster that he knows exactly what must be done to Make America Great Again?) and that he asserts complete control over everything. Any fool can now see that his belief in complete knowledge and control is the cry of a fool. In this administration the popular demand, America First, translates into “As long as I can profit it’s America First, but as for everything else, well, the country be damned so long as I can gain.” The criminality of empire building went out of fashion many years ago if it ever it seemed au courant. Those people too stupid to recognize the dangers in the President’s actions or who actually support the President’s policies are not the deplorables as Hillary Clinton said but the despicables. And the incivility and nastiness of President Trump by his words and actions provides sanction for their exercise of vulgarity.

            And still remain anxious, but that is another story,

Interesting Times!

There is this phrase, often xenophobically attributed to the Chinese (not unlike the blame directed at the Chinese for the recent pandemic) but actually spoken by British politician Joseph Chamberlain. The saying goes, “May you live in interesting times.” I do not believe any definition is given for what is meant by ‘interesting times’ though it is commonly believed ir refers to times that are turbulent. Dissension, war, revolution, social unrest., those events of times. Given even a casual glance at history, I suppose the times are always turbulent, and so I wonder, when are the times not interesting! Robert F. Kennedy had used the phrase to suggest that turbulent times could lead to change! But to my thinking, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. As for me, the existence of war, violent and dissension have been ever constant during my life: I cannot begin to list the events that have rendered my times turbulent.

 Turbulence begins as a small irregularity and to my unscientific mind this irregularity suddenly transforms unpredictably into something dangerous. Tornadoes are highly localised, extremely small and spontaneous systems. It is practically impossible to forecast their formation and path. They are, however, turbulent! As with tornados, a small personal or cultural irregularity suddenly transforms into a violent and dangerous turbulence. Airplane pilots recommend to passengers to fasten seatbelts when seated in case of unexpected turbulence. Turbulence is always unexpected, unpredictable and potentially very dangerous. Nobel laurate Richard Feynman says, “if water falls over a dam, it splashes. It we stand nearby, every now and then a drop will land on our nose. This appears to be completely random . . . The tiniest irregularities are magnified in falling so that we get randomness.” Personal and social order follows this pattern. “[G]iven an arbitrary accuracy, no matter how precise, one can find a time long enough that we cannot make predictions valid for that long a time. Now the point is that the length of time is not very large . . . It turns out that in only a very, very tiny time we lose all our information . . .  We can no longer predict what is going to happen!” A smoothly running classroom turns turbulent suddenly from some minor disturbance. Turbulence is inevitable and highly unpredictable. That is why pilots caution passenger to fasten their seatbelts. 

But there are those who disdainfully yet ignorantly deny the existence of turbulence and that neither they or any one else require seat belts; these are individuals and governments who foolishly assert their capacity to command control over everything. Their narcissism threatens everyone aboard the plane. Such leaders are fools. Tolstoy writes in War and Peace, “It is understandable that as long as the historical sea is calm, it must seem to the ruler-administrator in his fragile little bark, resting his pole against the ship of the people and moving along with it, that his efforts are moving the ship. But once a storm arises, the sea churns up, and the ship begins to move itself, and then the delusion is not long possible . . . the ruler suddenly, from his position of power, from being a source of strength, becomes an insignificant, useless, and feeble human being.” Oblivious to their own ultimate helplessness they construct homes out of sticks and straw. Such unwise leaders refuse to acknowledge that we cannot predict irregularity with very much accuracy, that we always must be prepared for unexpected turbulence, and that we mere mortals would be foolish to think that we are in full and inviolable control at all times.

There are, at least, two aspects to this ignorance: that of the one who behaves as if they are in complete control over everything and so denies the possibility of turbulence; and there are those who ought to fasten their seat belts but do not do so because they believe the swagger of their irrational leader. In 1834 Orestes Brownson delivered an address on the 58^th anniversary of American Independence. Brownson warned, “There is a worm gnawing into the very heart of the tree of liberty which our fathers have planted . . . a large portion of our community lies at the mercy of any political demagogue who knows how to veil his liberticide designs under a pretended love of the dear people.” And those dear people foolishly believe this solipsistic leader. I wonder . . . Make America Great Again? When was the United States ever great? During the religious persecutions of the 17^th century? At the advent and perpetuation of slavery? During the massacre of the Native indigenous populations? At the attempt by the Southern states to destroy the Union by seceding from it? The rapaciousness of the Gilded Age? During the Cold War Arms race? The Vietnam and Iraq Wars? The preent oligarchical takeover of the government by sycophants and incompetent officers? The incidences of turbulence continue to pile up. When wasn’t the nation beset by turbulence? Brownson knew that American democracy was an experiment and that it could fail if not nurtured and watched over. I think that any leader that assumes absolute control over events ignores the reality of turbulence and the responsibilities that attach to the offices they serve. But then that leader must be protected from the reality of turbulence by his minions and his secret services. They ignore the reality that they cannot protect him from someone who has greater accuracy with a rifle or from foreign leaders with less bravura and more skill. To declare a complete knowledge of and control over things and events and to confidently predict a future becomes evidence of stupidity. It denies the existence of turbulence. Such a position does not acknowledge the world as it exists. The narrator of George Eliot’s Middlemarch says, “to most mortals there is a stupidity which is unendurable and a stupidity which is altogether acceptable—else, indeed, what would become of social bonds?” Of the latter I might offer this: we teach a child to say please and thank you even though the child doesn’t really mean it. We demand that elementary school students recite the pledge of allegiance though they don’t understand one word of it, not even the word ‘I.’ The demands and niceties in the maintenance of social bonds are numerous, strong and sometimes even important. We must be guided to a sense of restraint. 

I think we live in interesting, turbulent times. We are led by stupid, self-centered individuals who believe that they can assert absolute control over everything and who deny the existence of turbulence. Of social bonds they care not a whit and so assume the right to do whtever they please and the rest be damned. Such stupidities are dangerous even as faith in these stupidities is equally troublesome. No one is that knowledgeable or powerful to ignore turbulence.

I have been thinking of the Schooner Fare song “We the People.” They sing,

We know the time has come
To take our heads out of the sand
'Cause if we don't the chance might never come again

If we do not fasten our seat belts and attend to the already present turbulences, the chance may never come again.

 

Draconology

            It is said that the blood of a dragon has the capability of curing all ills. Dr. Tesimond and Dr. Kircher in Daniel Kehlmann’s novel, Tyll, have been in search of dragons. To gather the blood of the dragon would be a welcome gift to the human world: no disease and ultimately no death! Eternal good health! But alas, dragons are very shy and therefore very difficult to find. “Yes,” says Dr. Tesimond, “dragons are inconceivably shy and capable of astounding feats of camouflage. You could search for a hundred years and yet never get close to a dragon. Just as you can spend a hundred years in immediate proximity to a dragon and never notice. it” But this problem does not overly concern Tesimond and Kircher because the appearance of a dragon is not what is important; rather, it is the dragon’s knowledge that one seeks! Pliny the Elder writes that, “dragons know an herb by means of which they can bring dead members of their species back to life. To find this herb would be the Holy Grail of our science.” What that seems to mean is that they need not kill the dragon for its blood which of course would be quite limited in supply regardless of how large might be the dragon, but rather they would seek to learn from the dragon and acquire its knowledge of herbs. I believe that such a discovery would, indeed, be significant to our species and certainly to the hypochondriac tendencies and displeasure with mortality that I suffer. The herb would serve a function equivalent to the dragon’s blood! Maybe you see the problem: finding a dragon seems an impossible task, but the dragon knows the herb that would effect the same result as its blood. It would it would be a significant discovery to learn the identity of the herb would be consequential to the human race. But how could one learn from a dragon that won’t be seen. 

Tyll wonders that if dragons can’t ever be seen—because they are too shy—then how do we even know that dragons exist at all! Good question. And somewhat relatedly Tyll’s father Claus asks, how can the blood be gathered if we never see a dragon from which to draw? And the draconologist Dr. Kircher answers that the blood of the dragon is so powerful that having it in actual possession is not at all necessary: one needs only to find a substitute. The efficacy of the dragons blood can be approximated by finding the correct substitute for it. How do we know dragons exist? The Doctor answers, “Because of the efficacy of the substitutes.” That is, we do not need the real thing but only its surrogates! And these substitutes will suffice. As an example, the doctor says, that earthworms and grubs look like a dragon and therefore, when ground up they are medicinally beneficial. Ah! What makes grubs so important in their capacity to cure is their similar appearance to a dragon: grubs are efficacious substitutes. Cinnabar is valuable in medicine because its color is so similar to that of a dragon’s blood! Medicine, it would appear, depends on the discovery of substitutes for actual dragon blood! The secret to a healthy life depends on the possession of the correct substitutes. But, I do wonder, which are the appropriate ones? Ah, there’s the rub!

            Substitutes. We never see the real thing: well, at least not Truth anyway. Truth is too shy, too evasive I suppose. Not to be seen. But our wish for a life of health and even of immortality depends on discovering the right substitutes but until they might be found . . . we suffer issues with health and we suffer death. And I might consider that our lives are devoted to the search for the substitutes. We find sometimes one or two effective ones, but our difficulties remain and so we continue to search for substitutes. What we search for may not be the secret to eternal life, but our Desire impels us into the world seeking. Thoreau writes “I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail.”  We seek the ideal and we settle for the substitutes, and they must suffice.

Ah, there must be a dragon somewhere out there! 

Thanksgiving, 2025

Thanksgiving again. Traditionally a holiday that celebrates the first feast between Pilgrims (I’ve begun to find the phrase ironic) and the Native peoples who it is said helped fee these early English settlers. Those settlers were Separatists—Puritans—who the legend tells left England to practice their religion. I learned this myth of the first Thanksgiving in school. It was told that the Wampanoag had helped the early Puritan settlers get through the previous winter by giving them food in that time of scarcity in exchange for an alliance with the Wampanoags and protection for them against the rival Narragansett tribe. The English had the guns. Wikipedia offers that “Historian David Silverman describes the myth of the First Thanksgiving in this way: "The myth is that friendly Indians, unidentified by tribe, welcome the Pilgrims to America, teach them how to live in this new place, sit down to dinner with them and then disappear" Apparently, things did not occur in this harmonious fashion and history records that things afterwards did not go so well. King Philip's War, half a century later was the last-ditch effort by Native tribes to expel the colonists from New England who had consistently broken agreements and usurped the land. Many Native Americans see Thanksgiving as a Day of Mourning.

Thanksgiving again. This amidst wars about the world, government leaders across the globe eliminating rights and destroying democracies in unconscionably violent circumstances. Here, we are governed a serial liar and bully and his cowardly sycophants, soiled by a level of incivility that makes the streets and by-ways of the United States fouled and threatening. Some carry firearms, some Mace, and some employ their automobiles as weapons.Out there one cannot know who might be the enemy and caution keeps many inside. 

Fermina Daza considers in Gabriel Marquez’s Love in the time of Cholera that life in the world, which had caused her so much uncertainly before she was familiar with it, was “nothing more than a system of atavistic contracts, banal ceremonies, preordained words, with which people entertained each other in society in order not to commit murder.” I gather insight in Fermina’s observation. The empty words simply remind me how false in the sentiment: those banal ceremonies and preordained words merely show for avarice and self-aggrandizement. I have written over the years that these empty Days of Prayer declared by reputed leaders serve merely as a masquerade for real concern and a cover for inaction; these empty declarations of prayer shade against the horror. Walter Benjamin was certainly correct when he wrote that “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the matter in which it was transmitted for one owner to another.” Benjamin cautions that it is necessary to learn to read history against the grain. Thanksgiving is not all it has been advertised as being. Its celebratory nature and spiritual affect covers over the travesty of what happened then and continues to be practiced today.

Thanksgiving again. And there still sits Arlo Guthrie on the Group W bench with all the father stabbers. Mother rapers. Father rapers. “Father rapers sitting right there on the bench next to me! And they was mean and nasty and ugly and horrible crime-type guys sitting on the bench next to me. And the meanest, ugliest, nastiest one, the meanest father raper of them all, was coming over to me and he was mean 'n' ugly' n' nasty 'n' horrible and all kind of things and he sat down next to me and said, "Kid, whad'ya get?" I said, "I didn't get nothing, I had to pay $50 and pick up the garbage." Yes, most of us are left to pay our fines and pick up the garbage, but none of them that serve miss a breakfast.

If Sleep Would Only Come

I remember when sleep was easy. Well in actuality, that is something I do not remember because back then I never thought about sleep except when Hamlet worried about the sleep that might come to end the heartache and the natural thousand shocks that his flesh might be heir to: the end of a day. Or when he worried about the dreams that might come in that eternal sleep when he had shuffled off his mortal coil. But then I just fell asleep without suffering troubling anxieties. As I continue to age, I think about the nothingness that is death and not the dreams that may come in it. I do not liken death to sleep. Sleep requires awakening and I do not hold to the possibility of an afterlife and resurrection which implies an awakening. I hold with John Prine’s father who told him “Buddy, when you’re dead, you’re a dead peckerhead.” Spinoza teaches me that the free man thinks least of all about death. Hamlet was not so free: he had the death of his father to think about and the question of his uncle’s and mother’s complicity in it. Maybe it was his own death, too, he thought about: “To be, or not to be, that is the question!” I do not now feel so free: I think too often about death, and I worry about the readiness of the sleep that can come to end the heartaches and natural shocks that are inherent in the life of the day. 

Back then I just slept. I would lay me down and not think about falling asleep at all: I would just fall asleep. I would dream. And after seven or eight hours I would mysteriously awaken rested, arise from bed and begin another day, and unless I hadn’t done my homework or studied for the test, I would do so with enthusiasm and anticipation. For years I ran four to six miles in the early, early morn even before the night shifts let out or the school buses began there runs. I suppose that there must have been times when sleep eluded me, but I cannot remember any extended period of troubled non-sleep. Then, I did not take medications that I do now to calm the anxieties that keep me awake. Then I did not awaken several times during the night to go to the bathroom to urinate.

Having assassinated King Duncan in his sleep Macbeth mourned that he had murdered sleep and subsequent to his heinous deed Macbeth did not sleep again. And yet he could not cease thinking what it was that he missed. He moaned, “Methought I heard a cry ‘Sleep no more!/Macbeth hath murdered sleep.’—the innocent sleep, Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care,/The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath/Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,/chief nourisher in life’s feast.” Macbeth had murdered sleep and therefore, “Cawdor shall sleep no more! Macbeth shall sleep no more!” What Macbeth had lost is exactly the availability of the chief nourisher in life’s feast, the relief and peace that comes with sleep. Macbeth is forever in life bereft of rest. This condition will drive him mad!

It is certainly not that I have murdered sleep so much as the process of aging and worry has made sleep all too conscious and anxiety burdened. These days I awaken regularly throughout the night and stir too early. Regardless of the season it is dark when I return frustratingly to consciousness and it seems futile to remain abed. Sometimes I might lay abed for another half-hour or an hour, but I am irrevocably awake and the dreams are finished and the worries of the day begin. No, there is no concern for being or not being, only considerations of what the day portends: the myriad thousand shocks that flesh is heir to. Perhaps, I have not murdered sleep but I have certainly given it serious wounds. 

Then, I was not concerned if I would sleep: I slept. In a matter of a single second I would transition from consciousness to sleep and my unconscious would take over. I dreamt. Now, I have little concern about the dreams that may come—that always do come—though I have no nightmares. I’m considering what it means not to murder sleep but to suffer angst about its occasion and span: to worry about when it will come and how long it will last. Sleep seems now an event that needs to be thought and worried about; now, each night when I decide to lay myself down I am concerned that my anxieties will keep sleep away, and to bar that possibility I take sleep aids and place replacements doses by the bedside in the event that sleep will not return after another trip to the bathroom.

Ah, this post requires a piece of closing wisdom but I am too tired to write one.

 

The Book I'm Not Reading

                                     

The book I'm not reading has a life jacket enclosed

 The book I'm not reading is a friend of mine

 God knows we need those

                                                                                Patty Larkin

I think often enough about W.G. Sebald’s eponymous novel, Austerlitz. It is a story that is concerned with the concept of memory as a foundation of identity. As a four-year-old child, Jacob Austerlitz, the novel’s narrator, had been sent on the Kindertransport from Prague to London and then shipped to Wales where he was given a new name, Dafyyd Elias, a new set of parents and a wholly new identity that erased the one that he had previously enjoyed. However, Jacob Austerlitz did not come to learn of his history or his real name until he became a teen-ager ready to graduate high school. The experience of his exile, though, had left him traumatized. He says, “I realized . . . how little practice I have in using my memory and conversely how hard I must always have tried to recollect as little as possible, avoiding everything which related in any way to my unknown past.” In his early life he knew nothing about World War II, the Nazi persecutions, the concentration camps in which both of his parents died, or the fact of his exile; it was not until he visited the Ghetto Museum in Terezin that he heard any suggestion “of the persecution which my avoidance system had kept from me for so long, and which now in this place surrounded me on all sides.” In response to this sudden awareness and attempting to learn his history, Austerlitz searches out his old Nanny, Vera, who had cared for him before his forced exile. During the conversations with Vera she remembers for him a question that once as a four-year-old, he had asked her. “Vera,” he had wondered to her, “when the snow covers the ground how do the squirrels know where to find what they have buried.” It is a perceptive question for a four-year-old to ask, I think, but Vera doesn’t in the present relate to him how she had answered, or at least, Austerlitz doesn’t narrate the response she offered him. But the adult Austerlitz in the present wonders, “How indeed do the squirrels know, what do we know ourselves, how do we remember, and what it is we find in the end.” I consider that what we know about ourselves is based on the stories we tell, but Austerlitz’s repression of memory had suppressed his stories. I guess ultimately I do not know what we find finally in our memory (a narrator in Jose Saramajo’s novel The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis asks “What will you be when you discover it is night and you find yourself at the end of the road?”), but for now I might answer Austerlitz in this manner: we remember when we tell the story and then we are the story we tell. Austerlitz had no memory until he narrated it. And perhaps the pop in any story lies first in its recall and then in the editing that over the years has revised it, in that exercise of memory that entangles the past and present. And where does the writing physically begin?

One place where I can discover what I have buried is in my journals. It is in those volumes that many of my stories begin. In the archives at the University of Wisconsin-Stout where I had taught for twenty-eight years, I have placed almost 50 years of day books and reading/study journals. Some of the volumes go back to my early 20s when I first thought to keep a journal. "What are you doing now?” Ralph Waldo Emerson had asked Henry David Thoreau. “Do you keep a journal?” On the 22 October 1837, when he was only twenty years old, Thoreau entered this in his journal: “So I make my First entry to-day” Almost two centuries later, on my bookshelf reside two large compact volumes of Thoreau’s journals that exist in forty-seven volumes that had run to over two million words and spanned twenty-four years and twelve days in length! My original entry was not so momentous though perhaps equally inspired, and I have long forgotten what I had then entered first in a journal. It is buried somewhere under the snows. But even before I became an official scholar—by which, of course, I mean reading and writing academic tomes and publishing articles in scholarly journals (where the matter was often filled with unpopped, unscooped facts), I had begun to keep day/reading journals that accompanied me everywhere I journeyed and into which I recorded my progress through any number of days, books, relationships, events and ideas: it was in the journals that I found what became the genesis of stories; some of those journal entries still surprise and delight me, but so many are buried under the snow in the archives. The journals offered me the raw material for what I might have hoped would become popped and scooped stories. Some of those journal entries even might have had pop and scoop! Over the years, I have entered these primary narratives into a variety of journal types: into reporter-like stenographic pads, and soft-covered, bright-colored school notebooks, or sometimes into tiny, clothbound, and lined books. For several years, I chose to make my entries into large, heavy and oversized blue accounting volumes all of which I kept close to hand in a variety of suitably sized Man bags. I was younger then and I did not travel light. Over the past several decades I have taken to make my entries into black moleskin books on pages graph-style-lined, a design I observed in one of my stays in Paris. On my shelves two still unwrapped volumes awaiting stories At some point I began writing in the journals with fountain pens that I filled with a variety of color inks though today I write solely in empyrean blue and jet black. 

 I have made my partner promise that when I die—as I must—she should deliver into the archives whatever volumes that I have continued to fill over the years since that first deposit. I do intend to maintain a journal for as long as I fam alive and have the capacity to do so. But I am a careless scholar and I often forget or am too lethargic to enter some of what I might consider my more profound thoughts; sometimes they then become lost until in some context they become found and then perhaps it is a new thought and idea. In the journals there does not exist an organizing principle in which the notes have been entered. When I am reading a book—but only sometimes—I set aside time to transfer into my journal under linings and annotations that I had added to the book’s margins, and at times I might even have added into the journal entry a comment or six inspired by the text. In the journal I might next directly enter a very personal description and comment that concerned events and thoughts and dreams deriving from and addressing to my personal life and times. This might be followed by an entry from my reading of some periodical, maybe The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, or  less frequently these days The New York Times. The latter too often always leads, however, to an angry screed—mostly a complaint—and I have restricted my reading in the newspaper to the arts and leisure section and the obituaries. If I’m not there I know I’m onto dead. Thoreau had written long ago that to read the newspaper daily is like a dog returning to its vomit, and cautioned not to read the newspapers! There is, as I have said, no organizational principle to the journal entries. How I would find something that I might want in them at some later time escapes me, and so I occasionally read in whatever journals are at hand looking in the snows for some food I have left. As for the tomes in the archives, they are unavailable for such browsing, though I believe, there is much excellent voice in those little organs, yet now I cannot make them speak. Later, to someone, they will have to speak for themselves. As I have said, I am a careless scholar.

 Why do I keep them, the journals I mean? How do I even make the present ones speak given the disarray of the entries; how can I give some voice to past volumes entombed now in the archives? Tucked away in several boxes in the archives at the University and inaccessible until 2035 no one, in fact, will be able to read the volumes. I can’t even get to them now without some immoderate effort in time and space. And where would I start, what year would I explore? I do not think the archive office has delved into the volumes to categorize them by date. I don’t even know that other than randomly I have dated the books. I would have to approximate dates by reading through the entries and remembering the narrated event, and in that search I could add the pop and scoop that stories require. Ah, memory: the narrator in Sebald’s Rings of Saturn says, “But, in reality, memory fails us,” and I have annotated in the margins of that page this comment: “As always.” As it must. Hence can be born the stories with pop and scoop.

The person narrated in those past journals might appear unfamiliar to the person narrated in the present, though I am certain that a recent story told will include traces of that past character. I know that over the future years he will have been and will still be narrated in various other voices. I suppose those journals contain matters that are not lost but only submerged deep in the subconscious awaiting like the cicada broods for their moment to arise. But as long as they remain buried they are veiled and unstoried until suddenly something in the present—I read a journal— inspires a memory and a story is born. 

This Was the End of a Beautiful Relationship

This past week for the last time I traveled 70 miles to have a final physical check-up exam with the family physician whom I have been seeing regularly for 35 years. He is retiring this year. During the past many years I have been his patient for whom he exhibited great patience. Outside of the relationship I have had with my children and siblings and one dear, dear friend, my relationship with this doctor is the longest one of my life. I am seventy-eight years old and it is doubtful that I will have opportunity to enjoy such a long relationship with another physician or really, with anyone else. Our intimacies were profound; I have allowed this man to probe every orifice of my body, and he did so gently and unreservedly at least once every year for each of the thirty-five years; sometimes if my hypochondriacal tendencies flared I visited with whom more than once in a year. I remember once, years ago, arriving home one Sunday evening after a personal trip East and driving directly from the airport to the emergency room of the hospital to relievedly find him there on duty: I learned that he was also an emergency room trauma doctor. I was having difficulty breathing and the admitting nurses thought that perhaps I was having a heart attack. I wasn’t and I almost knew it, though in my hypochondriacal fantasies I could have been experiencing a myocardial infarction having never had one before and knowing only what it looked like from the television shows I watched. And that night in the emergency room—because it was late and I was frantic—he cared for whatever was wrong with me physically and psychologically. Over the years with his attentions, he gave me the freedoms that I sought so that I could think myself healthy, and he supported me when I was suffering actually or hypochondriacally. He listened to my plaints and took me seriously in either case. When I would ask for a procedure—a colonoscopy, repair of a trigger finger, the freezing off of keratosis on various places on my vain body—he would right away order that precise procedure. At some point we actually did discover some real cardiac issues and he sent me to a specialist who was very skilled but was also too busy or disinterested in me as a person to listen. The cardiologist performed an endoscopy, discovered a bicuspid valve and an aortic aneurysm, and made some direct recommendations; I never saw him again nor would he respond to my phone calls. Of late I have experienced an outbreak of eczema and recorded the shortest doctor’s appointment ever—two minutes—and I left with a prescription. But over the years, visits with my family physician did not last less than twenty minutes and often extended to forty-five minutes and sometimes to an hour.. I always left his exam room feeling relieved and healed. On the last visit this past week, at the end of the exam we embraced and said goodbye. We had never done that before.

I had begun my visits with him when I had moved from New York to Menomonie, Wisconsin, the latter a semi-rural town harboring a moderate sized university that was a part of the University of Wisconsin system. I was a member of the faculty there. In New York I had not thought to ever need a family physician—I was young and my body seemed to function as it was supposed to and it did so mostly in silence. I also didn’t have the slightest idea how to find a doctor even if I knew what I was looking for in a primary care physician. I don’t think I ever had heard the term before I settled in Menomonie. In my twenties I became a long-distance runner, and I began to pay greater attention to the states of my body and especially as my body began to make some unfamiliar noises: my knees and feet would hurt and so they said I ought to see a podiatrist. He prescribed orthotics that seemed to work best when I held them in my hands. As a runner I learned to pay attention to my body and it talked back at me regularly. I began to notice every twinge and twist. But back then I did not have a family physician and attributed any ache and pain to the number of miles I had run that week.

 But when I moved to Menomonie with wife, child and two cats, I thought it advisable to seek out a family physician, and I asked my all-in-one holistic advisor, massage therapist and health product dispenser for a recommendation and she advised him because he was sympathetic to alternative treatments and medicines and was a good listener and by reputation a good doctor. I made my first appointment. I suppose our initial meeting was like a blind date!

It is ironic now to consider that it might have been his patience and his proximity that fertilized my hypochondriacal tendencies. He was so close and the clinic so relatively small that at any ache or twinge, slight as it might be, I could make an immediate appointment, drive to the clinic, and he would diagnose . . . usually not much was amiss though he would advise me in a soothing language and tone that, yes, I was going to live. When it became available, I added myself on to the patient portal where I could view a lot of things medical—appointments scheduled, test results most of which I could not understand. On this portal a patient could send messages to their care team and on which they might respond. I took frequent advantage of this means of communication and he patiently and with concern responded within twenty-four hours and usually in much less time, even when he was not even scheduled to be in the office. Though doctors take days off, his care of me knew no pause or impatience. When more serious conditions arose, he either treated me himself or directed me to appropriate specialists all of whom were skilled and none of whom were available as was he. He always was so.

And I am wondering what is now gone, and what does it mean to have lost his care. In that final visit he handed me a xeroxed sheet of available primary care physicians and recommended a few I might try, but really, he did not speak with any great enthusiasm. And it was like an experience of on-line dating: who “looked” right! Maybe he was experiencing a loss as well, not unmoved to arrive after thirty-five years at an end of our times together. During those years he and I have shared marriages, divorces, and re-marriages. We would speak of our children and their growths and difficulties, their marriages and our divorces, and finally our children’s children’s activities. We had never met outside of his office in which we shared intimacies that I do not believe we would have presented outside of the office. In there was sacred space, not, I suppose, unlike that of the confession booth. I am not sure I would have ever wanted to meet outside of the office. No place could ever be as intimate as was that exam room space. We were not friends or lovers; but if love is to care for the other, then he loved me. He was my loving caregiver. 

I think I am now too old to develop an intimate relationship with another physician. Oh, I talk to my cardiologist but . . . well, that conversation is always focused on my heart and its issues and does not begin to enter into the personal stuff I always shared with my primary care physician. In my cardiologist’s office I don’t even have to take off my clothes, though it is true that in the winter when I wear many layers I have to partially de-layer so he can hear my heart! No, over the 35 years of medical visits with my family physician developed an intimacy I expect not to experience again in a doctor’s office. As I age the world around me grows smaller and less populated, and I will miss my relationship with him.