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. 

 

The Pond in Winter

The chill in the air bespeaks the coming of Winter. The time is still only mid-October but the falling rain and gusty winds will soon pull the leaves off of the trees and they will be bare. Thoreau writes in his journal, “I knew a crazy man who walked into an empty pulpit one Sunday and, taking up a hymn-book, remarked: “We have had a good fall for getting in corn and potatoes. Let us sing Winter.” So, Thoreau says, ‘Let us sing winter.’ What else can we sing, and our voices be in harmony with the season?” As for me, I am not yet ready to sing winter, not anymore, and when it does arrive, I hope to be packing for warmer climates. 

But I have been thinking about “The Pond in Winter” a chapter in Thoreau’s Walden. When Thoreau lived on its shores and in winter the pond froze over to a depth of a foot and a half, Thoreau surveyed Walden. There exists his detailed surveying maps showing his considerable skill and thoroughness in the practice of surveying. In fact, Thoreau eventually worked as a professional surveyor, so accomplished in this profession that to support himself he traveled all about New England contracting as a surveyor. Thoreau was hardly an unemployed, unemployable, idle man, as he has too often been accused over the years. It may be that his skill as a surveyor, as Linda Walls suggests, led to his discovery of Walden’s bottom and the fulfillment of his purpose for coming out there to live for two years, two months and two days. That purpose Thoreau declared was “to front only the essential facts of life, and see if he could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when he came to die, discover that he had not lived, living being so dear.” I think that by his thorough survey he had found Walden’s bottom and had found in that bottom what he called reality. Walden Pond, he discovered, was not bottomless but was, indeed, rock solid at its bottom. Though Thoreau celebrates that “while men believe in the infinite some ponds will thought to be bottomless,” he knew that in such belief there would be no “hard bottom and rocks in place” which could be called reality. All would remain ungrounded, unsteady, and in constant flux. If a belief in bottomless ponds is a belief in the infinite, then there would be for the individual no solid ground on which to stand, there would exist no rock-bottom and no reality. I believe that this discovered bottom of Walden was the symbol Thoreau sought. Thoreau knew that it was necessary in and for his life to discover the bottom, to front the absolute essentials. He wrote, “Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake, and then begin, having a point d’appui . . . a place where you might found a wall or a state . . . .” Thoreau declared, “There is a solid bottom everywhere," and one had only to find it. Our rock-solid bottom is discoverable: “We will not be shipwrecked on a vain reality,” Thoreau asserted.

 Thoreau’s sounding and surveying of Walden made the pond for him a symbol for he discovered that when he drew his rule across the greatest breadth and length of the map, he discovered that “the lines intersected exactly (italics in the original) at the point of its greatest depth.” He considered that the law of the two diameters that had been true for the pond might be also true for an individual’s ethics—their personal moral code—as well. As the length and breadth of Walden intersected exactly at the point of its place greatest depth, so that intersection in a person would occur at the point of greatest depth. Thoreau wrote that one could “draw lines through the length and breadth of the aggregate of a man’s particular daily behaviors and waves of life into his coves and inlets, and where they intersect will be the height or depth of his character.” I suppose that the length and breadth of any person’s daily behaviors would intersect at a point of greatest depth, but sometimes that depth would be found not to be very deep and the reality shallow. The artist, Ben Shahn, complained that his own early work lacked the reality of his self. He said, “And then I began to realize that however professional my work might appear, even however original it might be, it still did not contain the central person which for good or ill, was myself . . . . All my views and notions on life and politics, all this material and much more which constitute the substance of whatever person I was, lay outside the scope of my own painting.” Shahn’sr ecognized that his paintings might have come from his skill but not from his reality, and he had to sound his depth to paint that reality, survey the length and breadth of his activities, measure where they intersected, and sound his depth.

I’ve wondered: does one first sound one’s Walden to find its depth. Or does one find its depth by measuring where the length and breadth of activities intersect?  Of course, for a bottomless pond there would be no depth and therefore no intersection of length and breadth would ascertain the place of greatest depth. Indeed, there would be no depth. There would be, then, no knowledge of self. But I wonder what would be the skill required to survey the length and breadth of a person’s action, to find the point of the intersection of the lines and to know the depth of character. I think Thoreau knew that to be good was not an immanence but an effort in the daily life of the individual. In Iris Murdoch’s novel, The Nice and the Good, Willi, a holocaust survivor says, “We are not good people, and the best we can hope for is to be gentle, to forgive each other and to forgive the past, to be forgiven ourselves and to accept the forgiveness, and to return again to the beautiful unexpected strangeness of the world.” That would be one answer, I suppose, but it would not be one Thoreau might profess. He wrote, “It is not necessary for a man to put himself in opposition to society, but rather. to maintain himself in whatever attitude he finds himself through obedience to the laws of his being, which will never be one of opposition to a just government, if he could chance to meet with such.” 

But yes, let me measure the breadth of my daily activities and the lengths to which I go to fulfill them. And where they intersect I will discover my depth, my rock bottom, my reality.

 

Maybe more than the time of year

                       

Maybe it was the time of year or maybe it was the time of man. Rosh Hashanah had ended the previous week and now, ten day later the shofar signaled the end of Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, the most sacred day of the year. Torah says on that day you should afflict yourself, and the Rabbis have interpreted the requirement to mean that for the whole of the day—from sundown to sundown—one should abstain from food and drink, from anointing, from wearing leather and from sexual intercourse. These denials should allow one to focus the mind not on the body but on the spirit. Teshuvah, the act of return after the confession, offers to the world a soul that has been forgiven and that can enter life in a new beginning. Sometimes over the years I have experienced this state, but throughout any number of bygone and recent years not so often. And certainly not lately. The historical materialist in me remains suspicious of this ideology. Freud has suggested that the past is never lost, forgotten or forgiven, and I have long held with Faulkner who had said in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, “The past is never dead. It is not even past.” Nonetheless, at Yom Kippur this year as in sixty-five years previous I have afflicted myself: did not eat or drink, did not anoint myself; I wore leather only on my belt so that my trousers would not fall down and I did not engage in sexual activity. This last was the least difficult, such as is my age. But at the end of my fast and at the blowing of the shofar I was aware that I had not experienced any spiritually transcendent moment, and  I left the shul not expecting my transgressions to have been forgiven and forgotten. I do not know when I might have lost the capacity for the experience, if indeed I ever did possess it, but now it was certainly  . . . unavailable.

            But two evenings later, on that Saturday evening at the concert, I enjoyed just such a spiritually transcendent moment. John McCutcheon’s presence, by which I mean the songs he sang and the stories he told to the room of perhaps 200-300 folks, many of them gray-headed or bald, many hopefully retired and at some peace, all who had been through the wars both social and political and who had come there to be present, John reminded us of the struggle which over the years he had shared with us and spoke and sang of the work still to be done. He sang of the joys and sorrows of this life, and he told stories of the sorrows and joys he had experienced as he traveled and performed throughout the world. I sensed that some of what he said had been scripted prior, but there in his narrative I felt unrehearsed emotion and meaning in the choice of stories and songs he would sing. 

            I have had for almost forty years’ experience with McCutcheon’s work and have attended more than several of his concerts in a variety of venues and states. In my storage unit are a dozen or more of his CDs. I do not listen to CDs anymore, but that situation demands another blog post. But last night my seventy-eight year old body, uncomfortable as a way of life and uncomfortable in the unupholstered bridge chairs at the Cedar Cultural Center, seated between my partner and my 31 year old daughter, who perhaps didn’t know to what experience to which she had accepted invitation and who was perhaps unprepared for what she would hear, but I was overwhelmed by an experience of transcendency at the intensity, sincerity and beauty of his singing and his playing on a variety of instruments, banjo, guitar, fiddle, hammered dulcimer, autoharp and piano. And I mean, not playing as in cursory performance, but singing and playing with a passion and a demand for social justice, for human rights, with an advocacy for the better parts of all of us in the multitude who sat with him. There was love in that room, and I knew somehow that I was not alone.

McCutcheon had created in that not very large room a community where for some brief moments all dissension ceased, and we sat and smiled together as we sang. Oh, we knew that there was an ugly world out there—McCutcheon reminded us of that in his choice of songs—but the songs and singing kept the wolf at bay for just a few moments. I felt warm despite the air-conditioning, secure and almost at peace amidst the chaos. For just a little while as we sang, hallelujah, the great storm was indeed over.
            As I stepped out into the sweltering October night, I knew, the storm that had been ended in there raged still out here. But for just three hours in there it had, yes, been over. And that would be enough for now.