Delight Springs

Tuesday, May 31, 2022

(Not so) little things

 We're betwixt two of our favorite calendar dates in my household today. Yesterday was wedding anniversary #29, tomorrow is Younger Daughter's birthday #23. Time keeps on slipping...

It was an odd coincidence, on our anniversary, to read that "The Writers Almanac radio program/podcast era has ended after 29 years." I was there for all of it, and for however much of TWA preceded the podcast era on radio. So much forgotten or overlooked history, so many great poems. 

So I'm relieved to realize TWA's not really going away at all, it's just beginning to run repeats from a deep archival reservoir. "No one has ever promoted poetry so widely as Garrison Keillor,” Donald Hall wrote in A Carnival of Losses, and he'll continue promoting them as the show enters its digital Afterlife. That's the great promise of literature: a legacy that may continue to illuminate others' experience long after the author's writing (or broad- or pod-casting) time has expired. 

Anyway, I tried to find the perfect Anniversary-themed poem to share with the spouse who gifted me with books from Parnassus including Afoot and Lighthearted: A Journal for Mindful Walking. 

And socks. "What'd I do?" Peripatetics usually let their feet speak for themselves.

I first thought to share a couple of non-poems, that Wallace Stegner Spectator Bird passage that we used for our wedding scroll souvenir in 1993.

“The truest vision of life I know is that bird in the Venerable Bede that flutters from the dark into a lighted hall, and after a while flutters out again into the dark. But Ruth is right. It is something--it can be everything--to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and fighting go on below; a fellow bird whom you can look after and find bugs and seeds for; one who will patch your bruises and straighten your ruffled feathers and mourn over your hurts when you accidentally fly into something you can't handle."
And then, the Ann Patchett line in This is the Story of a Happy Marriage.
“We are, on this earth, so incredibly small, in the history of time, in the crowd of the world, we are practically invisible, not even a dot, and yet we have each other to hold on to. When we do things differently, and very often we do, I remind myself that it is rarely a matter of right and wrong. We are simply two adults who grew up in different houses far away from one another.”

But I finally decided the best poem to share, after nearly three decades of often-blissful matrimonial association, is the one Jane Kenyon penned when she thought Donald Hall would be preceding her over the horizon. It turned out Otherwise.

 

We're going to watch and reflect on that together. 

It was a fine low-key Memorial Day, with the usual morning dogwalk followed by a bikeride to the Parthenon, lunch out at Martin's--what a wonderful tray of catfish and hushpuppies etc!.-- and then a lovely languorous afternoon at redneck poolside on our new deck, with pooches and streaming baseball. I feel bad for those who've never learned to love the little things that make life worth living. 

My brother-in-law might lately be one of those, especially since his heart-health challenges have become a source of constant worry. So it was gratifying to be able to help him out on Saturday with the logistics of replacing his ancient and dysfunctional Ford Taurus with a much newer, shinier vehicle. 

It's maybe not such a little thing after all, to move about in the world with pleasure in one's manner of conveyance. It might just be enough to shift his attention and elevate his mood, as he tools the "Swiss Colony" backroads of his little town (that time forgot and the decades could not improve, GK might say) and ponders our universally-shared mortal condition. One way or another, we all must find a way to keep moving forward.

Friday, May 27, 2022

U and me

Roger Angell, Donald Hall... I've been enjoying my time with the Geriatric Literature genre this week, I'm wondering what to read next. Jimmy Carter's written some poetry, he's 97. But he writes like an engineer/politician. Angell and Hall have set the bar high. Hall in particular is brutally frank, and at the same time funny, about the challenges and indignities of growing old in America. But Roger made it happily (it seems) to 101, Donald more or less so to 89 in 2018... after a painful and prolonged period of depressed loneliness--not to be confused with the preferred state of creative solitude--when Jane died much too soon in 1995. 

I'm 65. Ray Liotta the actor died yesterday at 67, my friend in Huntsville texted to point out. We turned 21 on successive days in 1978 as undergraduates at Mizzou. Suddenly it seems, here we are in the country of old men. And Ray's returned to the cornfield.

The passing of people in my cohort is becoming more frequent. I recall it as commonplace, in my childhood, for family elders to die in their 60s. Nobody was surprised. Most actually seemed relieved. There wasn't a popular expectation or demand for happy Golden Years.

But that was before the U-curve was proposed and propagated, the idea that it's normal to be happy in childhood and then again post-middle age, with a dip in the middle. 

"Lately, however, the curve has invited skepticism. Apparently, its trajectory holds true mainly in countries where the median wage is high and people tend to live longer or, alternatively, where the poor feel resentment more keenly during middle age and don't mind saying so. But there may be a simpler explanation: perhaps the people who participate in such surveys are those whose lives tend to follow the curve, while people who feel miserable at seventy or eighty, whose ennui is offset only by brooding over unrealized expectations, don't even bother to open such questionnaires..."

No you don't, New Yorker, you're not going to take away my U-curve just when I need it most. I'm planning to continue my ascent up the right face of the U. It'll help if I can find some more good writing on the subject. Arthur Krystal won't cut it. But I do appreciate his appreciation of Oliver Sacks's approach to the last chapters. "We should all make peace with aging. And so my hat is off to Dr. Oliver Sacks, who chose to regard old age as 'a time of leisure and freedom, freed from the factitious urgencies of earlier days, free to explore whatever I wish, and to bind the thoughts and feelings of a lifetime together.'"

There U go. Gotta look on the bright side of the aging process.

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Thursday, May 26, 2022

Diamond poetry

I'd forgotten than Donald Hall was one of Ken Burns's talking heads and narrative voices in that marvelous baseball documentary, until reading Hall's admission in Essays After Eighty that he was embarrassed by his inability to sing Take Me Out to the Ballgame for Burns in tune, on camera. But he sang beautifully all the same.


 

The Baseball Players

Against the bright
grass the white-knickered
players, tense, seize,
and attend. A moment
ago, outfielders
and infielders adjusted
their clothing, glanced
at the sun and settled
forward, hands on knees;
the pitcher walked back
of the hill, established
his cap and returned;
the catcher twitched
a forefinger; the batter
rotated his bat
in a slow circle. But now
they pause: wary, 
exact, suspended—
                                    while
abiding moonrise
lightens the angel
of the overgrown
hardens, and Walter Blake
Adams, who died
at fourteen, waits
under the footbridge.
Donald Hall, "The Baseball Players" from White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems, 1946-2006. Copyright © 2006 by Donald Hall.  Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Poetry Foundation




Wednesday, May 25, 2022

Happy endings

 Essays After Eighty is wonderful, Donald Hall became quite the eccentric old goat after Jane died of leukemia at just 47 (he was 66). Leave it to a poet to insist on speaking honestly and bluntly of our mortal condition, and contemptuously of our timid reluctance to acknowledge straightforwardly what old Henry James called "the distinguished thing."

“IT IS SENSIBLE of me to be aware that I will die one of these days. I will not pass away. Every day millions of people pass away—in obituaries, death notices, cards of consolation, e-mails to the corpse’s friends—but people don’t die. Sometimes they rest in peace, quit this world, go the way of all flesh, depart, give up the ghost, breathe a last breath, join their dear ones in heaven, meet their Maker, ascend to a better place, succumb surrounded by family, return to the Lord, go home, cross over, or leave this world. Whatever the fatuous phrase, death usually happens peacefully (asleep) or after a courageous struggle (cancer). Sometimes women lose their husbands. (Where the hell did I put him?) Some expressions are less common in print: push up the daisies, kick the bucket, croak, buy the farm, cash out. All euphemisms conceal how we gasp and choke turning blue.”

We die. I will die. That's the one sure message of Heidegger's that 's really stuck with me. Not that he was a clarion of honest language himself, the Nazi. Dasein? I prefer the old goat's way of putting the point. 

One of the goat's other winning ways, for me, was his devotion to his team. He loved the Red Sox. 

“Everyone who concentrates all day, in the evening needs to let the half-wit out for a walk.” Exactly. And now that I've paid for streaming I can follow all the teams and let the half-wit out for a marathon. Trying to resist that.

The old goat also says “there are no happy endings, because if things are happy they have not ended.” 

We caught up with the penultimate episode of This Is Us last night (the finale aired but we're saving that, we don't like things that make us happy to end either). Near the end of her hallucinatory train ride and escorted amble to the caboose, Rebecca says "it's all very sad, isn't it?" Her escort William (Randall's birth father) doesn't see it that way. If it feels sad at the end, he says, it must have been pretty great before the end. 

That's how I want to look at death. At life. Same thing, different aspects. 

“I feel the circles grow smaller, and old age is a ceremony of losses, which is on the whole preferable to dying at forty-seven or fifty-two.” 

The goat made it to eighty-nine, which is a decade-plus longer than my parents. Ask me, at eighty-nine, if I'm going for a hundred and one like Roger. Ask me today, at sixty-five, I'll say yes indeed. Keep the train on the track. Keep chugging.


Tuesday, May 24, 2022

Eagle Pond restored

 Still thinking this morning about Eagle Pond and the poetic life Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon made for themselves there (as once documented by Bill Moyers - * below), and about the transience of even the longest and most accomplished lives. All things must indeed pass (or fall), as Jane observed in her poem Things.

Things: simply lasting, then
failing to last: water, a blue heron’s
eye, and the light passing
between them: into light all things
must fall, glad at last to have fallen.

"The traditional New Hampshire sidehill farm at Eagle Pond sits close to where townlines join Danbury, Wilmot, and Andover. [About 55 miles southwest of WJ's Chocorua, btw.] Thought to date from 1803, the farm was in Don’s family from 1865 until it was sold in 2019, following his death in 2018." 

Here are his great-grandparents there in 1890, and he and Jane recreating the scene in 1979:

                       

I was saddened that so much of Eagle Pond was auctioned off, including Hall's wonderful old Victorian roll-top (kin to mine I think).


But I'm pleased to learn that much of that stuff is being regathered and returned, as preservationists proceed with plans to turn the place into a literary retreat. That's a far more appropriate disposition for an abode that became such a monument to poetry and gentle living.

It might have been otherwise.

 

* (Poignant moment at about 41 and a half minutes of the Bill Moyers conversation below, when Don declares himself unlikely to live past 70. Little did he know that his much younger wife would be gone within two years, at just 47; and that he'd persist to 89. Little do we know.)


Monday, May 23, 2022

An Eagle Pond of the mind

LISTEN. Another Sunday, another blowout win for my team, another embarrassing ninth inning for a soon-retiring legend whose lifelong dream it apparently has been to take the mound and demonstrate that pitching in the big leagues is a lot harder than it looks. Albert last week, Yadi yesterday. It was a bit funny the first time but no more please, Ollie. Sure it's only a game but let's not "make a mockery" of it. The score had already done that. Watching a blowout is embarrassing enough, I only do it when my team's on the long end of the score. Is that schadenfreude? Maybe not, if the embarrassment's sincere. 

Games don't matter, but mattering matters. Caring about what matters matters. (See Roger Angell, below.)

That's why I'm redoubling my resolve to devote each day's earliest and freshest attention to what matters most to me. That means heeding Jane Kenyon's quality advice,* unplugging the phone/internet, writing and reading good sentences and postponing all else except the daily morning dogwalk. It particularly means refusing the sorts of interruptions and solicitations that email invariably delivers. I'm quite capable of being my own time-thief, thanks. But I'm going for an Eagle Pond of the mind.

So that's one of the new (old) summer habits I'm working on: no email in the a.m.

Another one: in addition to my digital morning journal, which I've learned to visit first thing (after the coffee's brewed), I'm going to report faithfully in the late evening to my non-digital longhand journal. I get lazy about that, tapping keys is so much easier (faster, less straining on the hand's digits) than wielding the pen. But I want the day's last conscious words to be intentional and possibly fecund. See if the slumbering mind can do something creative with them, something that may spill into the morning journal and maybe even eventually into the ever-distracted and distracting world.
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*At Eagle Pond Farm Kenyon and Hall lived simply. They got up every morning, walked the dog, made coffee, ate breakfast, then went upstairs to write… Her advice to aspiring writers was: “Tell the whole truth. Don’t be lazy, don’t be afraid. Close the critic out when you are drafting something new. Take chances in the clarity of emotion… Be a good steward of your gifts. Protect your time. Feed your inner life. Avoid too much noise. Read good books, have good sentences in your ears. Be by yourself as often as you can. Walk. Take the phone off the hook. Work regular hours.” WA


 

Saturday, May 21, 2022

Roger Angell

Roger Angell has died. 101. What a terrific age, if you can keep your wits, health, and gratitide. He evidently did, and wrote earlier in his last decade of the challenges and (mostly) delights of growing quite old in a youth-besotted society. He's always been my dependable ally, whenever I felt the need to justify my baseball obsession. He makes it cool to care about "the haphazardous flight of a distant ball." Just to care.

“It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look - I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring - caring deeply and passionately, really caring - which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naïveté - the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball - seems a small price to pay for such a gift.” Five Seasons

What, after all, is the great world we must care about but a haphazardous ball adrift in the night? 



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Friday, May 20, 2022

The morrow

 Today's poem from Wendell Berry raises a perennial theme: how best to live today, so as best to discharge our obligation to tomorrow. I've interpreted his view before.* Present satisfaction and continued existence are not rivals. Hope for the future must center on ourselves, in our own time.

I. from Sabbaths 2014
Wendell Berry

The long cold drives inward
into shelter, into the body, into
limits of strength and time.

Out of darkness day comes.
The earth now white, the trees bear
bright new foliage of snow.

beautiful, yes. “Beautiful, but hell!”
Junior Wright said, wading
in knee-deep snow to feed

the snowbound cattle. We were young
then and really didn’t mind.
This morning, half a century

later, under the beautiful trees,
beautiful truly, repaying much,
I dig out the paths again,

renewing again the pattern of home
life grown old in this place
and many times renewed. Continuing
my difficult study, I remind myself
again: “Take no thought for the morrow.” WA

Thursday, May 19, 2022

Absorbed by what is given

LISTEN. It's glorious May in mid-TN, the season when I'm least apologetic for indulging WJ's advice to bring life "down to the non-thinking level, the level of pure sensorial perception." It is indeed intensely interesting, to slow down, look around, smell the roses, ride the bike, dip in the drink. Emerson had his bare common, James his Chocorua, I my redneck pool.

The occasion and the experience, then, are nothing. It all depends on the capacity of the soul to be grasped, to have its life-currents absorbed by what is given. "Crossing a bare common," says Emerson, "in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear."

Life is always worth living, if one have such responsive sensibilities. But we of the highly educated classes (so called) have most of us got far, far away from Nature. We are trained to seek the choice, the rare, the exquisite exclusively, and to overlook the common. We are stuffed with abstract conceptions, and glib with verbalities and verbosities; and in the culture of these higher functions the peculiar sources of joy connected with our simpler functions often dry up, and we grow stone-blind and insensible to life's more elementary and general goods and joys.

Not me, not now, not in May. 




Wednesday, May 18, 2022

Wasted attribution

Bertrand Russell did not say "the time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time," says the Quote Investigator. I suspected not.

In addition to John Lennon and Bertrand Russell, the saying has been attributed to T. S. Elliot, Soren Kierkegaard, Laurence J. Peter, and others. The attribution to Russell was a mistake that was caused by the misreading of an entry in a quotation book compiled by Peter.
Peter (in his management/self-help bestseller The Peter Principle) was apparently offering his personal gloss on Russell's actual statement in Conquest of Happiness that "The thing that I should wish to obtain from money would be leisure with security," when he (Peter) added parenthetically (The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time). Peter should have added Russell's actual next sentence: "But what the typical modern man desires to get with it is more money, with a view to ostentation, splendour, and the outshining of those who have hitherto been his equals."

In other words, Russell was saying, we imprudently undervalue our time and overvalue money, as a mark of success in what we mistakenly conceive as the great competition of life. "The root of the trouble springs from too much emphasis upon competitive success as the main source of happiness... success can only be one ingredient in happiness, and is too dearly purchased if all the other ingredients have been sacrificed to obtain it."

One other very important ingredient is time (which in our terms, after all, is simply experience) enjoyed for its own sake. Time experienced happily is not wasted. You can quote me on that. 

Tuesday, May 17, 2022

Back

Back from the dismal land of COVID. Finally felt more or less normal in yesterday's mild loveliness, a few days after quarantine lifted. I got my positive diagnosis at the Vandy walk-in clinic on the very day I was scheduled for my fourth jab. Guess it was just my turn. Did I catch the vile virus at the Lyceum party? Could be. It was still a good party.

Yesterday was a fine day for a long leisurely drive on the Natchez Trace Parkway. My brother-in-law needed a ride home to Hohenwald from Centennial Hospital, where his persistent heart issues landed him again last weekend. Hope the sunny stress-free 50 mph drive we shared with just a few random bikers and almost no other vehicles was as restorative of his spirits as it was mine. Gotta have heart, brother.

Sure wish that was my regular commute instead of I-24.

But that's the little road trip I'm doing later this morning, just halfway to the 'boro--to the pool superstore for that black bucket of chemicals we need to open our redneck pool for the season. We've added a little deck this year. Life is good.