Kathy Covid

 

            The past week brought us to a new plateau of optimism.  In large measure the explanation is rather obviously calendrical and meteorological.  We are very near the equinox.  The increment in the hours of daylight, the quality of the light itself, a dramatic if brief rise in temperature that has left in our field of vision only scattered patches of snow rather than deep snowfields.  We are threatened with some more cold days and even snow flurries, but we are surely past some tipping point.

 

            For us the specific day may have been February 19.  On that day we got our first injections of the Moderna vaccine.  I am fairly patient and stoical, but the moment I got the shot I realized that I had been much more concerned about the matter than I was willing to let on even to myself—or, perhaps, especially to myself.  The somewhat unlikely venue was the gardening section of a huge Walmart store in a shopping mall in North Brunswick, NJ, about fifteen miles north of us.  This may sound a bit dubious, but the whole set-up was brilliant—quick, efficient, and uncrowded.  The registrars were all friendly, courteous, upbeat young people, solicitous of  their elderly charges.  The hardest thing about it was walking from the registry desk at the pharmacy to the place where the shots were actually administered, a distance of about a city block, all of it of course through aisle after aisle of Walmart merchandise.  I deduce that the garden department had been chosen both for its peripheral location within the big box and because in mid-February there are few customers milling about among the large sacks of grass seed and turf-builder.  I suppose a sense of relief is what most people experience as they leave a Walmart,  but on this occasion the experience approached delight.

 

            But what I set out to write about was not that we got our jabs but how we came by them.  Many weeks ago I registered my sense of dissatisfaction at how vaccination was proceeding in the state of New Jersey.  The system was poorly organized and poorly explained, leaving one with the impression of a poverty of opportunities and an arbitrariness in their allocation.  I now realize this was, and to some extent still is, pretty much a national problem.  Elaborate websites featured impressive full pages of telephone numbers to call and forms to fill out, but none of this seemed ever to lead to actual vaccination appointments as opposed to endless referrals to other telephone numbers.  Once crucial medical workers and other “front-liners” had been addressed, the largest number of high priority candidates for vaccination were the elderly—and especially the already infirm elderly.  The press began to raise an unsettling theme.  Getting an appointment might depend less upon a theoretical eligibility than upon  digital sophistication and a persistent Darwinian competitiveness, characteristics for which the targeted population was perhaps not conspicuous.  Though there are more geezer computer whizzes and Tiger Greatgrandmoms than you might think, there was more than enough truth in this analysis to cause a bit of generalized elder distress.

 

            Then, out of the blue, I got a telephone call from a woman named Kathy.  She has a last name of course, but of course I didn’t take it in, neatly demonstrating that I was exactly the kind of person she had it in mind to call.  She is now preserved in my phone “contacts” as Kathy Covid—perhaps a poor repayment for her kindness, but an efficient way of differentiating her from  a surprisingly large number of other Kathies recorded in that registry.  Kathy was calling from somewhere up in the northern part of Somerset County.  She told me that she and a few friends had formed a group to help elderly people (the diplomatic phrase she used was eligible people) set up vaccination appointments.  Would we be interested?  You bet.  Within two hours we were able to schedule appointments.  I passed on her number to friends, and they had similar results.  When I called Kathy myself a couple of days later to thank her for her help, she was very gracious, though it seemed to me obvious that she hadn’t remembered my name.  By that time she had probably talked with, and aided, dozens of other elders.

 

            Most people who love poetry even a little are likely to have read Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” a poem which is about, among other things, recollected memories and their relation to the moral life.  In it the poet recounts revisiting, after an absence of five years, the beautiful countryside above the ruins of a twelfth-century monastery on the Welsh borders.  His earlier memories of the natural beauty are revivified, though they have never left him.  “These beauteous forms, Through a long absence, have not been to me As is a landscape to a blind man's eye: But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to them, In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; And passing even into my purer mind With tranquil restoration:—feelings too Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps, As have no slight or trivial influence On that best portion of a good man's life, His little, nameless, unremembered, acts Of kindness and of love…”   Little, unremembered acts of kindness and of love…perhaps the most famous lines in a famous poem.  They hardly need glossing, though these days one should perhaps make an observation relating to linguistic history.  Wordsworth here uses man in its common eighteenth-century generalizing sense of human kind.  It is not, as we say now, “gender specific”.  What Kathy Covid did for us was indeed an act of kindness and of love, and indeed was also apparently unremembered after only a few days, or at least detached from memorial specificity amid a plethora of other such kind acts.

 

            It is now just over a year a since the plague fell upon the world, negatively affecting all of human social life, but especially the daily life of complex industrial and commercial societies like our own.  And in our country the effects seemed exacerbated by a threatening synergy of medical and political malaise culminating, in these parts at least, in the midst of the darkening cold of winter.  The lack of social cohesion made vivid at the personal level in the enforced isolation of so many of us, and more broadly in the inability of our government to get anything very serious done, has seemed painfully apparent.  Under these circumstances little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love can suddenly claim a great name and memorability, certainly, among those who have experienced them. 

 

The Glory and the Freshness of a Dream

John Stuart Mill

Only rarely can I recall my dreams, but I have a vivid fragment of one from two nights ago.  It’s a hot, summer Ozark day, and I’m a small boy sitting on the slight slope of a stock pond.  My fishing equipment is primitive and makeshift, the pole a cut cane, the bobber an actual bottle cork.  Suddenly it bobs, at first faintly and hesitantly, then decisively, propelling little concentric rings spreading out about it on the surface of the muddy water.  Immediately there shoots through my infantile frame a current of nearly inexpressible joy and excitement.  I may have been remembering an actual event; I certainly was experiencing an actual but long dormant psychological state.  It was the wonderment of my young granddaughter Cora a year ago or so when she looked through the glass wall from dining room to atrium and beheld the miracle of a turtle which, she had no way of knowing, I had secretly introduced into that spot a few days earlier.

Jesus, who frequently said strange things, is reported as saying “Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.”  I don’t think this is a heavy moral admonition so much as an empirical observation.  Jesus had noted an unfortunate aspect of the “maturing process” or “child development,” concerning which Wordsworth has more to say than Freud or Spock.

THERE was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

The earth, and every common sight,

To me did seem

Apparell'd in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream.

It is not now as it hath been of yore;—

Turn wheresoe'er I may,

By night or day,

The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

If we are ever going to get back to the garden, as Joni Mitchell among other theologians tells us we must, we may need to read more poetry and think about the things poets write about.  “From the winter of 1821, when I first read Bentham…I had what might truly be called an object in life; to be a reformer of the world.”  So wrote John Stuart Mill in his famous autobiography.  To be a “reformer of the world” is no small ambition, but by the autumn of 1826 all meaning and purpose had drained from Mill’s life.  Medicine had not yet defined clinical depression.  The common term was still melancholy, as in Burton’s famous Anatomy thereof.  Mill lacked even the words to describe his agony, though he would find them much later in Coleridge’s poem entitled Dejection: "A grief without a pang, void, dark and drear, a drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief, which finds no natural outlet or relief in word, or sigh, or tear  .” 

Mill had then still nearly half a century to live.  Had he been unable to overcome his depression the Victorian age would never have known one of its greatest intellects and philosophers.  But overcome it he did, and it was the nature of his self-medication that interests me here.  It involved no opiates or psychotropic drugs.  It consisted entirely in a self-directed course of readings in the English Romantic poets, especially the early Wordsworth.  Mill delineates his therapeutic experience in the fifth chapter of his autobiography.  He slowly worked through an early two-volume edition, at the end of which was the “Immortality Ode,” of which I have already cited the opening lines.

                                                                                   Wordsworth

Mill wrote thus: “At the conclusion of the Poems came the famous Ode, falsely called Platonic, ‘Intimations of Immortality’: in which, along with more than his usual sweetness of melody and rhythm, and along with the two passages of grand imagery but bad philosophy so often quoted, I found that he too had had similar experience to mine; that he also had felt that the first freshness of youthful enjoyment of life was not lasting; but that he had sought for compensation, and found it, in the way in which he was now teaching me to find it. The result was that I gradually, but completely, emerged from my habitual depression, and was never again subject to it.”  The rest is, as they say, history.

I presume that one of the beautiful but bad passages—bad because it clearly suggests that there are more things in heaven and earth, John Stuart, than are dreamt of in your philosophy--is the following.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar:

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison-house begin to close

Upon the growing Boy,

But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,

He sees it in his joy;

The Youth, who daily farther from the east

Must travel, still is Nature's priest,

And by the vision splendid

Is on his way attended;

At length the Man perceives it die away,

And fade into the light of common day.

I cannot say precisely when the shades of the prison-house closed upon this growing boy, but it has been a very long time since a piece of cork bobbing on the surface of a stock pond could nearly ravish me with joy and wonder.  I can but be grateful for dream fragments.

Wordsworth Vindaloo

"Ten thousand saw I at a glance"

Last week I revealed to my readers some of the many exalted positions I occupy, and this week I announce another: I am a Co-Chair of the Grounds Committee of the Gray Farm Neighbors Association. The residents of our lakeside tract in Princeton Township share ownership of ten or fifteen acres of meadows and woodland. For the Grounds Committee the main tasks in tending the Common Ground are beating back the jungle and cleaning up storm damage, but we strive also to do some actual landscaping. In its third year, my scheme of mass bulb planting has begun to pay off, and in particular we have a spectacular show of daffodils and narcissi along the paths next to the lake.

Daffodils above Ullswater

Unfortunately I can show you no photograph, for blog day has arrived precipitate in a double sense. It hardly matters, though, since you can capture the essence of the scene perfectly by looking at the most famous water-side daffodils in the world, those above Ullswater in the Lake District in England. The divine Creator gave them their beauty in time immemorial; William Wordsworth gave them their fame in 1804 with the following poem.

I WANDER'D lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretch'd in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed -- and gazed -- but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

Anybody who reads poems at all has probably read this one. It is justly famous, despite some pretty awful lines, such as

I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought. 

In chasing a pedestrian rhyme Wordsworth leaves huge, muddy bootprints all over the natural syntax of the English language, completely abandoning, incidentally, the noble theory he and Coleridge laid out in the “Preface” to the Lyrical Ballads: “The Poet thinks and feels in the spirit of human passions. How, then, can his language differ in any material degree from that of all other men who feel vividly and see clearly?” Well, by the verb to the end of the sentence artificially postponing, that’s how. Still, the inward eye…the bliss of solitude is pure gold, like the daffodils themselves.

The line that makes the poem unteachable today, though, is not Wordsworth’s fault:

A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company

This now elicits titters or guffaws. But the sexual meaning of gay, today nearly universal, is a mysterious neologism. Wordsworth had never heard of it. It is furthermore incoherent. If homosexuality is gay, heterosexuality should be morose. Instead, oddly, it is straight, in which case…

But I learned long ago, in my very first job, that the Romantic Poets were unlikely to survive modern undergraduate sexual obsessions. The moment of truth came in 1963 at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, in a freshman literature survey populated largely by fresh-faced, blue-eyed, blond-haired young women called Karen, from someplace called Fond du Lac.

We read Wordsworth’s “Lucy” poems, and I assigned a short paper on one of the best known of them, “Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known”. In this poem the poet-lover sees his girlfriend’s house by moonlight and has the irrational apprehension (“strange fit of passion”, indeed) that she might lie dead within it. As the rider passes the house, the moon sank low upon it.

And now we reached the orchard-plot;
And, as we climbed the hill,
The sinking moon to Lucy's cot
Came near, and nearer still. 

Well, I was home one Saturday night grading papers, just beginning to nod, when I came to one that made the hair on the back of my neck stiffen. One of the fresh-faced Karens from Fond du Lac had written a psycho-sexual interpretation of the poem that probably deserved an X-rating but might have squeaked through with a strong Parental Guidance Advisory. For both Wordsworth and Karen had been victimized by philological vagaries over which they had no control.

cots

There was a perfectly good Old English word cot, meaning a modest house, a humble dwelling. Eventually it was replaced by cottage, but it survived well into the nineteenth century and survives still in various place names and compounds such as dovecote. Meanwhile there had been a distantly related old Sanskrit root *khatva, generally suggesting narrowness or constriction, which in a later Prakrit became khat, meaning a most useful piece of portable furniture so characterized—to wit, a camp-bed or cot. The Brits brought back this useful thing, and the useful word denoting it, along with other Indian treasures such as umbrellas and Darjeeling tea. Gradually the Indian homophone hogged the whole space formerly occupied by the Old English word.

 Karen (from Fond du Lac)

For Wordsworth the cot was his girlfriend’s little house, viewed distantly as a dark exterior--and nothing more. And why should Karen from Fond du Lac think that the cot was anything else than, well, a cot. I have to admit that it definitely spices up a rather lugubrious poem if you think that it is all taking place in bed—sort of Wordsworth Vindaloo.

 William Wordsworth (from the Lake District)


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SEMI-SUNSHINE ADDENDUM  3PM ET 20 April 2011

Some weak sunshine has appeared, allowing me to give an impression of what this post was supposed to be about--the show of daffodils on the Gray Farm paths above Carnegieswater.