Bambusoideled

We remain digital ingenus, and we learned only this week, and by accident, that Alexa has a “question of the day” for the general amusement of her large clientele.  We then had to check the day’s question out, of course.  It turned out to be a soft pitch, and we were able to knock it out of the park.  “What,” Alexa wanted to know, “is the fastest growing plant?”  The answer is bamboo (Bambuseae), as we have good reason to know.

We moved into our house, the only one we have ever actually owned, just over thirty years ago.  It is a largish modern rectangular house with a flat roof (bad idea) and a glass wall on the back looking out into natural beauty (good idea) and a path through woods down to the lake a quarter of a mile away.  I can rightfully call it “architect designed,” since a Professor in the Architecture School designed it.  I think we are the third owners of the house, and will almost certainly be the last.  The edifice and its occupants seem on track for simultaneous collapse.  The man who built the house must have had been a spiritual Californian.  At any event, he put in a few bamboo plants among some massive and carefully strewn boulders on the west side of the property.

These plants had become a dense grove by the time we moved in, and within two more years they had surrounded the aforementioned boulders, creating within our larger garden a kind of mystery zone perfectly suited to entrance small grandchildren.   The mature bamboo is a beautiful thing to behold both in the pattern of the leafing and in the fascinating segmentation of the small circular trunk, which have presented an inexhaustible subject for classical Chinese and Japanese painters.  The leafy tops of these giant grasses (as they are technically classified) dance and bend with the breeze, creating a strange sensation of violent motion tethered to a graceful solidity.  In heavy or icy snow their tops may bend all the way to the ground; and since many are thirty feet tall, that means roughly a third of the way across the whole back lawn.  Quite soon we had to lay down an imaginary red line beyond which we were prepared to fight back.

The appearance of the roots is skeletal, like yellowish-green human finger bones, but of seemingly infinite length.  They shoot out underground in a straight line, every now and again barely breaking the surface to expose an inch or two of serpentine loop.  It is along these shallowly subterranean and rapidly advancing roots, stronger than Antaeus in their earth-grip and virtually ineradicable, that the new vertical bamboo shoots spring up.

Giving the bamboo its inch, which allows you to enjoy the beauty, is very difficult.  For it wants its mile, or rather unlimited mileage, which can ruin your garden in very short order.  So far as I can tell there are only two solutions.  The first is to construct subterranean containment walls deep enough to block the advance of the roots.  My son in Brooklyn, a great bamboo aficionado,  lucked into this solution.  The old house he bought in Red Hook had most inappropriately in its small back yard a small cement swimming pool that looked as though it dated from the ‘Fifties (maybe the 1850’s).  He transformed this ugly and useless thing into a huge flower-pot in which a beautifully tamed bamboo copse now thrives.  I recommend this elegant solution both for the perfection of the results and for its inexpensiveness—once you have amortized the cost of building the pool, of course.   The situation is not unlike that attendant upon Bo-Bo’s discovery of roast pork in the famous essay by Charles Lamb.  But underground containment is not a possibility for us.  We are not dealing with a patch but a forest, and the only answer for us is an annual draconian slaughter of the offspring.

            Each year in early May, usually before the tenth, the bamboo starts sprouting.  One day you see nothing; the next long straight lines of shoots pop up everywhere adjacent to the bamboo groves, in the lawn, in the flower beds, already two or three inches high the first time you notice them.  From that time on, you can practically watch them grow, ever more phallic in appearance—sometimes two or three inches overnight.  The really spectacular growth comes later, after they reach three or four feet, but by then the stems at ground level are becoming tough and woody, dark green in color, and difficult to cut easily.  You can also hear them growing—intermittent, squeaky, slightly railroadish sounds coming out of the dark of the spring night.  The young plants are cunningly made, covered in very tight overlapping paper-like wrappings, which they gradually shed as they climb ever upward.  In this they are like vegetable snakes.  They await their Stephen King to exploit the incipient horror of it all.  Cutting them to the ground in their sprout stage is only the first step.  They are likely to return in a year, but in a spindly state.  A second attack usually does the trick, and a third always does.

            This year’s campaign has a new twist.  Bamboo is of course edible, but I have never had confidence that our variety would be.  On Monday, however, I had a revelatory experience.  Our private lot abuts fifteen or twenty acres of “common land” shared by all the houses in the neighborhood.  Scattered throughout these acres are several other lush bamboo groves.  Just beyond my southern stone boundary wall is a large field.  As I was working at the bottom of my lawn,  I was surprised to see in this field a large black SUV with New York plates.  This was a most curious sight, and also highly suggestive of transgression.  Only large lawnmowers and heavy tree-care machines ever appear on the common ground, through which there is no actual vehicular road.  A private sports-utility vehicle could not have been more out of place on one of the great lawns of Central Park; but I go with the flow.  Later I saw two young, maskless Chinese women, both carrying heavy bags filled with the severed tips of bamboo sprouts, coming out of the woods.  In thus identifying them, I refer not to nationality, of which I have no knowledge, but to the probable national origin suggested by their physical appearance, the language they were speaking, and the vegetable loot they were hauling.  When they saw me, and realized that I had observed them, one of them dropped her heavy bag and both ran toward the SUV.  Then a middle-aged Chinese man appeared from I know not where, scooped up the discarded bag, and also rushed to the vehicle.  The guilty conscience needs no accuser.  Hand in the cookie jar doesn’t do justice.  You would have thought I had stumbled upon a major heist in progress at the First National Bank.  The black car took off at as high speed as risk of breaking an axle in rough terrain would allow, across the field, through a bumpy vacant lot, and then (out of sight to me) to a paved road and successful escape.  It seems clear that these desperadoes were unaware that my attitude, should I have been capable of one other than astonishment, would have been of gratitude for the their help in controlling the Green Menace.  I also concluded that if the Great Bamboo Sprout Caper was worthy of the automotive drama of The French Connection, we must have some pretty great bamboo sprouts.  So I set aside a promising bunch from my own back yard, and I’ll steam some for lunch tomorrow.

with thanks for several photos by Joan Fleming and Lulu Fleming-Benite

Socially Distanced

We are in a demographic more likely than many others to tolerate more or less equably the enforced social isolation of the past two months.  We are far from being social butterflies.  Our greatest sense of “crowd” deprivation comes from the cancellation of the program of musical concerts to which we subscribe.  But there is also a highly enjoyable periodic dinner, what we call the “Dinners for Six,” that we now have to forego—or, rather, “virtualize”..

To explain this dinner I call upon the talented Peter Arno, the nom de plume of Curtis Arnoux Peters, Jr., the artist who established the tradition of great cartoons for which the New Yorker magazine is justly famous.  Roger Angell, another New Yorker stalwart, called him “the magazine’s first genius.”  He was not primarily a political cartoonist, but he did come up with some memorable pieces on political themes.  The cartoon above appeared in 1936.  I cannot say I remember enjoying it at the time.  That was the year of my birth, and though I am sure that I must have been precocious, I was probably still bogged down in Junior Scholastic.  Nineteen thirty-six also initiated the second term of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency.  FDR has long since enjoyed political beatification, and most Americans regard him as a figure semi-divine.  Arno’s cartoon reminds us that he was once highly controversial.  A quartet of the New York upper crust are passing by the open window of some of their peers.  “Come along,” one of the women shouts out in invitation to those in the house.  “We are going to the Trans-Lux to hiss Roosevelt!”  The Trans-Lux was an art deco movie theater at 52^nd and Lexington, and cinema programs in the good old days usually began with News Reels devoted to more or less current events, including presidential appearances.  The cartoon satirizes moneyed fat cats, of course; but it preserves an anti-Roosevelt attitude held by millions at the time.  Conservatives liked to call him “a traitor to his class.”

Though the parallel is not exact, a Dinner for Six is a little like a group trip to the Trans-Lux.  The “six” are three couples of very old friends.  We all share a number of interests in common, and though there is a certain amount of difference in our political views, there is probably a good deal more agreement.  Fairly early in the Trump administration we found ourselves sufficiently alarmed by the state of things that we decided to have regular meetings at roughly six-week intervals to discuss the latest developments.  These discussions focus in the main on the White House—to such a degree that an alternative term for Dinner for Six is “Trumpian Dinner”.  The actual dinner is an important part of the Dinner, if you follow, and we rotate among our private houses and share the preparation of an entrée, a salad, and a dessert on a regular rota.  Heaven forfend that we should get competitive on the culinary aspects; but I can say that everyone sets a pretty high standard.  The meals themselves, accordingly, are memorable.  We do not actually hiss the President, but we do subject his deeds and his words to sometimes frankly censorious review.

Since we are very old friends, and since there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in half of anyone’s philosophy, and thus endless fruitful topics of conversation, we sometimes take rather a long time arriving at the Trumpian theme, and one evening we came close to never getting to it at all.  But we invariably end the evening with predictions.  There is always something cooking, after all—the Mueller Report, impeachment, the latest hiring and firings, portentous developments pregnant with the apparent likelihood of effecting dramatic change.  Our predictions, which are actually written down to be recalled at the next dinner, are mostly wrong and even if not exactly wrong, rendered more or less irrelevant by the time of the next meeting by other unforeseen developments.

We are continuing our conversations “virtually”, but if you take away the food you do risk losing an important part of dinner.  That essential etymological element of companionship that I so often mention—the sharing of bread—is lacking in the virtual and socially distanced world.  I have been trying to clarify in my mind just what it is about the current situation that is so off-putting.  Such reflection is probably an idle enterprise.   There are many disturbing aspects, some quite serious, others merely annoying; and the scene changes significantly from day to day in response to accidental and trivial circumstances.  But one constant is the unnaturalness of social isolation.  We are built not for isolation but for community.

Read the Virus Away

Picasso

Meekly accepting our assignment among the highest risk group in a pandemic has meant accepting a social isolation so nearly complete as to leave us struggling to impose structure on our days and to find meaning in activities that might unkindly be called killing time.  The most socially redemptive of these is reading.  There’s always been a lot of that in my life, but this takes it to an altogether new level.  It has also made me think in a slightly new way—this after a long career of being an English professor—about the social role of stories and story-telling.  It is as though my whole library had been picked up and moved into a brightly lit cubbyhole between two of the departure gates at Newark Airport to compete with racks of hard candy and potato chips.

The illusion of large swaths of uncommitted time stretching out before me is one of the more curious aspects of the medical house arrest in which we find ourselves.  One knows, of course, that it is an illusion, that actually the circumstances are an emblem of vulnerability and mortality rather than leisure, but it encourages the adoption of mad projects, such as reading all of Don Quixote in Spanish.  Mind you that is an aspiration rather than a guarantee.  It’s a book of half a million words or so, and my Spanish, though a little better than minimally functional, struggles with the richness of Cervantes’s vocabulary and the frequent obsolescence of his constructions.

As a character Don Quixote is a man who has been made mad by books, or at any rate whose madness has been made all the madder by them.  Art is supposed to imitate life, but Quixote reverses that.  The knights errant of the endless romances in his library take over his life, creating a work of genius frequently described as “the first novel.”  That characterization is not uncontested, and I have simultaneously been reworking my way through another claimant to the title of “first novel,” the Latin prose narrative of Apuleius of Madaurus.  Apuleius was a north African Roman writer of the second century.  The general cultural milieu of his circumstances and training in rhetoric and Platonic philosophy inevitably invites comparison with that of the young pagan Augustine two centuries later.  Only a few of Apuleius’s writings have survived, but one of them is a masterpiece.  It is The Metamorphosis, a picaresque narrative about the adventures of a young man supernaturally transformed into a donkey.  What happens to him in his donkey state is scarcely to be believed, and certainly not to be put down before you read the last word.  The book was known in translation to the English Renaissance  as The Golden Asse, a title of ribald amusement to my fellow undergraduates in the college course in which I first read it.

We professors are prone to make extravagant ethical claims concerning the benefits of reading fiction carefully, and I can hardly abjure  a high seriousness that kept food on my family table for so many years.   But these competing first novels suggest something less grandiose.  The purpose of stories seems first of all to be entertainment and distraction, and the recompense of the story-teller has more to do with bread than with philosophical celebrity.  The narrators of the tales in the Decameron, one of our earliest and best collections of tales, are motivated by the desire to take their minds off the plague and think of something less serious.  Six hundred years ago Boccaccio placed them in the fictional situation that we are today living through in reality.  Though I and others are capable of finding ingenious moral meanings in those tales, they are presented first and foremost as pastime and entertainment.  Scheherazade, the genius narrator of the Arabian Nights, has an aim more urgently practical yet: indefinitely deferring her execution!  The monarch Shahryar’s draconian response to his wife’s infidelity was—after disposing of her--to marry a fresh virgin every night and remove her, permanently, the next morning.   But he got hooked on Scheherazade’s brilliant narratives, and always wanted to hear just one more day’s life-extending installment.

With sea shanties and work-songs of other kinds toilers sought to dull the monotony and physical exhaustion of hard labor.  Travelers, especially, were story tellers.  Travel (with its obvious connections to the two different senses of French and English travail) was arduous work, and often dangerous.  Medieval pilgrims undertaking serious journeys were compelled by canon law to make out their wills before departure.  They well might not be coming back.  The Golden Ass of Apuleius begins with its narrator Lucius on a tiring business trip on horseback.  His destination is Thessaly.  On the road he overtakes two travelers arguing.  Lucius can hear the one accuse the other of having told outrageous tall tales.  It is precisely far-fetched narrative that Lucius seeks as palliatives for the rigors of the journey, and certainly what he delivers in his own right.  As a matter of fact, ancient travelers—and their medieval counterparts, mainly pilgrims—gained the reputation of extravagant fabulators.  The parallels with the framing premise of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are quite marked.  The Canterbury pilgrims agree to participate in a tale-telling contest, the prize for which will be a meal at a wayside inn.  Lucius proposes a very similar arrangement.  Story-telling, traveling, and sharing a meal form a fundamental social nexus.  Remember the literal meaning of the word companion—one with whom you share your bread (panis).

“All men by nature desire to know”, as Aristotle’s Metaphysics famously begins.  “An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves; and above all others the sense of sight. For not only with a view to action, but even when we are not going to do anything, we prefer seeing (one might say) to everything else. The reason is that this, most of all the senses, makes us know and brings to light many differences between things”.  But for the Greek philosophers the desire for true knowledge was quite different from idle and indulgent curiosity.  Curiosity is regarded by most of us today as a plus, but do remember that it killed the cat.  In the Latin moral vocabulary, both classical and Christian, the word curiositas is deeply ambivalent.  If we can believe Saint Paul the Greeks and especially the Athenians had an insatiable appetite for hearing about the new and the strange.  “Now the Athenians in general and the foreigners there had no time for anything but talking or hearing about the latest novelty” (Acts 17:21). 

Apuleius’s narrator Lucius would seem to be an honorary Athenian.  When he hears one of his prospective new companions accuse the other of telling “absurd and monstrous lies,” he becomes all ears.  “Such is my thirst for novelty that I said, ‘Please let me share in your conversation, not because I am one of those curious ones, but I am one who wants to know everything or at least most things!”  That curiously qualifying phrase has to be a nod to Aristotle, but its literary-critical import is hard to pin down.

There is an explicit invocation of Aristotle in the first narrative chapter of Cervantes, which deals chiefly with his hero’s literary pathology.  The old don struggled with the vapid purple passages of his beloved romances, “although Aristotle himself would not have been able to understand them, even if he had been resurrected for that sole purpose.”  Don Quixote “had filled his imagination with everything he had read, with enchantments, knightly encounters, battles, challenges, wounds, with tales of love and torments and …had come to believe that all these fictitious happenings were true; they were more real to him than anything else in the world.”  That’s one hell of a fix in “real life,” but, boy, does it ever make for an absorbing story.

Masque of the Dread Slime

So people are doing all sorts of novel things to distract themselves, raise their spirits, avoid thinking about unpleasant realities, or simply kill time during the novel virus pandemic.  One of the things they are doing is to begin answering almost any question asked of them with the word so.  “So we’re just sitting here cooped up like everybody else, but…”  To be sure this aberration long antedates the current plague, of which it is, however, one of several linguistic analogues.  It is far from clear what part of speech so is in such constructions, though it clearly cannot be an honest conjunction.  I’d have to side with Miss Ihrig, my elementary school grammar teacher.  Words like hence, thus, then, yet, moreover, still, and so (when so means therefore) are not conjunctions.  They are formal conjunctive adverbs….So so has about as much of a claim to be at the head of that sentence as a razorback hog has to unemployment benefits, but let it pass.  I suppose I should be grateful that it isn’t Like.  “Like, we’re just like sitting here like just cooped up…"

Living in effective isolation as we do, we have been largely unaware of hip ways to kill time.  With us it has been mainly reading, video binging, and continuous, protracted tournaments of games of skill.  Well, some skill.  We completed one cribbage tournament, and are now well into a Boggle tournament.  Modesty forbids me from reporting who won the first or who is ahead in the second.   In my last post I described a vehicular birthday party in which we had participated, little knowing (as I later learned from numerous emails) that the genre was already well established and perhaps even “trending”.  This past weekend we had a somewhat similar experience.

"American Gothic" by Grant Wood and by the Goths themselves

Our daughter, a major executive hunkered down in a Manhattan apartment--from which she conducts a wide variety of business, including large electronic staff meetings, with virtual virtuosity--thought it might be a morale booster for her hard-working team to sponsor a staff competition in another trending amusement that I shall call the photographic tableau vivant.  The idea here is to get yourself photographed in a pose that invokes a famous painting.  I thought that this, too, was an original and promising idea.  Left to my own devices I would have chosen the posture of Goya’s “Maja desnuda”.  It’s a case of type casting.  But I didn’t have a choice.  Katy apparently wanted to win her own competition, and she thought she had in her two parents the raw materials for an unbeatable rendition of Grant Wood’s “American Gothic.”  O wad some Power the giftie gie us/ To see ousels as ithers see us!   The photography was effected on Saturday.  On Sunday I saw in the Times a mention of the new sport, including specifically a posed version of “American Gothic.”

I have now had the opportunity to see the results of the contest, which are very impressive.  While I think we could reasonably be described as remaining competitive, the standard was extraordinarily high, and we would have been lucky to show or even place.  There is a downside to hanging out with very smart people.  But very wisely the Authorities decided to invoke the Dodo-bird verdict from Alice in Wonderland: “Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.”  Out of family pride I will point to one other outstanding entry, the “portrait” of one of my delightful granddaughters (Lulu Fleming-Benite) as orchestrated by her likewise delightful and slightly younger sister (Cora Louise Fleming-Benite).

Alice Neel portrait / Lulu Fleming-Benite (by Cora Louise Fleming-Benite)

A few weeks ago I praised Queen Elizabeth’s pep-talk to her countrymen.  In it she identified three qualities that in her opinion could help see her country through the crisis.  One of them was good-humored resolve.  Of course she actually said “good-humoured”.  That good-humoured resolve might be the contemporary British version of the old stiff upper lip I will regard as one of the more benign evidences of the international impact of American culture, for I have thought that hilarity in the face of difficulty is more an American thing. 

The playful, puckish  quality clearly discernible in mobile birthday parties and photographic  tableaux vivants could serve us well if extended throughout the lively arts.  I think particularly of the arts of the stage.  One of the secrets of success shared by creative artists of all kinds is the ability to see and to exploit usually unnoticed similarities among disparate data.  What is the characteristic icon of our shared situation?  I would say it is the face mask.  Throughout our country skilled volunteers sit at their sewing machines turning out masks by the gross, many of them works of art.  When our dear friend Elizabeth Billington Fox of La Crosse mentioned to us that she was among these Singer Sister heroines we were shameless enough to beg a pair for ourselves, and boy are they beauties!  The William Morris motif is a graceful homage to the year we spent at the William Morris Centre in London.  And what strange accoutrement of costume do we associate with the ancient origins of our theater?  The mask, of course.  Spell that masque, and you will immediately grasp the connection.  The Renaissance masque was a usually short interlude on a mythological, political, or especially moral theme, almost always played by amateurs.   E. A. Poe took a pioneering step toward a pandemic masque in his great short story “The Masque of the Red Death.”  But in that one, unfortunately, the pathogen triumphs.  I want to commission one in which it loses, something along the lines of Milton’s Comus.  This is a dramatic allegory of chastity in which an otherwise unnamed “Lady” triumphs over the charms, blandishments, and even the date-rape drugs of Comus, god of wassail, revelry, and sexual promiscuity—the dramatic antithesis of social isolation indeed.

 

 haute couture masks by Elizabeth Billington Fox

 

Surely some talented reader of this blog could come up with a brief Masque of the Dread Slime.  The cathartic potential for the national audience would be boundless.  In the medieval mystery plays the audience was given license to vociferate execration against any of Satan’s brood and other unpopular characters like Judas and Herod.  Who could be more unpopular than Corona Virus?   Not even Cruella de Vil.  There is a contemporary analogue in our elder son’s Brooklyn neighborhood of Red Hook, where each year a street pageant commemorates the community’s hard-won victory over Storm Sandy in 2012, with Sandy represented by a scary float not much different from a medieval hell’s mouth.  It seems that these days the trending epithet for a really, really awful person is scumbag, replacing the once preferred slimeball.   That would probably be different if more people knew that the principal meaning of the Latin noun virus is “slime”.

A Moving Celebration

Julie Denny, Birthday Lady

The national slowdown demanded by the medical situation is fraying a few nerves around here like everywhere else, but what I am mainly impressed by is the imagination and good cheer on display among so many imaginative and cheerful friends.  One of these people is a splendid lady named Julie Denny, with whom our friendship dates back about five decades.  It was through church that we first met her and her late husband, Harry Clark, a brilliant macro-Mensch who had done graduate work on Dickens before taking up a creative career in advertising.  They had two delightful boys—Toby and Gregor--real originals who, so far as I could tell, didn’t march to anybody’s drummer.  But how could I predict they would one day launch a birthday party start-up?

There followed a period, which my faulty memory cannot precisely date, during which our friendship was put into a kind of cold storage.  First this family moved away from Princeton to build a dream house somewhere in New York State near the Connecticut line, so that we were only in Christmas card touch for several years.  (Bad news for us.)  But then Harry and Julie returned to Princeton, and we picked up our friendship as though there had been no decade-long hiatus.  (Good news for us.)   But we are born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward, and very sadly Harry died, far too young.  All of us who knew them grieved, but also marveled at the courage and resilience with which Julie absorbed the blow, determinedly carrying on with her skillful professional work as a counselor/mediator while  expanding her volunteer work with worthy social and cultural organizations in our area.  Among many other valuable skills, she has a rare genius for friendship and a flair for cooking, often joined together in delightful dinner parties of which we have been the beneficiaries.

Of course, the years do go by, and it so happens that just last week a highly significant birthday rolled around for Julie Denny.  For the largely youthful readership of this blog such an event and its spiritual freighting can hardly be imagined, though well captured in a New Yorker cartoon I once saw.  Two grumpy geezers are sitting in stuffed chairs at their club, and one says to the other: “You know, eighty is not the new anything.”  Alas, too true, yet its arrival absolutely demanded festivities which, at first glance, seemed absolutely prohibited by social responsibility; and if any single concept defines the Julie Denny Circle, it’s Social Responsibility.  The dilemma must have seemed particularly acute to the aforementioned boys and their families.  High Noon.  Gary Cooper.  Whether to choose twixt love or duty?

Well, it turns out that the boys are no longer around.  While I was busy with the Lesser Ambigua of Maximus the Confessor, they were approaching the Middle Age from a different point of view.  They are highly competent professionals who share the manifestly heritable impishness, wit, dramatic flair, and inventiveness characteristic of the Clark-Denny ménage of my own comparative youth.  Gregor, abetted by his brother Toby, came up with a brilliant idea.  They couldn’t organize a birthday dinner for their mother, so they organized a parade!  This required the email collusion of several of Julie’s friends.  The idea was that at four in the afternoon of her birthday an automobile convoy of such people would drive by her house with posters, banners, flags, noise-makers, and any other appropriate accoutrements we could think of.  I thought of camels and elephants, but it turned out that the Philadelphia Zoo is ruled by the same uptight social distancing requirements as we are.  So cars it must be.

The ideal place for this convoy to bivouac was a nearby elementary school with a broad circular drive designed to make it easier for parents to drop off students or pick them up.   Better yet was its suitability for mustering a parade of automobiles.  Even had the event not fallen on a Sunday, as it did, the place would have been deserted by gubernatorial decree.  By the time we got there to take our places in the formation there were at least a dozen vehicles ahead of us.  According to a report we got later from somebody or another, the caravan when fully formed had more than forty cars.

 

The convoy forms....                                       

             ...and passes in review

 

We snaked through a few quiet blocks of tidy suburban houses, astonishing some masked strollers, who well may not have seen another car in motion all day, to the celebrity’s house.  By I know not what ruse she had been lured to her front lawn just as the first cars arrived.  Fortunately for posterity one of her good friends who is a videographer had also appeared.  Gregor’s concept proved brilliant.  Progress was slow but steady, intermittent rather in the fashion of a traffic stream going through an Easy Pass reader.  Drivers and their passengers shouted their safely distanced greetings through opened car windows.  Now and again a car would stop and someone would quickly deposit a safely distanced gift in its fumigated packaging on the front lawn.  Bells rang, scarves waved; I think I heard some singing.  Julie appeared to be pixilated.  And thus the convoy went around twice without anybody rear-ending anybody else

This event happened last Sunday afternoon.  Sunday afternoon is usually about the time I start trying to dream up a blog topic for Wednesday.  Of course, recognizing plausible topics is not identical to writing essays.  The actual writing is usually a Tuesday night sort of thing.  My role-model here is the great Doctor Johnson who never even began to write his periodical essays until the boy from the printer’s shop was at his door clamoring for copy.  But there conceivably could be some people who might not consider their personal birthday party, however artistically conceived and executed, the proper object of a public retrospective.  So on Monday I ran the idea by the birthday lady herself.  I gained her gracious permission to proceed, so long as I could guarantee that the piece would not go, well, viral.  Among the few promises I can conscientiously make about this blog, fortunately,  is its continuing obscurity.  In the course of our conversation I did drop the hint that I could use some photographs, if she happened to know of any, which led to an embarrassment of riches that I cannot adequately acknowledge.*

As I am dependent entirely upon photographic evidence I can give no full account of the tributes presented to this worthy woman.  Hiram, King Solomon’s admiral, every three years brought to his sovereign from Tarsus a shipload of “gold and silver, ivory, and apes, and peacocks.”  I presume Julie will have received her well-deserved share of such good things, but I am certain that she scored at least one gift more precious yet.  You can consult my recent essay “The Tissue Issue”.

*I am grateful for photographic help from Gregor Clark, Eliot Daley, Elyse Pivnick, Anne Seltzer, Marna Seltzer, and probably others whose names are known only to God.

Virtual Easter

Noli me tangere (Albrecht Dürer)

Come ye faithful, raise the strain

Of triumphant gladness,

God hath brought his Israel

Into joy from sadness.

Zoom or Skype this blessed day,

Singing with perfection

Celebrate His mighty deeds

And virtual Resurrection.

“Resurrexit, He yet lives!”

On-line voices rang out.

As we  shared the joyful news

In our Google Hangout.

Now He dwells in cyberspace

Yet praised throughout the land,

Or at least those parts thereof

With sufficient broad-band.

            John of Damascus (8^th c.)

                  trans. By John Mason Neale (d. 1866)

            You are only as old as you think you are.  Says who?  Actually you are as old as other people think you are, especially if they happen to be your children joined in deep conspiracy based on the shared opinion that you no longer have the good sense to come in out of the rain.  We have three very accomplished adult children who, professionally busy as they are, still spend a good deal of quality concern on the APs.  The solicitousness is heart-warming even if its cost is grudging toleration of the diagnosis on which it is based.   

            Last Wednesday marked the beginning of Passover, and we began our bizarre cybernetic adventures via brief Zoom participation in a seder being held by members of my son-in-law’s family in Jerusalem.  Zvi himself was zooming from New York, but I had no idea of who most of the other guests were, aside from his parents.  Many happy smiles, endlessly welcoming good will, and nearly total incomprehensibility as to substance during our brief visit.  But it definitely put us in a virtual mood, and encouraged us to push the envelope of social isolation.

This we did on Saturday, when we entertained our son Richard’s family to a Distance Lunch in the backyard.  Rich, Katie Dixon, and their daughter Ruby have fled Brooklyn and are magnificently sequestered in their rural paradise on the Delaware near Frenchtown.  Simon Stylites would have to be impressed by their heroic isolation.  You have to drive a quarter of a mile from their digs before you can even see another building.  We had orchestrated a little egg hunt for Ruby, limited in ambition but enthusiastically appreciated.  As they downed their light but elegant lunch of salad and chunks of Jarlsberg, the two generational families sat at separate tables on the lawn, at least twelve feet one from the other but still in good conversational range.

"Please don't pass the mustard"

Later on Saturday our son Luke, an anthropologist at the University of  Montreal, came up with a suggestion for Easter morning.  It has been the custom for his family to join us for Easter.  It is a rather grueling drive with two still young children in the van, but—quite apart from other motives of familial love--the two said kids get such unmitigated joy from searching for artificially panchromatic chicken eggs in our large backyard that the Easter visit has become as the law of the Persians and the Medes.  But this year it is the Law of Coronavirus that has triumphed.  The lockdown in Quebec is ferocious, though perhaps not so ferocious as that in New Jersey, where an aide to our governor told our bishop that anyone joining in a communal Easter religious service would be subject to arrest by the police!  I suppose I should be encouraged that Christianity is still sufficiently threatening to require persecution, but still...  A virtual egg hunt being beyond our technical prowess, Luke, who is quite musical, suggested a symbolic gesture for Easter morn: that we Zoom-sing a hymn together.  I even got to choose the hymn: “The Strife Is O’er,” Luke Fleming on keyboard in Montreal, Joan Fleming on pianoforte in Princeton, all of us singing, sort of, with yours truly marvelously out of tune and out of time.  The Latin original of “The Strife Is O’er” is probably medieval, though first recorded in a seventeenth-century Jesuit collection.  One mainly hears it at funerals, which is of course what Easter started out as, until the defunctus began walking around in a gardener’s outfit.  Our international sing-along was pretty weird, but no more so than other aspects of our New Weird World, and it softened us up for our full-scale official virtual service later in the morning.  That event was actually very moving, with great music, solo performances by individual singers in their own homes.   The preacher made the salient observation, which for some reason had not occurred to me earlier, that the  first words of the risen Christ (spoken to Mary Magdalen) are the famous noli me tangere, or in English “Stay six feet away and wear a mask!”  And that’s on authority higher even than the Governor of New Jersey.

There was now only the one major virtual Easter event to go:  the Family Dinner of the Zoomed, scheduled for 4 pm.  The word virtual was a fairly late arrival in English.  It comes from Latin virtus, “power” or “capacity”.  One hopes for good power, as in the virtues as opposed to the vices; but its indifferent if redundant form still exists in officialese: “by virtue of the power invested in me by blah blah…I blah blah…”  Its computer-talk meaning, for all intents and purposes, is “for all intents and purposes.”  In my old-fashioned view of things a major intent and purpose of a meal is the food, our local portion of which I was still busily preparing when four o’clock rolled around.  But of course the main part of a Zoom event, in my admittedly limited experience, is a cacophony of voices babbling about the technology.  “Oh, look, there’s Aunt Katy….There, in the corner…How do I get into Gallery View?” etc., etc.  I remember in the very early days of cell phones one would overhear in railway carriages loud halves of conversations consisting mainly of “Hello, I am on the train.  I am on my smart phone.  I am talking to you on my smart phone, on the train!”  Et cetera.  You see, the speaker was on the train, and he was talking to somebody on his cell phone.  Loudly.  I suppose that every advance in our methods of communication must be broken in in similar fashion.  And I have to admit that it was a jolly, heart-warming event; and I eventually even did get a few bites of the roast chicken, which, if I say so myself, was delicious.

That is my Easter report.  By the time the dinner festivities were over, the day was done, virtually, and so was I.  It remains only to send my very best and most festive greetings to all my readers.

The Queen's Speech

 

Essays beginning with the author’s profession of faith, either political or religious, are often pretty bad, but what I am undertaking requires one.  I am a sincere democrat (or republican), that is, a believer in that form or government prescribed by the Constitution of the United States and famously described by Lincoln as “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”  I am opposed to monarchy, and I deplore the principle of hereditary power especially as it survives in the modern world and in our country in particular, largely divorced from any sense of hereditary responsibility.  Although I was partly educated in England, and spent a career studying the English language and literature (among other languages and literatures) I am not particularly Anglophilic.  I admire certain characteristics of the vanishing British middle class, but Atlantic culture becomes ever more homogeneous in its cultural decadence, and there’s not all that much difference between York and Youngstown when you get right down to it.  Apart from York Minster, that is.  So when I write in praise of the Queen of England, it is not out of predisposition or favoritism.

On Sunday Queen Elizabeth made a four-and-a-half-minute speech to her countrymen, and to anybody else in the world interested in listening to her, on the subject of the huge challenges presented by the coronavirus pandemic.  The Queen is an old lady.  To be precise, she turns ninety-four in a couple of weeks.  She has been the queen for nearly seventy of those years.  Her reign has been a marathon of dutiful and dignified service to her country during a period of dramatic social change that has left the nature of constitutional monarchy, always ambiguous at best, nearly incomprehensible to many.  Is she supposed to be a relic or a rock star? Unlike other personages of real or self-imagined consequence, and especially our political leaders, the Queen rarely seeks to speak to large audiences.  But she gave one hell of a speech on Sunday.   Nobody has a better right than Elizabeth II to speak the Queen’s English.  This may sound stilted to American ears.  Patrician or “U” accent and usage are on the wane in Britain, and various big-wigs now aim to sound closer to Mick Jagger than to Lord Cholmondeley.   But when you are ninety-three you have every reason to behave as though you belonged to a bygone age, since in fact you do; and you have every right to act like it.

 

The talk was eloquent though not rhetorically elaborate, and it had a clear and effective structure.  She began by acknowledging the disruption the pandemic has brought to people’s lives, the sorrow that has been thrust on many, the financial difficulties on many more, the fear, the uncertainty.  She then offered heartfelt thanks to the medical professionals of the National Health Service, to their official and unofficial helpers, and indeed to all Britons of every stripe who have been cooperating with the policy of isolation and who have through small but concrete acts of charity and aid been helping to protect the needy, especially the elderly.  Right on, Queen E.!  The circumstances reminded her of her first radio broadcast, at the age of fourteen in 1940, when she and her younger sister spoke words of encouragement to all those children who had been evacuated from the dangers of the German bombers.

It was a serious, dignified, and in some ways somber talk.  What else do you want under the circumstances?  But it was not just a list of “steps” taken by her government.  It was an appeal to all Britons so to behave in this crisis that future historians will truthfully report that the nation had lived up to its historical traditions.  This was the only vaguely “literary” moment in the talk.  One could hear Churchill promising to fight upon the beaches, and behind that Henry V rallying his troops on Saint Crispin’s day in 1415.

In one important function the speech was a pep talk, with a pep talk’s exhortation to difficult struggle and its prediction of eventual victory.  But the basis of the speaker’s optimism deserves attention.  There was nothing in it of the narrow or the self-regarding.  She acknowledges the crisis as one shared by all nations, and requiring a world perspective, grounded for her audience, of course, in their own nation and its responsibilities.  She did not count on pulling through because of “Britain First,” “We are the greatest,” or “I am a stable genius.”   Instead she identified three personal qualities as the ones that could see us through: self-discipline; quiet, good-humored resolve and fellow feeling.

My first reaction upon watching the Queen’s modest video was admiration, but it was soon followed by one less worthy: envy.  I shall not even pretend to avoid odious comparisons.  I don’t know whether our current medical crisis will prove in the long run to be so grave as to define an historical epoch.  I am old-fashioned, and for me history is more convincing as retrospection than as prediction.  But anyone with eyes can see that it is a crisis, that it is huge, that it is ubiquitous, that it is frightening, and that its duration and outcome are uncertain.  When, God willing, we look back upon this episode from a vantage point of relative security, how will we remember our own national performance and the lead offered by our own head of state?  How can I regard a four-minute talk as a near model of Ciceronian eloquence simply because it is composed of coherent paragraphs made up of complete English sentences each of which has a subject and a predicate in agreement?   How can I find it newsworthy that a national leader knows what self-discipline, good humor, and fellow feeling are?