Month: February 2018

Lethargy

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Marle, Edward; Lotus Eaters

 

Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore 

Than labour in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar; 

O, rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more. 

Tennyson “The Lotus Eaters”

 

In 1957, when I was five, I came down with rheumatic fever and was bed bound for two months or maybe even longer. (I can’t remember, and there’s no one left living to ask). I do know it was long enough for me to have forgotten how to ride a bike.

During the period of my incapacity, my mother borrowed a piece of furniture designed especially for the bedridden called a secretary. With me propped up on pillows, my legs stretched out underneath, the secretary provided a platform for coloring, putting together puzzles, and playing board games (which adults allowed me to win out-of-pity). It also provided me a stage to perform plays with my Zorro hand puppet (complete with mask and cape). I can’t remember if there was another puppet or not. It seems as if Zorro monologues delivered by a lisping five-year-old affecting a Mexican accent might get pretty boring.

On the non-Humanities side, my uncle Jerry bought me an erector set, which was about as appropriate a gift as presenting Donald Trump with a copy of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. I recall lots of screws dropped, uncomfortably discovered when I rolled over, but I don’t remember a project ever being completed, which brings to mind graduate school and that phantom thesis on Auden’s poetry in relation to painting.

no fun ahoy

 

Anyway, I wonder if spending such a long period in bed with only 60 months-of -being to my name negatively affected my personality or character, if I can point a finger at my fifth year and blame rheumatic fever for my sloth.

This Sunday, for example, I felt like not getting out of bed (as opposed to not feeling like getting out of bed), like lying there the entire day, like maybe calling Bert’s Market to deliver some camphor-soaked handkerchiefs. I had essays galore to grade, sheets to wash, groceries to buy, a garage in desperate need of sweeping . . .

Got the lotus-eater’s blues,

Too lazy to put on my shoes . . .

[Not to be continued].

le temps perdu dans le temps 1 (acrylique)
artist: Paul Vigne Pavi

 

A Paean To Ireland, Sort Of

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View from A Rented Cottage in County Clare, photograph by Wesley Moore III

Although I’m certain I have a drop or two of Irish blood, I’m not of the Catholic immigrant variety with distant cousins in Kerry or Donegal. Nevertheless, ever since I saw at the age of seven Darby O’Gill and the Little People, I have loved that “little green place” and its soulful inhabitants, its poetry, music, fairies and leprechauns, its abundance of foxgloves, and those mountains in the distance so vaporous it looks as if you could puncture them with your forefinger.

And, oh my god, that rainbow I encountered in 1978 outside of Limerick!

Judy Birdsong Preparing Supper in County Cork, photograph by Wesley Moore

Ireland was the first place I went abroad at twenty-five, and I have been twice again since. In the previous century, Judy, our boys, and I rented cottages, burned peat, shopped at the butchers, drank and listened to music in the pubs, climbed Ben Bulben’s back, and crawled our way up Croagh Patrick.

Ned Moore descending Croagh Patrick, photograph by Judy Birdsong

We got to know our neighbors, so hospitable. Here below are the boys helping John Joe O’Shea shear a sheep near Bantry Bay on the Berea Peninsula in County Cork.

Ned and Harrison Moore and John Joe O’Shea shearing sheep

What truly astounds me about Ireland, though, is how an island the size of South Carolina could produce so many literary masters– Swift, Goldsmith, Yeats, Shaw, Wilde, Joyce, Beckett, and Heaney, to name the ones who come immediately to mind.

Despite his kooky mysticism and rightist politics, Yeats is my hero, and despite his arrogance and sometime meanness, Joyce is my hero.

Joyce, of course, had his issues with his native land. For example, Dubliners isn’t exactly what you would call a flattering portrait of that city. I’m currently on Disc 30 of the Donal Donnnelly/Miriam Healy-Louie recording of Ulysses, “Episode 16,” the so-called Eumaeus episode when Bloom and Stephen seek refuge in a cabman’s shelter after Stephen has been punched out by an English soldier.

An old tar, DB Murphy comes into the shelter and asks Stephen if he knows Simon Dedalus, Stephen’s father, and Stephen says, “I’ve heard of him.” The seaman answers, “He’s Irish [. . .] All Irish.” Stephen “rejoins” (to use Joyce’s dialogue prompt) “All too Irish.” As a Southerner, I can certainly identify with Stephen’s love/hate relationship with his native land.

Anyway, listening to Donnelly read Joyce’s rich broth of Anglo-Saxon and French-derived words, I have gotten the cadences stuck in my head, and to purge them, I’ve composed this negative ditty, trying to stick with only Anglo-Saxon, through which I mean not to stereotype my Irish brethren but merely to make music out of misery.

 

Manic Irish Reeling

Slop flung from a window above

Splatters on stone in globby plops.

 

Curses, fists, flung and shook,

Shuffling brogans, baleful looks.

 

“With a high ro and a randy ro and my galloping tearing tandy O!”

 

After toil a stop at the pub,

Reeking redbearded guzzling swabs

Fritter away their coppery coins

Picking scabs by swapping tales.

 

“With a high ro and a randy ro and my galloping tearing tandy O!”

 

Baggy-eyed mothers fret

Greedy sucklings at their breasts,

Keening toddlers at their feet,

Their stillborns gone, but not forgotten,

Their overripe love on the road to rotten.

 

“With a high ro and a randy ro and my galloping tearing tandy O!”

 

Out in the street across the way

Waifs and strays banding about.

Rail thin curs and scrawny cats.

Yelping and mewling till the sun comes up.

 

“With a high ro and a randy ro –

 

Hit it!

 

“With a high ro and a randy ro and my galloping tearing tandy O!”