Author: wlm3

In Times of Trouble Marcus Aurelius Comes to Me

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In times of trouble, it’s not Mother Mary who comes to me, but Marcus Aurelius whose Meditations provide a practical response to the woes we face, and there’s no question that because of the election of Donald J Trump, the Western World is going to go through some things, especially Eastern and Western Europe. My father used to say that Russia will take us over without firing a shot. It certainly seems as if he might have been right.

Here, in the US, we have a patchwork of abortion laws, some so strict that so-called pro-lifers would rather a woman bleed to death than receive treatment during miscarriage. Trump has promised to put crackpot Robert Kennedy in charge of health and Elon Musk in charge of transforming the civil service into a Soviet-like bureaucracy of yes men. Most galling to me is that this adjudicated rapist, convicted felon, incorrigible liar and his servile minions are now in full celebration mode, not to mention that my faith of the good will of the American people has been severely compromised.

Yes, I’m heartbroken, but I am powerless at the moment to change the situation; however, I do have the power to herd my thoughts from the edge of a cliff to safer ground.

Here’s Aurelius:

“The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.”

Of course, maintaining an untroubled spirit is much easier said than done.[1] However, “if you are pained by external things,” as Aurelius writes, ‘it is not they that disturb you, but your own judgement of them. And it is in your power to wipe out that judgement now.”

By judgement, I think he means your thinking of them, dwelling on them at the expense of the mundane joys of life, like looking up and seeing a formation of geese flying overhead, listening to Lester Young speaking through his tenor saxophone, enjoying the taste of olives plucked from a bowl that has been cured in a kiln, the bowl, a thing of beauty, which guides your thoughts to Keats’ great ode in which he sings, “a thing of beauty is a joy forever.”

Our moments are too precious to squander in barren speculation. What will be will be. I’ll attempt to employ what the Buddhists call mindfulness. I’ll try to pay attention to what is in front of me rather than the agonizing over what may or not be. I’ll attempt not to dwell in the shadows dark speculations.

In short, 

Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing

Now all the truth is out,
Be secret and take defeat
From any brazen throat,
For how can you compete,
Being honor bred, with one
Who were it proved he lies
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbors’ eyes;
Bred to a harder thing
Than Triumph, turn away
And like a laughing string
Whereon mad fingers play
Amid a place of stone,
Be secret and exult,
Because of all things known
That is most difficult.

WB Yeats

[1] Here’s a link to a piece I wrote called “The Art of Not Thinking.”

Swashbuckling Pundit Wesley Moore’s Prediction for the 2024 Presidential Election

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Look, if you’ve ever been sucked into one of those social media video medical advertisements where some physician or chemist claims to have discovered a ridiculously easy way to detox the superfund-grade contamination of your liver without dieting or exercising or giving up your Jim Beam, you know you’re going to have to endure twenty plus minutes of tease before the secret is revealed that for $59.99 for can purchase a magical elixir, the great great great grandchild of 19th Century snake oil, and presto, no more liver problems.

But I’m not going to put you through that. I’m going to explain right away why Kamala Harris is going to win the presidency, maybe by a comfortable margin, and I wouldn’t be risking my stellar reputation as internet sage the weekend before the election if I were not positive.[1]

Let’s start unscientifically by plumbing the rich grotto of my intuition, a storehouse of data and sensations forming what the vulgar call “a gut feeling,” or what I’d prefer to call “an intestinal foreshadowing.”[2]

Okay, let’s get this show on the road.

Although I don’t believe that yard signs and crowd sizes are accurate predictors of election outcomes, this cycle seems somewhat different. At her rallies, Kamala’s audiences hang on her every word as she catalogues a future marked by communal problem solving whereas the less populous crowds at the Trump rallies tend to leave early during Trump’s interminable dystopian descriptions of mongrel hordes laying waste to municipalities or children exiting their school buses an entirely different gender than when they boarded in the morning. Any sane person who doesn’t reside inside the un-fun house of QAnon conspiracy theories knows that Trump is lying and/or delusional. Not a good look for someone entrusted with nuclear codes.

He offers no specific plans, but all the world’s and the nation’s ills will be solved, like the magic liver elixir, by his magical presence.

Slathered with orange make-up and topped with clownish platinum hair, like a cartoon character in the same clothes, he shambles around the nation in a haze that very well could be drug-induced.  I mean who falls asleep during his own felony trial? At any rate, his campaign has devolved into a Roman circus where he cosplays fast food minimum wage earners or sanitary workers. Yesterday, the garbage truck driving in circles with Trump staring out the window seems an apt metaphor for the campaign’s final stages. It’s almost as if his staff wants him to lose.

Segueing into a more data-driven arguments, early voting seems very promising for Kamala.  Although Republicans have been voting early, unlike in 2020, the voters have tended to be elderly high propensity voters, and Jen O’Malley Dillion, Kalama’s campaign chair, says, “We feel really good about what we’re seeing out there.” Even in Nevada where early voting rural Republicans have established a red fire wall, Dillion says in the last two days in Clark County, a Democratic stronghold, “we’ve had higher turnout from young voters than we have at any other point in this cycle.” She adds, “We are seeing Republicans voting early, but these are Republicans that are going to vote no matter what. So what they’re doing is that they’re changing their mode of voting. They were going to vote on Election Day, now they’re voting early.” She also claims that in other states low propensity voters are voting Democratic early. Polls also show that undecided voters are more open to voting for Kamala, not to mention than more women than men are voting with reproductive rights being one of the major issues.

Then there’s the discrepancy in the ground games. The Democratics boast a well-trained, well-staffed group of dedicated, enthusiastic doorknockers, postcard writers, phone-callers and texters whereas the Republicans are relying on paid workers, mercenaries you might say, to attempt to get the undecided to vote.

In short, the Republicans are, like their Dear Leader, disorganized (cf. Trump’s stashing classified documents in his bathroom). In the last days of the campaign you have Mike Johnson promising to end Obamacare if Trump wins, you have Elon Musk predicting Trump’s slashing spending will create temporary economic hardship, and Nikki Haley trashing the campaign. I suspect that Kamala will win at least 10% of Republican voters and a majority of independents. After all, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove are voting for Kamala. 

Lastly, the Democrats have several pathways to 270 electoral college votes, even if they were to lose Pennsylvania, which seems unlikely with a half-a-million pissed off Puerto Ricans living there.

Last, but certainly not least, the last three heart-breaking presidential loses in 2000, 2004, and 2016 featured wooden candidates incapable of warming the hearts of non-partisans. Obviously, Kamala is charismatic, out-Obama-ing Obama in my opinion.

Now that’s it. Excuse me while I check out some new promising dietary supplements. Cheers!

 

[1] Caveat: I’m not as positive that fawning Republican state legislatures and/or Speaker Mike Johnson will allow the certification of a Harris victory.

[2] Please note, I have now removed my tongue from my cheek. 

Wesley’s Weave: Dark Musings on Election Eve

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Apocalypse by Adrian Kenyon

Donald Trump has dubbed his rambling speeches “the weave,” claiming that if you connect the dots of his zigzags, a unified picture appears. So I thought I’d give it a try myself.

Here goes.

The other night, after suffering through a self-righteous, ill-informed screed from a Facebook follower, I found myself listening to Bob Dylan’s masterful protest song “Hurricane,” a cinematic narrative recounting the arrest and trial of Rubin Hurricane Carter, a boxer wrongly convicted of a triple homicide in 1966 in Patterson, New Jersey.

Meanwhile, far away in another part of town
Rubin Carter and a couple of friends are drivin’ around
Number one contender for the middleweight crown
Had no idea what kinda shit was about to go down

When a cop pulled him over to the side of the road
Just like the time before and the time before that
In Paterson that’s just the way things go
If you’re black you might as well not show up on the street
‘Less you want to draw the heat

Near the end of the song Dylan sings,

How can the life of such a man
Be in the palm of some fool’s hand?
To see him obviously framed
Couldn’t help but make me feel ashamed to live in a land

Where justice is a game

Now all the criminals in their coats and their ties
Are free to drink martinis and watch the sun rise
While Rubin sits like Buddha in a ten-foot cell
An innocent man in a living hell

As I was listening, the long gone idealism of the 60s came to mind. Dylan himself — and Joan Baez –performed at the March on Washington, sharing the stage with Martin Luther King. They heard firsthand the “I Have a Dream Speech.”  They’re both still alive sixty-one years later.

In 1963, the American people considered communism the greatest threat to the nation’s sovereignty, and the Soviet Union was our greatest enemy whose spy agency the KGB eventually became the employer and training ground for Vladimir Putin, whom Donald Trump so idolizes, along with Kim Jong Un, the North Korean dictator. 

According to Trump, outside forces like Russia and North Korea aren’t the greatest threat to American sovereignty; no, it’s “the enemy within,” American citizens, news organizations, and celebrities tarred with the paradoxical disapprobation “woke.”  It’s Joe McCarthy redux, and McCarthy’s corrupt lawyer Roy Cohn was Donald Trump’s mentor.

Trump and his followers bring to mind WB Yeats’s lines from “The Second Coming”:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Fueled by the fifth deadly sin wrath, these resentful white supremist faux Christian cultists seem to prefer a dictatorship of oligarchs to the teachings of their would-be Savoir who famously preached

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.

Meanwhile,  

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned.

Connect these dots and what do you get?

[a] rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouch[ing] towards Bethlehem to be born.

James, Huck, and James McBride: A Review of Percival Everett’s “James”

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After reading Dwight Garner’s laudatory review of Percival Everett’s James, I was eager to check it out, especially since I’m a huge fan of Huckleberry Finn. 

Here’s a snippet of Garner’s paean:

Percival Everett’s majestic new novel, James, goes several steps further. Everett flips the perspective on the events in Huckleberry Finn. He gives us the story as a coolly electric first-person narrative in the voice of Jim, the novel’s enslaved runaway. The pair’s adventures on the raft as it twisted down the Mississippi River were largely, from Huck’s perspective, larks. From Jim’s — excuse me, James’s — point of view, nearly every second is deadly serious. We recall that Jim told Huck, in Twain’s novel, that he was quite done with “adventures.”

Garner goes on to say, “This s Everett’s most thrilling novel, but also his most soulful.”

Alas, when reading James, I was never able to suspend my disbelief, to lose myself in the flow of action and forget that the narrative I was reading was a fictive construction. In his retelling of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, Everett creates the conceit that the antebellum argot of slaves, the “Else’n they takes you to the post and whips ya[s]” is a linguistic ruse to appease the white population by making them feel superior. The narrator James (aka Jim) speaks (and thinks) in English so standard that he uses “one” instead of “you.”  In short, for me the novel is a contrivance; it’s created in a way that seems artificial and unrealistic.

Everett’s relating the events from James’ perspective in easy-to-decipher prose makes a lot of practical sense; however, the regionless diction of the retelling of Jim and Huck’s escape robs Jim of a breathing individual’s voice –– he could be from 21st Century Dayton, Ohio –– there are no quirks in his phraseology, no flashes of individuality, few regional linguistic markers, which divorces him from time and place and therefore relegates him into the status of a character in a novel rather than a person whom we believe is real. 

That said, Everett does an outstanding job of effectively depicting the horrors of slavery, the never-ending degradation, the perennial fear of having your family disbanded, the horrors of being horsewhipped, the constant verbal abuse. And the novel, especially after James hooks up with a minstrel show, becomes a real page turner, a sort of thriller with cliffhanging chapter endings as he and Huck manage a series of hairbreadth escapes a la The Perils of Pauline. Everett also creates a rich array of colorful characters that you care enough to keep reading, though you might grow a bit weary of the episodic nature of the plot bequeathed by Clemons. 

I couldn’t help unfavorably comparing James to James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird, which is also narrated by a slave, Little Onion, who is “liberated” by the historical abolitionist John Brown.  

Here’s Little Onion describing his liberator:

The old face, crinkled and dented with canals running every which way, pushed and shoved up against itself for a while, till a big old smile busted out from beneath ’em all, and his grey eyes fairly glowed. It was the first time I ever saw him smile free. A true smile. It was like looking at the face of God. And I knowed then, for the first time, that him being the person to lead the colored to freedom weren’t no lunacy. It was something he knowed true inside him. I saw it clear for the first time. I knowed then, too, that he knowed what I was – from the very first.

This is a person talking, not the idea of a person talking, which creates a depth of character that James lacks.

Compare McBride’s description with this: 

I was afraid of the men, but I was considerably more afraid of the dogs I’d heard coming our way. I could only imagine that they were after me, and so I was left confused by the presence of these two white men in our boat. Adding to the absurdity was the fact that they were opposite in nearly every way. The older man was very tall and gaunt, while the younger was nearly as short as Huck and fat. The younger had a head full of dark hair. The older was completely bald.

That’s not what I would call “cooly electric first person narrative.” In fact, when I taught composition, I would not allow my students to use the phrase “was the fact that.”

But, hey, look, as I’ve said elsewhere and often, writing a novel is a very difficult undertaking, and James is well worth reading, even though it falls short of my censorious standards for the high praise it has received.  It’s an audacious effort to reconfigure the novel that Hemingway credited with being the root of “all American literature.”  Also, the idea of seeing Huck’s world from Jim’s perspective is existentially cool, underscoring Hamlet’s observation that “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” 

I’d give it a B+ overall.

Hurricane Hugo Anniversary Ramblings

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Today, 21 September 2024, happens to be the autumnal equinox, and here on Folly Beach, the Edge of America, the weather is perfect, not a cloud overhead, the temperature Edenic, downright Elysian — no flies at Chico Feo, no mosquito swatting needed on my walk home from the bar. 

However, today also happens to be the 35th anniversary of Hurricane Hugo. As you can see above, Hugo was, “a mighty, mighty storm.”[1] Ask any Lowcountry resident who opted not to evacuate, and you’re likely to hear tales ranging from extreme discomfiture to abject terror.

Our family – Judy Birdsong, sons Harrison (5) and Ned (3), springer spaniels Jack and Sally, and I-and-I lived on the Isle of Palms, a barrier island that lay in the crosshairs of a cone of inevitability – in other words, Charleston was going to get clobbered by a monster category 4 cyclone.

On Wednesday evening before Thursday’s late night landfall, before we drove to my parents’ house in Summerville to drop off the dogs and spend the night before fleeing further inland to Columbia, I drove downtown to Charleston to hear Allan Gurganus read from his just published novel The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. I bought a copy, had Allan inscribe it, then drove back home and nailed plywood over sliding glass doors.

As it turned out, the novel, which deals with Reconstruction, offered a parallel to what we were about to endure. My father-in-law Ralph Birdsong compared the post-Hugo Isle of Palms and Sullivans Island to the bombed out towns of Europe he witnessed in World War II. 

Sullivan’s Island 22 September 1989

Reconstruction indeed.

We left Summerville first thing Thursday morning and arrived at my friend’s Jake’s house around noon where we watched the storm swirl closer and closer to the coast on a television screen. That evening, we had dinner at a restaurant in Five Points. We had been lately listening to Lyle Lovett’s most recently released album, which featured a song called “Here I Am.” 

Here’s are the lyrics from the last verse, which is spoken rather than sung:

Look, I understand too

little too late.

I realize there are things

you say and do

you can never take back.

But what would you be if

you didn’t really try?

You have to try.

So after a lot of thought

I’s like to reconsider.

Please if it’s not too late,

Make it a cheeseburger.

When it was time to order our meal, I asked three-year-old Ned what he would like to eat, and he said in a tiny little Lyle Lovett voice, “Please make it a cheeseburger.”

That almost made the entire ordeal worth it.

Almost, but nor entirely. Because the only bridge to the islands was destroyed, we became homeless for 17 long days, moving from family to family, devoured by anxiety. However, once we finally made it to the island via a ferry and walked from the marina to our home, he were delighted to see it standing in one piece. The ground floor had received about two inches of water, a tree had smashed through a back door into our bedroom, the floors were warped, so we had tons of work to perform, but we could sleep upstairs.

Sullivan’s Island Bridge (photo credit Judy Birdsong)

Ever it be so pounded, there’s no place like home. 

[1] I copped that quote from the Black spiritual about the Galveston hurricane of 1900.

Every Bod Gone Cruzy

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Every Bod Gone Cruzy[1]

Well, not everybody’s gone cruzy. I’m as sane as David Attenborough, Walter Cronkite, Ward Cleaver, as sane as Thich Naht Hahn — or at least I’d like to think so. Certainly, I’m saner than the Lt. Governor of North Carolina, Mark Robinson, who has dubbed himself a “Black Nazi” on a transporn[2] site where he confessed nostalgia for the institution of slavery and expressed the desire to purchase a couple of human beings himself.

Here’s a photo of him mugging with the 45th president of the United States. Obviously, he and Idi Amin share a common ancestor.

BTW, here’s the greatest sentence in the history of American literature that features “Idi Amin.”

“I was in the water for six hours. Shivering, praying, scared, full of adrenaline. I kept making deals with the Fates, with God, Neptune, whoever, thinking I’d trade places with anybody anywhere – lepers, untouchables, political prisoners, Idi Amin’s wives – anything, so long as I’d be alive.”

                                                                        T. Coraghessan Boyle, Budding Prospects

Idi Amin

Also, I’d like to think I’m saner than Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy, Jr. For example, if I were ever unfortunate enough to run across a washed up dead whale, I’d like to think I wouldn’t saw its head off and take the head home with me. 

How did these [alliterative participle deleted] fools attain such high status you might wonder.

Well, Kennedy is a Kennedy after all. He was born into perhaps the most famous American family this side of Maybelle Carter’s clan. But Robinson? How did he rise from an abusive childhood bouncing back and forth from foster homes to his mama?  Here’s how. By giving a pro-gun speech at a Greensboro City Council meeting that went viral on Facebook. 

Robinson’s entry into politics reminds me of Lester Maddox’s who gained fame by chasing potential Black customers out of his restaurant with ax handles, became a sort of redneck folk hero, and was chosen as governor by the state legislature because of election confusion caused by a write-in candidate.

Lester and Mark strange bedfellows indeed.

And now both Georgia and North Carolina are swing states.

It’ll be interesting to see in forty something days, how many US citizens will vote for a candidate promising detention camps, mass deportations, tariffs, a candidate who portrays The US as a hellscape despite inflation under 3%, all three stock indices at record levels, and crime significantly decreasing.[3]

Maybe, a majority of voters in swing states won’t have gone cruzy. Maybe Georgians and North Carolinians will dump Trump. 

I wouldn’t bet on it, though.

[1] The title is a direct quote from a paragraph I received when I was teaching Developmental English at Trident Technical College circa 1980. Here’s another direct quote from the same paragraph. “Vivid sex on my mind every day.”  

[2] Can’t believe stodgy ol’ Microsoft Word doesn’t have “transporn” in their spelling dictionary. Tsk, tsk. 

[3] In 2020, the United States experienced one of its most dangerous years in decades.

The number of murders across the country surged by nearly 30% between 2019 and 2020, according to FBI statistics. The overall violent crime rate, which includes murder, assault, robbery and rape, inched up around 5% in the same period.

But in 2023, crime in America looked very different.

“At some point in 2022 — at the end of 2022 or through 2023 — there was just a tipping point where violence started to fall and it just continued to fall,” said Jeff Asher, a crime analyst and co-founder of AH Datalytics.

In cities big and small, from both coasts, violence has dropped.

Observations from the Other Other Wes Moore on the Trump Harris Debate

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Observations from the Other Other Wes Moore on the Trump Harris Debate[1]

Back in the hypersensitive days of yore, Gary Hart’s extra marital shenanigans or Howard Dean’s oddly too exuberant “woo-hoo” could suddenly disqualify candidates from seeking their party’s presidential nomination. 

To coin a phrase, “Them days is over.” Nowadays, paying hush money to porn stars and being convicted on thirty-four felony counts are no longer disqualifying. 

Also, nowadays, online misinformation is taken as the gospel truth by simpleminded people. 

For example, here are two direct quotes from Donald Trump from Tuesday’s debate, which, in a sane society, would in and of themselves end his campaign for the presidency..

Quote number one: “Now she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.” 

This statement is so off-the-charts-creepy-Thanksgiving-dinner-bachelor-great-uncle-ish, that I can’t summon the energy to cough up from my dyspeptic spleen an HL Menckenesque screed of mockery because Trump’s claim is so batshit crazy that anything I’d come up with wouldn’t do justice to its absurdity.[2]

So here’s another quote: “They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” [i.e., Springfield, Ohio]

They, being Haitians, i.e., goggle-eyed zombies that at night wander from homestead to homestead abducting unfenced pets to feed on their brains.

An aside: Do white people hate people of color so much they don’t mind that this idiot is in charge of the nuclear codes?  

When the debate started, I disapproved of Kamala’s first answer, an evasion of the question, a rehearsed opening salvo, a laundry list of proposals, and I thought Trump looked calm and uncharacteristically presidential at first. I was worried for a minute or two.

However, in no time. he was careening into nonsense while she was getting her groove, smiling incredulously in high-snark amusement while Trump bragged about how much Hungarian strongman Vicktor Orbán admired him. 

His performance throughout the debate was the opposite of grace under pressure. 

In other words, it was ugly – like his rallies, like his hair, like his suits, like his ties. 

[1]For the record, I’m not the Governor of Maryland.

[2] I’d love some grammar maven to diagram that sentence.

Lines Stolen on a Gloomy Sabbath after Being Led Astray

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Lines Stolen on a Gloomy Sabbath after Being Led Astray

Do you know the New York Times game Connections?  

If not, in the game, you’re presented each morning with a square consisting of sixteen boxes, four up and four down. The object is to discover an affinity of four of the words/terms that appear in the boxes, in other words., to find a common thread. Essentially, if you correctly identify three groups, you win because the final four you didn’t choose, will form the last group. 

Here’s today’s puzzle:

Frost                Beach              Pump               Pope

Race                Bishop             Pet Shop          Pound

Hardy              Beat                 Prior                 Bake

Throb              Bad                  Preheat             Pastor

The first category that came to my mind was poets’ surnames.

(Robert) Frost

(Alexander) Pope

(Elizabeth) Bishop

(Ezra) Pound

(Thomas) Hardy

This seemed unfair because there are five obvious choices, but not to worry, poets weren’t a category, and I almost botched my 48-day streak, missing my first three guesses but somehow managed to get the blue category (the second to the hardest), then the green (the second easiest), and finally, the yellow, the easiest, third, which left the purples, the hardest, now a gimme.

So I decided in protest to construct a poem by lifting lines from the poets that appeared in the puzzle.  Here it is:

Lines Stolen on a Gloomy Sabbath

Back out of all this now too much for us,

Down their carved names the rain drop ploughs.

One tear, like the bee’s sting, slips.

The paired butterflies are already yellow with August

And sport and flutter in the fields of air.

Sources:

Robert Frost, “Directive”

Thomas Hardy, “During Wind and Rain”

Elizabeth Bishop, “The Man Moth”

Ezra Pound, “The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter”

Alexander Pope, “The Rape of the Lock, Canto 1”

So thank you, whoever, constructs Connections, for leading me astray.

A Post Labor Day Meditation

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A Post Labor Day Meditation

I said, ‘It’s certain there is no fine thing   

Since Adam’s fall but needs much labouring.

WB Yeats, “Adam’s Curse”

It’s the Tuesday after Labor Day, and, as if on cue, the weather has turned a tad cooler.  The trees outside my second story office are swaying, nodding, trembling in a brisk breeze. In the back yard, morning glory vines have carpeted the Asiatic jasmine with purple flowers while the untended Elaeagnus is broadening its realm and sprouting ugly baldish shoots skyward. 

So this morning, armed with swing blade and hedge clippers, I braved the mosquitos to do a bit of long overdo maintenance, which oddly enough brought to mind Milton’s Paradise Lost where Eve and Adam are tasked by their Creator to tend to the garden’s growth. They must “lop” or “prune” or “bind,” but nevertheless “wanton growth derides” and the garden “tends to wilde” (sic). So, channeling her inner Adam Smith, Eve suggests she and Adam divide their labor, which leaves her isolated and vulnerable to the blandishments of Satan’s forked tongue and phallic charms:

            [The Serpent] Address’d his way, not with indented wave,
            Prone on the ground, as since, but on his reare,
            Circular base of rising foulds, that tour’d
            Fould above fould a surging Maze, his Head
            Crested aloft and Carbuncle his Eyes; 

            With burnisht Neck of verdant Gold, erect[1]
            Amidst his circling Spires . . . 

This seduction, of course, leads to the fall of humankind, so farewell, delightful gardening, hail back-breaking farm labor.

Thus, Adam’s curse is twofold: death and labor.

Yet, I think that without meaningful labor we humans tend to wither, and how horrible a terrestrial eternal life would be! Just ask Petronius’s Sibyl: 

I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a cage, and when the boys said to her: “Sibyl, what do you want?” she answered: “I want to die.”[2]            

                                                                                                Petronius, The Satyricon

Or the old man in Chaucer’s “The Pardoner’s Tale”:

            Thus I walk, like a restless wretch,

            And on the ground, which is my mother’s gate,

            I knock with my staff, both early and late,

            And say, “Dear mother, let me in!”

                                                            Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Tale”

So, we should be thankful for Original Sin. Otherwise, we’d be stuck in a never-ending cycle of gardening, which would delight some of my friends, but is not to my taste.

I’ll give Wallace Stevens the last word:

            Is there no change of death in paradise?

            Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs

            Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,

            Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,

            With rivers like our own that seek for seas

            They never find, the same receding shores

            That never touch with inarticulate pang?

            Why set the pear upon those river-banks

            Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?

            Alas, that they should wear our colors there,

            The silken weavings of our afternoons,

            And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!

            Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,

            Within whose burning bosom we devise

            Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.

                                                                        Wallace Stevens, “Sunday Morning”

[1] Emphasis mine. But while I’m at it here below, shouldn’t some vice crusader alert Moms for Liberty that this filth is hiding in virtually every high school library in America! 

[2] “The Sibyl of Cumae was a prophetess in service to Apollo and a great beauty. Apollo wished to take her as his lover and offered her anything she desired. She asked to live for as many years as there were grains in a handful of dust. Apollo granted her wish, but still she refused to become his lover. In time, the sibyl came to regret her boon as she grew old but did not die. She lived for hundreds of years, each year becoming smaller and frailer, Apollo having given her long life but not eternal youth. When Trimalchio speaks of her in the Satyricon, she is little more than a tourist attraction, tiny, ancient, confined, and longing to die.”  from a hyperlink in windingway.org’s hypertext version of TS Eliot’s “The Waste Land”

Back Then, Right Now

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Back Then, Right Now

When you face the preacher, there’s only one thing to say:
Just skeep-beep de bop-bop beep bop bo-dope skeetle-at-de-op-day!

                                                                           Cab Calloway

Back Then 

In the1950s version 

            of yesteryear

                                    beatniks all hepped up 

                                                                        on goofballs 

            snapped their fingers  

                                                in the wee hours 

                                                                                    while 

                                                                                    Cub

                                                                                    Scout

                                                                                    den

                                                                                    mothers

                                                                                    slept.

Secondhand smoke thick as pre-EPA Pittsburg smog.

Dizzy, Bird, Trane, 

            blowing their horns,

                                                Roy, Max, Billie Higgins beating their drums.

But then what? 

                                    The next day, 

                                                                        the unforgiving light,

                                                                                                            and then another day . . . 

Right Now

In the 2020s 

not much linguistic abracadabra, 

but on the other hand, 

I can hook up with Lester Young and Lady Day

on YouTube 

                        and snap my fingers 

                                                            all hepped up on 

my very own 

            garden variety 

                                    brain chemicals in a

             smoke 

                        free

             space.

                        It ain’t all bad – not yet.