The Ruby Slippers

I read the odd news this week that someone had been arrested in Minneapolis for the 2005 theft of the famous ruby slippers from the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. The FBI recovered them in a sting operation last summer and is now charging a second person with the deed.

It’s weirdly reminiscent of the saddest scene in Raging Bull, when the retired boxing champion is so hard up for cash that he wrecks his championship belt to harvest the rhinestones from it. Only when he tries to pawn them does he learn that they’re not real gems, that his belt is only valuable as an artifact for collectors, not some raw material, and furthermore that he’s already seriously damaged that value by punching and twisting his belt.

Luckily the thieves hadn’t pulled the sequins off the slippers before trying to sell them, and the slippers have been returned. There is no place like home.

This all inspired me to take yet another look at The Wizard of Oz. I’ve written in the past about why I see it as not just one of Hollywood’s best films but a uniquely central American myth. This time, I must say, my companion was skeptical of my conceptualization, that the ruby slippers are an allegory for female sexual maturity.

There is one detail I had missed in the past, even when I was paying particular attention to Frank Morgan in his rapid-fire numerous roles in the Emerald City: gatekeeper, wagonmaster, herald, and (spoiler alert) the bogus wizard. As the wizard’s herald who tries turning Dorothy and her crew away, Morgan is holding a very Christian prop, a staff with flowers growing out of the end.

Joseph the father of Jesus – not the biological father, of course, but the man who made an honest woman of Mary, Saint Joseph the Worker – is usually portrayed in art as holding a staff with flowers sprouting out the end. The Polish nun who taught me second grade told the story like this: The men of Bethlehem all had to choose who would marry the pregnant Virgin Mary. So they went to the temple where each of them whacked sticks against the temple wall. Joseph refused at first because he felt he was too old to be a father. He finally relented, and beat his stick and alas, a flower burst out of the end.

Is that sexual, and more than a little odd? If you don’t think so, then you probably think a sixteen-year-old girl dressed like she’s 12 running through the woods with three adult men after tossing apples back at the tree of knowledge isn’t odd. No, not at all.

The Horny, Stinky Mephitidae of Winter

Snowdrops aren’t the only sign of spring approaching. These weeks before the vernal equinox, as the days are getting noticeably longer and the frozen core is melting out of the soil, leaving it muddier, there’s a whiff of a funky polyamorous musk in the air. Beasts are risking their lives for trysts in the woods.

I was not surprised to read last week that late winter is the mating season of skunks. Sadly, last month I also saw no fewer than four of them dead in the road, and saw and smelled a few more still living.

When you move from city to country, you can expect to undergo a newfound practical annoyance with animals you once thought magical. I once loved seeing deer, but now I have known too many gardeners, vegetarians even, who would gladly shoot a deer to protect their flowers. Bears are still widely liked, but we’ve all whacked ourselves with a bungie cord tying up our trash cans.

Skunks, on the other hand, are an animal that urbanites think of as a pest, but the more you see them in the semi-wild you can’t help smiling. They may not be our absolute favorite next-door neighbors, but with familiarity you no longer regard their smell as a nuisance. It takes a lot out of a skunk to spray, something they only do when they’re utterly desperate. I imagine their tiny muscles feeling sore as a human’s abdomen might after vomiting.

Skunks are both beautiful and bad-ass, and that’s their tragic truth. On account of their scents they have few predators, so they don’t fear us, or our automobiles. I ran over a skunk once in the middle of Route 209 in Stone Ridge, NY in the wee small hours of the night. It was walking up the center line, the stripes in its back aligning perfectly with the solid whites of the road, till it stepped out to face me, way too late to do anything about it. It stank for days.

That also explains their self-aggrandizing appearance. I am half-way through Emily Wilson’s beautiful new translation of The Iliad, and one recurring detail keeps surprising me: the amount of attention devoted to the horsehair plumes on top of the heroes’ helmets. Expressions of vanity, like a Shogun warrior or the marshall in the board game Stratego, or like the brawling newscasters in Anchorman who lay out one ground rule: Don’t mess up anyone’s hair. Like skunks!

Most animals follow the lead of their camouflage hides as they slink through your yards, blending in as best they can. Skunks walk though brazenly, leading men, front and center.

As quoted in the Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France 1610—1791:

“The other is a low animal, about the size of a little dog or cat. I mention it here, not on account of its excellence, but to make of it a symbol of sin. I have seen three or four of them. It has black fur, quite beautiful and shining; and has upon its back two perfectly white stripes, which join near the neck and tail, making an oval which adds greatly to their grace. The tail is bushy and well furnished with hair, like the tail of a Fox; it carries it curled back like that of a Squirrel. It is more white than black; and, at the first glance, you would say, especially when it walks, that it ought to be called Jupiter’s little dog. But it is so stinking, and casts so foul an odor, that it is unworthy of being called the dog of Pluto. No sewer ever smelled so bad. I would not have believed it if I had not smelled it myself. Your heart almost fails you when you approach the animal; two have been killed in our court, and several days afterward there was such a dreadful odor throughout our house that we could not endure it. I believe the sin smelled by sainte Catherine de Sienne must have had the same vile odor.”

Priceless, but

“Thanks For the Trouble You Took From Her Eyes.”

Two years ago this month I fell in love, for about the fourth time in my life, and late-late one night we needed a song to hear before nodding off to dreamland. That’s when I came across Marissa Nadler’s 2007 version of Leonard Cohen’s “Famous Blue Raincoat,” and I’ve heard it dozens of times since.

You can hear a song hundreds of times and not follow its narrative meaning, or let me rephrase that:

I can hear a song hundreds of times and not follow its narrative meaning. Frankly it makes me feel like a big dummy. What was I doing all those years I’d been listening to the original “Famous Blue Raincoat”? Is music just sonic incense to me, a mood enhancer that cues the appropriate feelings?

You can forgive me, I guess, for tuning in exclusively to the atmospherics of Cohen’s version. It is extra rich in what Pádraig Ó Tuama often calls the “furniture” of a poem. “It’s four in the morning, the end of December,” it starts. “New York is cold.” “Jane came by with a lock of your hair.” “Your famous blue raincoat was torn at the shoulder.”  “I see you there with a rose in your teeth.” Everything vivid and tangible.

I guess it read to me like a series of unconnected moments till I heard Marissa Nadler sing it. Sometimes it takes hearing an unfamiliar version to tune into the actual meaning of lyrics. Leonard Cohen’s voice, to my ear, was all about New York in the early 70s, bohemians huddled in glamorously cold apartments. In Nadler’s voice the love triangle the song is all about comes front and center:

A man is writing a letter to an old an old friend with whom his girlfriend Jane once cheated on him. An impulsive incident, it nonetheless left a scar, understandably, but it also forced him to appreciate Jane anew. His friend has moved far away, off to the desert, literally we can suppose. Halfway through writing his letter we hear that Jane has woken up, meaning the couple is intact!

“And what can I tell you my brother, my killer? What can I possibly say?/ I guess I forgive you, I guess that I miss you, and I’m glad you stood in my way./ If you ever come by here, for Jane or for me,/ Your enemy is sleeping, and his woman is free./ Yes, and thanks for the trouble you took from her eyes./ I guessed it was there for good, I guess I never tried.”

Marissa Nadler, photo by Rick Kern.

Nadler takes some liberties with the lyrics in that last stanza, but keeps the essence of it: gratitude, even for an “enemy.” Love survives, it seems to say, when we give ourselves the time and space to feel all the subtle and conflicted feelings for the people who hurt and get hurt on the way.

Rain in Ponckhockie

As I write this I have the pleasure of watching water waft across the asphalt in front of my house – water that used to be in the crawl space under my house, that is. I watch it collect in the gutter across the street, right where the curb has a cut for a driveway. (Its cut being so filled with silt that grass is growing in it, the driveway is for cars that no longer visit the house across the street, which is empty and rumored to be soon condemned by the city.)

That side of the street is graded toward the south end of the block, and my side of the street is graded toward that side of the street. People in my neighborhood are self-taught experts in the meaning of that phrase, “is graded toward.” I live in Ponckhockie, a neighborhood that few people outside of Kingston seem to know about, but the people who know it have two associations with it that are both pretty darn accurate.

High tide along the “River That Flows Both Ways.”

One is that Ponckhockie is charming. Upon hearing that I live there, they saw “Ohhhh” the way they might if I told them I just bought a Volkswagen Beetle. Ponckhockie is special to anyone who has ever seen it. Often they will quickly add, “That’s right by the water,” in that adverb-of-degree sense of the word “right,” ripe for creative inflection.

We are indeed rrrrright by the water. There are precious few houses around here that weren’t built into a hill or next to a flood plain, and that don’t need some ingenious form of drainage, and many of them are downhill from somebody else’s ingenious way of grading water away from their foundation. And because it is and always has been a working class neighborhood, solutions have always come on a budget. On evening walks we find ourselves saying, “Hey, look what these people did with PVC pipe and wire.” “Nicely done!”

A year ago on the day before Christmas Eve, rain clogged the Rondout Creek, and high tide on the Hudson came up to the doorsteps of the house across the street and down the block. The Hudson is tidal. In Lenape its name literally means, “the river that flows both ways,” and there are hollows all over the reedy woods where you can watch the swampy water flowing one way in the morning and the opposite way in the afternoon.

You can see the Catskills from Kingston. The Target parking lot has an especially uplifting panorama of them, just ten minutes from here. If you drive the 45 or so minutes from Hunter Mountain to Ponckhockie on a summer night, you pass from an airy mountain atmosphere, through a steep valley to the humid, Tristate-area-feeling Hudson basin, and then down again to a positively Mid Atlantic wetland that evokes South Jersey.

Homespun hydrology: The author admiring the work of a neighborhood genius.

This week, as one of the biggest rainstorms of the year pattered on the roof, I took a deep satisfaction from the thought that the work-in-progess pumping system in my crawl space was going to trounce this Flood Watch storm. Coincidentally, I was reading a book called Rain: A Natural and Cultural History, by Cynthia Barnett.

She points out that Jonathan Swift made the first use of the phrase “raining cats and dogs” that we know of, in 1738, although a playwright a hundred years before that used the phrase “raining dogs and polecats.”

“Cat-and-dog cloudbursts seem practically ordinary compared with ‘raining young cobblers’ in Germany. It rains shoemakers apprentices in Denmark, chair legs in Greece, ropes in France, pipe stems in the Netherlands, and wheelbarrows in the Czech Republic. The Welsh, who have more than two dozen words for rain, like to say that it’s raining old women and walking sticks.”

Well, it rained old women and walking sticks here in Ponckhockie this week, but the sun is out, and high tide has come and gone a few times, and life goes on.

Original Cast Album

And speaking of Smiles of a Summer Night, lots of people who didn’t spend the 90s ticking Swedish film after Swedish film off their watch list know it through Sondheim’s A Little Night Music. I confess that Stephen Sondheim’s death a few years ago meant very little to me – though judging by the outpouring of tributes and genuine grief, it meant a great deal to the people around me.

Broadway between Sound of Music and Hamilton was a parallel musical universe to the one I grew up in, a place where Andrew Lloyd Weber was the one-eyed king. I knew who Sondheim was, but little more. Last year, however, I could see how ignorant I was. That’s when I watched Original Cast Album: Company, the D.A.Pennebaker documentary about the marathon recording session of the album for Sondheim’s 1970 musical, Company. I’ve seen it twice since!

Pennebaker’s much better-known Don’t Look Back bears repeated viewing, in part, because Bob Dylan is so much more fascinating when you get to see him be both a visionary and a jerk. That was one version of musical genius in the mid- to late-60s, the solitary genius. Sondheim’s wheelhouse being Broadway, the making of one of his shows was much more collaborative. He spends most of Original Cast Album standing behind record producer Thomas Shepard with a cigarette in his hand, occasionally emerging to correct a note or vowel pronunciation by one of the singers.

The climax of Original Cast Album: Company is an end-of-night, or early morning, attempt to record a decent take of “Ladies Who Lunch,” in which Shepard and Sondheim struggle with what to do about Elaine Stritch losing her voice after 14 hours of recording. Anyone who has ever slogged through a too-long day of film production, or suffered the spectacle of an actor just not delivering, with no easy Plan B in place, will definitely relate.

Smiles of a Summer Night

Last week’s solstice reminded me of the Swedish romantic comedy Smiles of a Summer Night.

That’s an understatement. Really any long summer evening with a slow moonrise makes me dream about recreating what writers call “the world” of Smiles of a Summer Night. The film, I think of every day. I quote it to friends the way macho guys sprinkle lines from The Godfather in their conversations. When I witness romantic love enduring through hardships or perceived infidelity, I make sense of it through the wisdom of this script. To me it’s the most perfectly crafted film of its kind, written and directed by Ingmar Bergman.

If Doctor Zhivago “owns” winter sunrises, and Badlands owns midwestern summer dusk, then Smiles of a Summer Night owns summer evenings, not by capturing them visually, but by showing what urbane and desperate souls are prone to do in these hours. It has inspired me to throw vodka and cake-themed dinner parties and numerous small gatherings at art-house cinemas, when I could find a screening of it.

I should add that the film has met with decidedly mixed reviews from my friends. (The strawberry cake, they like.) Some found the lead characters lacking sympathetic traits, some found the Shakespearean roundelay of couples switching partners in mid-summer too laborious in its set up, some found it too theatrical and dialogue-heavy, not cinematic enough. I can’t disprove any of these, and yet I will keep on proselytizing for this 1955 film.

This year I had the pleasure of introducing it to someone who was very familiar with the musical inspired by it, Sondheim’s A Little Night Music. So she already knew the story:

Frederick Egerman is a wealthy lawyer around 1900 in Sweden, widowed and remarried within the previous few years. Frederick, aka Lawyer Egerman or Advokat Egerman, once had an affair with a stage diva named Desirée, presumably while his wife was still alive. When his wife died, he broke things off with Desirée and married Anne – and kept her a virgin, right up until this summer weekend. Frederick’s handsome son Henrik is home from seminary for summer break, tormented by desires of the flesh, and by his attraction to his step-mother Anne in particular; Anne, for her part, is clearly ready to reciprocate, but still playing the part of young wife. Frederick foolishly takes Anne to the theater to see Desirée perform, leaving Henrik at home, failing in his attempt to seduce their servant Petra. Anne feels woozy when she sees the connection between Ferederick and Desirée and insists on going home, freeing Frederick to visit Desirée alone after the show. He finds that she has a 4-year-old son named Frederick, but has begun an affair with a military count, who also comes to visit that night until he kicks Frederick out under threat of physical violence.

The next day, Desirée visits her ancient mother, a retired starlet of the demimonde, and persuades her to host a party for Frederick, Anne, the count and countess, and young Henrik. As soon as the guests arrive, the countess and Desirée hatch a plan so that they each can get their desired men back: Desirée gets Frederick, and the countess gets her count back. To do so they begin by arranging a seduction between Henrik and his stepmother Anne. That unfolds via a diatribe against bourgeois sexual values in the middle of dinner, and a comically botched suicide.

“Tickets to the theater!”

The rest, ya just gotta see. Smiles of a Summer Night spoke to me as a young man who’d grown up the youngest of four athletic boys. The wider world of women, and men who’d grown up with sisters, was an unfolding mystery. I’d just spent college reading Refusing To Be a Man and lots of books on gender -that were a generation ahead of their time, it turns out.

That the men in the Egermans’ orbit were windbags; that masculinity itself had an air of buffoonery about it; that the women were talking circles around the men, and their plans were the motor of the story; and that the women had a knack for knowing what the men needed more than they did; these things all rang inspiring and revelatory to me.

The funniest of them all was Count Malcolm, played by Jarl Kulle. In the 1980s Kulle used his stentorian voice and laugh to great effect for the speeches he gave in Fanny and Alexander and Babette’s Feast. This is a chance to see him in the 1950s, young and brash, skewering a more youthful iteration of that same masculinity.

More importantly, I think I was most taken by this story because of the pathos of young Henrik. You first see Henrik reading Martin Luther to his desirable step-mom, as one does, with a quote that has served me over the years: “You can not keep the birds from flying over your head, but you can keep them from nesting in your hair.”

To Henrik, the revelation that principles may be one thing but the accommodations required to live in the real world are quite another, overcomes him out of necessity, because he has fallen in love. Love and life are a wide open frontier he is crossing. To his father Advokat Egerman, the totality of life and love are something he can already get his head around, but with an assist from Desirée he succumbs to what’s best for him.

The best film of its kind, ever.

Revolution and “Revolutions”

Yesterday April 27th was the 377th anniversary of King Charles I’s flight from Oxford to take refuge with the Scottish Army in the North during the English Civil War. The Protestant New Model Army was circling in on him, so he cut his hair and beard so that he wouldn’t look like a Van Dyck portrait, disguised himself as a servant, and slipped out the back, jack.

This date stuck in my mind because one of the mind-expanding pleasures of passing the time commuting by car these past four years has been has been listening to podcasts – and my favorite one of those by far has been Mike Duncan’s Revolutions.

Reading history comes much easier to me than reading fiction, and Duncan is an exemplar of a type of history lecturer: thorough, even-paced, and eminently fair. His flatness makes you lean toward your speaker whenever his inflections becomes the slightest bit…inflected, and he’s scrupulous about the difference between widely-accepted facts and the interpretations he favors.

His narratives also include a steady drip of irony, most of it regarding the bumbling of leadership. One of the great themes of Revolutions, in Mike Duncan’s telling, is common to all revolutions, from the English, to the American and French, Haitian and Russian, and that’s the failure of leadership, both civilian and military. I learned history, like most people my age, under the long shadow of Marx. I was taught to always look for the materialist essence of events: who was economically ascendant or in the decline, and how did that express itself in the culture and politics on the surface. Duncan is plenty aware of this too, but he makes a convincing case, time and again, that unforced errors on the part of leaders are what mark these earthquakes in time we end up calling revolutions.

On rare occasions Duncan makes an actual joke, and when he does he is howlingly funny, like his episode on the French Revolution in which he describes the death of the Comte de Mirabeau and its effect on the National Assembly as it was winding up its business in the spring of 1791. The first Revolutionary hero to be interred in the very weird monument The Pantheon, where, Duncan says, he is resting to this day. “Naww, I’m just kidding,” he adds, and reminds us that Mirabeau was disinterred a few years later, when his secret correspondence with King Louis was discovered, and his remains tossed in an unmarked grave. It’s as if his metronomic telling of months of legislative history (around 15 of the 55 half-hour episodes on the French Revolution alone) were one long setup for this glorious punchline.

Duncan also saves some irony for the overreaches of the Left, like his wry comments about how the anti-Catholic measures of the Parisian revolutionaries are going to play in the countryside. Revolutions make pleasurable stories the same way that drama does, by showing flawed characters becoming ambitious, hatching plans, and failing beautifully.

If I have one complaint about Revolutions the podcast then it’s the amount of time it spends on military details – and I realize already how ridiculous that sounds. It’s like saying jazz has too many horn solos. That could be a lesson for would-be revolutionaries, that the history of revolutions is the history of wars about them. Still, and though I could be projecting here, I can’t help sensing that Duncan really loves political philosophy and he’s going through the military histories as a matter of duty – or to engage with a different kind of history nerd than we are.

In other words, which flank of the Royalist line failed first at the Battle of Naseby I don’t care so much about. Although military history matters, I have always read history with an emotional attachment to the ideas at stake, and an appreciation for the concessions that elites were or weren’t willing to make to win wars, and the sacrifices that common people made at home, but the military fights that went with them were like rolling the dice and hoping the good guys win.

Which brings us back to Charles I, King of England, Scotland and Ireland. Was he a “good guy”? I love Duncan because he settles for an answer that speaks to me: Charles wasn’t a bad guy. (He has a similar take on Louis 16th.) A subtheme of this theme of incompetent leadership, when looking at the spectacular fall of the various old regimes, was the mixing of civilian and military authority. When one family, or one person, controls both the army and the other institutions at any one time, they’d better have good judgements about which tool to pick up to deal with whatever problem is at hand, and Charles had bad instincts about this.

We only come to see this, however, after we’ve heard the long story of how he ended up where he never wanted to be in the first place. Charles was the younger brother, who only became the heir apparent when his natural-born-leader big brother died. And it’s not like it was easy picking a wife from the courts of Europe while the atrocious religious wars of the 1620s were raging. And it certainly does not help that the Calvinists who took over Parliament and eventually suffocated it were absolute jerks too.

Charles I was everything we love to hate: autocracy, snobbery, chauvinism, and privilege. His mistakes cost thousands of lives. And yet by the time he is sitting in jail waiting for execution you are absolutely disgusted at the people who are going to do it. That’s good drama, and good history.

Gone To Kingston

Walking down the street in Kingston, New York this week I was stopped in my tracks by the smell of lilac. It occurred to me that it’s been almost a year since I posted here. I’ve been gone.

Gone? It got me thinking about the word “gone” and the many senses we use it in. It means absent. It means drunk. It means completely in love. And it means out of love. It means to have left, and to be poised to leave. The day my father died, someone texted me, “I heard your father’s getting close.” “He’s already gone,” I replied.

The online dictionary etymonline says the word has been used since at least the 1590s to connote hopelessness and the condition of being “beyond recovery.” (It also notes that we have been using the word “go” as a euphemism for “urinate” since at least the 1920s.)

I’ve never once enjoyed a day of fishing, though I’ve made a few attempts. While watching old black and white comedies as a kid, however, I already knew what “gone fishing” meant – and what it connoted. You could say “on fishing break” or simply “closed till next week,” but that’s not the same thing, is it?

Ponckhockie, Kingston, with the Hudson River behind it. The mouth of the Rondout Creek is to the right and the Kingston Lighthouse, at center left, is visible from the Rhinecliff train station across the river.

I’ve been gone to Kingston. I left New York five years ago with the intention of buying a little place in a small village in the greater Catskills. Then a year ago I ended up buying my first home, not in the picturesque mountains – though you have an excellent view of them from the Lowe’s parking lot – but in this mini-Brooklyn on the Hudson. And I live in the lowest part of it, where the accents and the climate are positively Mid-Atlantic.

A year ago I had a house picked out in a town with the wonderful name Bovina Center. With a yard and a historic barn and a friend who lived own the street. And friends reminded me what a social creature I am, and how much I’d miss being surrounded by people. So without trying to, I ended up in a strangely secluded part of Kingston. With skunks and raccoons and industrial ruins with chutes growing through them all around me.

And Whitman! And friends. And The Criterion Channel. Dreams and aspirations come and go – and as of this year the house in the country is gone. Things change, even change radically, and also stay the same.

The film that uses the spring blossoms to show the cyclical nature of time to the sweetest effect would be Amarcord, to my knowledge. It starts and ends with the puffballs that marked the end of winter in Fellini’s hometown. Wouldn’t you know it, I stepped out the door of a restaurant yesterday and saw puffballs. I’m gone, but I’m also back.

Lilacs and ‘Ever-Returning Spring’

One morning this week, there was plenty of light in the sky at 6am, and powdery floral odors wafting in the window. On my walk the night before I stopped three times to smell the lilacs in particular. It meant it was time for the annual ritual of reading Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”

Poems that stick in your brain always beg the question, why? Why this poem? What about it resonates with you? (The best audio reading of it I found online was produced by the Nashville Public Library for its podcast, Just Listen.)

“With many a pointed blossom rising delicate, with the perfume strong I love,/ With every leaf a miracle…”

In the case of “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” it’s an easy favorite for sensory reasons. I mean, who doesn’t like lilacs, fleeting and early of the season and redolent of crushed Smarties as they are? But still, the poem is over 200 meandering lines, an unfocussed elegy that can’t keep its attention on the subject of its own grief. “Lilacs” especially shocked me when I first read it for all its sections that turn grief on its head by singing the praises of death.

It starts, sprawlingly enough, with a line in its first (of sixteen!) sections, “Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,” then jumps from one to the next in that “trinity” in whom its addressing, from a “powerful western fallen star” (Venus presumably, as metaphor for the deceased Illinoisan, Lincoln), to the sweet-smelling sprig the speaker impulsively breaks upon hearing the news of his death, and then to a bird: a thrush, whose song unexpectedly absorbs more attention than either of the other two.

It’s an ambitious and unwieldy premise, but Whitman can’t even stay that focussed.

It’s a poem I have turned to in times of grief over death but never really dared share, since its praise of death, as much as I love it, may be the wrong message to those in the deepest throes of loss:

Come lovely and soothing death,
Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
In the day, in the night, to all, to each,
Sooner or later delicate death.

Prais’d be the fathomless universe,
For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious,
And for love, sweet love—but praise! praise! praise!
For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death.

Then later, Whitman being carnal as always:

From me to thee glad serenades,
Dances for thee I propose saluting thee, adornments and feastings for thee,
And the sights of the open landscape and the high-spread sky are fitting,
And life and the fields, and the huge and thoughtful night.

The night in silence under many a star,
The ocean shore and the husky whispering wave whose voice I know,
And the soul turning to thee O vast and well-veil’d death,
And the body gratefully nestling close to thee.

Carnal, as always.

As a Union Army volunteer nurse he was something of an authority on the subject, and he is the high priest of our secular culture, in a sense, but this is not the sort of thing you break out between “Amazing Grace” and “Morning Has Broken,” unless you really know your audience!

I was surprised to read, in prepping for this post, that Whitman wrote it in the summer of 1865, just a few months after Lincoln was shot. It worked for me as a poem about the “ever-returning” season, and the capacity for the smell of lilacs to evoke the day Lincoln died, so I’d figured he had to have written it the following year. I guess I took the word “last” in the title too literally: “The last time lilacs bloomed in this dooryard.” Not knowing that was better perhaps (You’re welcome, or maybe Sorry, about that.) since the poem works so well as a meditation on the the cyclical nature of time and memory.

I have tried reading Drew Gilpin Faust’s book about the way the American Civil War changed how we think of death itself, Republic of Suffering, a few times, and honestly keep wondering what I’m missing. This poem, however, I read every spring, and many times in between, and it says something profound about the privateness of grief.

For all the bombast about the “orb sailing the heaven,” the “Sea-winds blown from east and west,” and the “battle-corpses, myriads of them,” Whitman takes his grief to a quiet swamp: “The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements.” Increasingly the line between the warbling of the thrush and his own poetic voice, becomes blurry, reinforced by a sweet, archaic use of the word tally.

No surprise, I guess, that the man who did so much to create the vast interior life we are all carrying around in our heads, took all the grandeur of the most public death of his century and distilled his grief about it into the quietest of moments: “Lilac and star and bird entwined with the chant of my soul/ There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.”

Goosebumps every time.

Sweetness and Power

Yesterday morning, like most days this year, I made tea and toast and read the headlines before attempting to write something. “Made the mistake of reading the headlines,” I often say, since tuning in to the minutiae of the news gets in the way of creativity – or does it?

You should be able to write a love story knowing that respectable Americans are whitewashing an attempted Right Wing coup. You should be able to write a poem about springtime knowing what city in Ukraine is getting bombed hardest today. If reality is too much of a distraction, then what the hell were you writing about in the first place? Write deeper, answer harder questions.

The headlines yesterday were mostly about Elon Musk buying Twitter for $44 Billion. He is a hero to some of my friends – immigrant entrepreneurs I know have a big soft spot for him – and a villain to most others. He’s a controversial personality I had no strong opinions about, but was starting to. For context I put the computer aside and looked at … my tea and toast.

See, I was sitting in my friend’s apartment and found myself scouring the fridge for some kind of jam to spread on my toasted quarters of leftover bagels. (I’d been told to make myself at home.) Not finding any at first, I put extra sugar in my tea, but then looked harder: she had to have some, it’s a staple. It occurred to me that this craving of mine was not something endemic to my humanity, but was socially created by a monopoly just a few centuries ago.

This winter my nightstand reading book was Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History by Sidney W. Mintz. I found it sitting lonely in my local bookstore. Published in 1985, it predates the works of, say, Mark Kurlansky or Michael Pollan by decades, written for a time when a historian wrote a book expecting only other historians would read it – or perhaps their students, begrudgingly. If you can wade through Mintz’ passages about his grand historical synthesis, then you find all the (sorry) delicious anecdotes you’d expect in a more popular history and find yourself motivated to understand his more abstract points.

In just 200 pages Mintz walks you through the introduction of sugar to the European pantry. What we think of as a staple cooking ingredient was first a spice, a preservative, and a medicine even. In the era of competition with the Muslim Caliphates of North Africa, sugar made its way around the continent, and was cultivated in Spain, Sicily, and most successfully in the Canary Islands. Its first use beyond spice cabinets and apothecaries was often in the form of “subtleties,” or sugar as a medium of sculpture.

I admit I was not familiar with the word in this sense, having missed Kara Walker’s sculpture at the Domino Sugar factory in Brooklyn back in 2014, that of the fabulously antique title “A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant.” Another blog by Harvard students, called Chocolate Class, tells the history of subtleties very succinctly – according to their notes, leaning heavily on Mintz’ Sugar and Power.

History bores people because they think they know how the story ends, but this book reminds us that in 1600 it wasn’t at all clear which colonial power would emerge on top in the New World. The Spanish had the biggest head start but the Portuguese were still players. The French controlled huge parts of the North and the Caribbean, the Dutch and lastly the English were late to the game, the English still pre-occupied throughout the 1600s by their domestic crises and Civil War.

While telling the story of expanding consumption, Mintz also tells of monstrously expanding slavery in the Caribbean – the great democratization of luxury going hand in hand with colonialism at its worst. For years I had been perplexed by the order in which the colonizing powers stripped one resource after another from the rest of the world. I got that New Amsterdam was sending tens of thousands of beaver pelts a year from the Hudson valley alone back to the Netherlands, because there just weren’t that many beavers left in Europe, but why were so many of the first colonial products luxury stimulants: tobacco, chocolate, tea, coffee, and sugar. This book more than speaks to that, it tells it as one coherent story:

Ironically that series of crises in England in the 1600s resulted in a domestic economy that gave slightly higher wages to its post-feudal working class, and those coins in English workers’ pockets represented some earning power to be spent on cheap calories. Treacle was the first popular form of sugar for common people because it could be used in place of honey. That was followed by loaves of hard brown sugar, then the refined stuff, and it dovetailed with the marketing of tea in particular.

Lots has been said and written about the preconditions for the economic world as we know it. Calvinism created the spiritual and psychological mindset for capitalism. Colonialism the callously ever-expanding worldview. But tea and sugar, and coffee, and to a lesser extent chocolate, were necessary to creating a working class able to drag its sorry asses to work on time, and a professional class jacked up enough to always want more of everything.

I’m always taken aback, when I read colonial histories, by how private enterprise was steering the ship. How much kings were willing to give away to well-connected young, industrious men with dreams of fortunes. How genteel upper-middle class ladies and gentlemen were willing to invest in slavery, literally.

The title page to Sugar and Power quotes a 1773 work by Bernardin de Saint Pierre titled Voyage to Isle de France, Isle de Bourbon, The Cape of Good Hope… With New Observations on Nature and Mankind by an Officer of the King, which says it all: “I do not know if coffee and sugar are essential to the happiness of Europe, but I know well that these two products have accounted for the unhappiness of two great regions of the world: America has been depopulated so as to have land on which to plant them; Africa has been depopulated so as to have the people to cultivate them.”

Will Elon Musk and the investors he represents turn out to be responsible keepers of what’s become an important public square? I don’t know. Ask a Barbadian.