Flim-flam jingle jangled by advertisers and other hucksters. Not by Socrates…

A New Year… and masses probably resolving to lose pounds. Yet my 2024 resolution is not about weight but shedding paper. The rub, however, is an idiotic need to read everything first before the papers end up at the dump for recycling. This tedious habit is how I came across a quote on yellowed paper from a wise Greek. I have no idea when I typed this gentle prayer and failed to identify the source for the words in Plato. What mattered to me was the message. One I wanted to remember.

“Dear Pan, and all other gods that dwell in this place, grant that I may become fair within, and that such outward things as I have… may not war against the spirit within me. May I count him (her) rich who is wise and as for gold, may I possess as much of it …as only a temperate person might bear and carry within.” (I took the liberty of changing man to person, since we have the vote, as Athenian women didn’t.). If you allow yourself to read the words slowly, preferably aloud, and more than once, they are incantational. (Forgive the directive teacher-writer in me!)

Plato’s Four Muses: The Phaedrus and Poetics ofPhilosophy,  Chapter 4

Socrates: “Dear Pan….”

A few other tidbits this third Sunday in the New Year.  Last week I forgot to give the title of the William Butler Yeats poem.  A fellow teacher kindly let me know this. I asked webmaster Ilona to add the missing title, “The Second Coming,” to last week’s blog.

I have frittered away this Sunday, though not deep fried it in butter. Which is to say I am not using the noun form, as something eaten, or as Virginia Woolf did when she wrote, “People have been staying here…such a fritter & agitation.”  One reason I love the OED is the seeker gets to see how fine writers use words. Who should I find under fritter as a verb?  None other than the brilliant British writer, Julian Barnes.

Those who have taken my classes or read Tennis Talk of a Nobody, know that I adore JB. Here is how he used fritter: “She had watched her mother’s intelligence being frittered away on calculations about the price of tinned food.”

My frittering today was other than this. Sometimes I sits and thinks and sometimes I just sits. A friend and brilliant artist & graphic designer said this to me once. In memory I hear Cort’s playful intonation. I mention this because my Spanish phrase a day calendar told me, Debes descansar mas. You should get more rest.  And yes, things fall apart, such as one’s spine. Truthful words resonate from a physical therapist last week. Yes, I have young knees and can run (thank you Dr. Nordt) but the rest of me is over 80. Very tedious and painful to keep my head back, chin not jutting forward.  Today in a study with two walls of windows, looking out at the creek, edged a frozen white, I see floaters.  I swat at them as if they are actual tiny black bugs.  They remind me to close my eyes and rest. This is tahsome (as Virginia W. pronounced it) for me and the reader! I apologize to a childhood friend who wrote recently that he had read my blog and enjoyed it because I was not writing about myself!

Today I have in my lap an essay by Baltimore writer Patricia Schultheis, “In the Meantime.” It won first place in Creative Nonfiction in the Soul-Making Keats competition in 2020. I recently pitched seventeen “winning” (first, second, third) essays from 2017 to 2023, when the contest ended after three decades.  I have kept Patricia’s lucid and lyric essay on creativity and mortality.  On the back of this narrative essay is what I wrote to myself, the judge, in December 2020. “From the first read I knew this was the winner.  As gentle and rich as Yo Yo Ma’s CD, “Songs of Comfort and Hope,” playing in the background.  Next week, I will relate what Patricia’s memoir, A Balanced Life, has inspired me to do. This action is related to the Franz Kafka quote that precedes the memoir’s preface.

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief.” 

The Mysterious Two C’s of Life

A gale outside…and in a house on eleven forested acres in Virginia, this means hundreds of agitated trees. Some are shaking their remaining brown withered leaves while the resilient green Hollies keep smacking against other trees. These sounds and sights remind me of how much I hated wind as a child in Southern California. And only one writer caught in prose the strange and unsettling Santa Ana winds. I speak of the native Californian Joan Dideon and her essay, “Los Angeles Notebook,” in the collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. 

Given I’m in Physical Therapy twice-a-week due to age-old slouching, I noted the ironic title as I pulled Joan off the shelf she occupies with Virginia Woolf and Doris Lessing. Then another irony struck me, given the title of JD’s first essay collection.

                                                            *

Husband Mike taped the PBS Newshour last night, and this Saturday morning he was watching it downstairs and called for me to join him to watch an interview between an Iowa evangelical preacher and a PBS journalist. Her old beat was the Senate. Now she’s a regular on the News Hour, and I must say her aplomb with the pastor was laudable. He of self-certified beliefs and an unwrinkled face supports del santo de Florida.  But this pastor will back Trump if he is the Republican nominee. Why? He recognizes DT as the Good Lord’s appointed messenger. In Iowa Republicans and those promising to change their party, will be slogging and sledding to their voting places or more wisely (my bias) slouching at home.

(If you read my book, Tennis Talk of a Nobody, you know I take the two C’s, chance and circumstance, seriously. And from blogs, you might remember I employ books as a bibliophile’s filing system.)  Which is to say after the PBS interview, seated at my desk, I opened Dideon’s essay collection.  What fell out? A folded article, yellow with age, and marked on both sides where scotch tape had been. A column by the late Sydney Harris, a journalist for two Chicago papers. The piece in my hand was, “Prophetic Words from Yeats.” And before Didion’s Preface to Slouching Toward Bethlehem, a full page of the famous William Butler Yeats poem, from which Dideon borrowed her title. Then below the famous Irish poet’s two-stanza, 22 line poem is a wink from the late Joan Dideon and a statement from a Hollywood star.

“I learned courage from Buddha, Jesus, Lincoln, Einstein, and Cary Grant.” Miss Peggy Lee

From Sydney Harris I borrowed courage until his death in 1986.  His column syndicated all over the USA (era of newspapers) was in the San Francisco Chronicle.  For a decade in the 1970s in the Napa Valley, I taught high school English. I often cut Harris from the Chronicle, typed his short personal essays, and ran them off on a ditto machine!  I used his writing as a model of economy, simplicity, and clarity. Accessible to ‘regular’ students in a way that formal essays in textbooks were not.

The yellowed column in front of me is 316 words and eight paragraphs. (Might be possible to hear an audio recording on the internet of “Prophetic Words from Yeats.)  I will offer a few lines.

Harris begins, “Things fall apart, the center does not hold,” Yeats proclaimed in one of his most famous lines. Prophetically, even more so today, there seems to be no ‘center’ to hold things together.”

“Life is meant to be like a pair of scissors. One blade is the individual, the other is society.  Together they cut the fabric of civilization…. But the scissors are broken, and one blade has been contemptuously discarded—the blade of society, of community, of tradition in its best and blooming sense.” (The Evangelical, Sydney, and I could have quite a discussion about what that best and blooming tradition means.) * If you don’t know the Yeats poem, "The Second Coming," it is easy to find on the internet.

Lastly, I’m grateful today for an unlikely conjunction. Yesterday I had been asked to send in a title and description for a course I’ll teach in the fall. Joan Dideon and Sydney Harris helped me decide to teach, “The Art of the Personal Essay.”

Next time: Thoughts on Memoir and one called A Balanced Life 

Novels for 2024 & Airline Future Shock, circa 2008 & Beauty in Motion

As promised last week, here is a list of “serious” novels for our 2024 RCC-RILL book club. The twelve members have chosen to meet four times and discuss eight novels this year. We begin in March with Kazeo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills, and Marilynn Robinson’s Housekeeping.  In June our novels are The Master by Colm Toibin (a fictional work about Henry James), and HJ’s What Maisie Knew. We head to the American South in September with Toni Morrison’s Beloved and William Faulkner’s Light in August. Then in November our two novels share the same title, Snow, by the Irish and Turkish writers, John Banville and Orlan Pamuk.  In December for our end-of-the-year fest, we’ll discuss Orwell’s Animal Farm and Lewis Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland.  A perfect duo after November’s election, regardless of the outcome.

To end this brief opening, I offer a quote from Frederick Buechner. “Words you read become in the very act of reading them…part of who you are, especially if they are the words of exceptionally promising writers.  If there is poison in the words, you are poisoned; if there is nourishment, you are nourished; if there is beauty, you are made a little more beautiful.  In Hebrew, the word dabar means both word and deed.  A word doesn’t merely say something, it does something. It brings something into being.” From Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC.

When I read serious literature, I do not experience Future Shock. And today while cleaning out files (metal variety), I found a long piece from 2008, when I went to Sri Lanka to do three weeks of volunteer teaching for an NGO. At the time, American Airlines had instigated “total” self-check- in at D.C. National. The machine sent me to the desk set up for rejected humans. I was not alone and joined a long line. Two of those serving the desk disappeared, which left a man past retirement age to handle the many confused customers. When my turn came, I learned the computerized system could handle only four flights. I was using miles, the One World Alliance, and taking five planes to Colombo. Then I heard, “We have no manual tags.” The man left. Fortunately, my practical husband, the pilot, was with me. The AA fellow returned with a white tag, from which dangled a thin string.  He slowly began copying my flight numbers onto the tag, one at a time. The destiny of my large black bag?  It would be heaved on and off aircraft ten times. I looked at the string and said, “Oh, my god.  Three weeks in Sri Lanka with nothing!” My husband intervened. “In his USAF commander’s voice he said, “Use some tape.”  Finally, it was time to weigh my one piece of luggage. I could have had two bags, totaling 100 pounds. I could have weighed 300 pounds. But I could not have a bag of 52 pounds and not pay extra for the one bag. Did the overweight bag with its paper tag make it to the Emerald Isle with me?  That’s another story and not for today. But I will ask what counters a machine laden and now Beyond Future Shock AI world?  For me, only beauty, in all its manifestations. Here is a photo sent to me the other day. 

Until next week…. Gail