Gelb

Yellow, yes; jaune, of course. Amarillo ? A cousin of yellow. But gelb ? I looked up, disappointed but not surprised, from my German-English dictionary. Gelb. Gelb !



But "yellow" is no more yellow than "gelb," after all. It's a small miracle that "yellow" floods my mind's eye with, well, yellow. Just as "gelb" presumably floods Greta's eye with gelb. But there is something in it of the old question about the dog and Buddha Nature. Does a Jerusalem Artichoke have Yellow Nature ? Mu !



And, come to think of it, it's got an alias or two: girasole, earth apple. Girasole -- get it ? -- turns with the sun, sunflower. And, playing botanical charades, it sounds like Jerusalem.

And, I read, it has an edible, tuberous root. Like a potato. Like a pomme de terre.

And what about the ubiquitous, autumnal air potato ? As in Frost's poem ?


For I have had too much
Of apple-picking. I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down and not let fall.

Words, words words. Ten thousand thousand words. To touch, cherish and lift down onto the page. No wonder the poet is weary and has taken to staring at the hoary grass

...through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough



Consider two translations of Rilke's famous, autumnal poem from The Book of Hours

The first, Robert Bly's I think, begins

Already the ripening barberries are red
and the old asters hardly breathe in their beds

and ends with (you being God)

... And you are like a stone
that draws him daily deeper into the depths.

The language is simple, stately, anaphoric. The speaker describes the man who is not "rich" by harvest time, not full of a confident, vision-generating interior darkness. "No days open" to him and everything that does happen "cheats" him, "Even you, my God," prays the speaker.

But then the speaker calls God a "stone" "drawing" the unfulfilled old man "deeper into the depths" -- an image that is the mystical antithesis of the "God" who "cheats," the merely conceptual God, the idea of God.

The other translation begins

The red barberries are about to ripen,
the old chrysanthemums heave

and ends with the old man considering everything, "even you dear Lord," "blatant lies."

... And you become a stone
to him, one that drags him down.

Here the lie, the cheat, the conceptual "God" simply "drags him down." There is no implicit mystical movement in this translation as there seems to be in Bly's. Bly's uses the softer, gentler, less violent verb "draws." The heavy alliteration -- "draws him daily deeper into the depths" is like gravity; the man is drawn into the depths of himself by God that resides there, heavy as a stone. A mystic involution, involuntary. Even though "deeper into the depths" is annoyingly redundant, it makes its point.

"Drags" is a harsh verb. I picture someone sinking in water, drowning, pulled down by a stone.

And the last lines in German ?

Und wie ein Stein bist du
in tagliche in die Tiefe zieht.

I speak no German. My German dictionary makes my eyes cross -- all those strings of consonants and ie/ei words. But I extract several key words --

You stone
daily depth draw

...and can't help thinking that Bly has been more faithful to the text. Indeed, listen to the book's opening stanza via the second translator:

The clock has struck and nudges me
with clear metallic beats:
My senses tremble. I feel I am able --
and I tackle the day that greets.

How can I begin to enumerate the infelicities ? The worst is the overwhelmingly clumsy and unnatural "tackle the day that greets," obviously chosen to rhyme with "beats." The second line in German is "mit klarem, metallenem schlag." "Schlag" means blow or beat, and, since "pulschlag" is pulse beat, Rilke seems to have chosen it to imply human pulse or heart beat. So "beats" is a reasonable choice for translation. But it "sounds" wrong. At least to my ear. I think musical beats more than heartbeats, maybe resisting the anthropomorphized, pulsing clock that's rousing the speaker into sensibility.

Then take the last two lines:

mir zittern die Sinne. Ich fuhle: Ich kann --
und ich fasse den plastichen tag.

Where is "plastichen" in the translation ? And why didn't she chose "I can" instead of "I am able" ? Surely not for the silly off rhyme of tremble and able ! "I can" also has a nifty, built-in GMHopkins homage --

Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist -- slack as they may be -- these last strands of man
In me or, most weary, cry I can no more . I can;

-- how could she have resisted it ? Is there really a "clock" (uhr) that "nudges" (stupsen) in line one -- Da neigt sich die Stunde und rührt mich an ? And what does babelfish, a useful albeit stupid machine, have to say about all this ? It's not clever enough to chose "beats" for its implied pulse, but it's more faithful to Rilke's images --

there the hour leans and touches me
with clear metallic impact
me the senses tremble. I feel: I can
-- and I seize the plastic day

-- a leaning, touching hour is not the same as a nudging clock.

This translator has attempted to preserve Rilke's rhyme and meter and sacrifices fidelity to his images to that end. Well, one's rhetorical allegiances must go somewhere, I suppose.



Words, words, words: our grand, imperfect harvest, the thorny thicket where I've lost my way. If mere naming is a slippery and fraught enterprise, how can translation ever hope to succeed ? Is God -- "God" -- a lie or a stone ? If I had no eyes, what would "yellow" or "gelb" be to me ? And what is the eye that can realize "God" ? Do I need a neurophysiologist or a priest ? A translator or a poet ?

Is "God" Father Son and Holy Spirit in the same way that a sunflower is yellow ?

And if I sit here long enough, eyelessly enough, until all vestiges of "God" and "gelb" (and "rough" and "tall" and "crucified") are burned away, then what ?

Enlightenment, the Kingdom or just some human sleep ?

Decidual

A year or so ago I moved my journals -- 35 volumes, spanning 1971-1994 -- from bookshelf to closet shelf, then closed the door. A faint smell leaks out from time to time, not so much the frank stench of putrefying corpse, as the sour, stale odor of sloughed epithelium -- toe jam, navel lint. But that smell is far less nauseating than the sight of them there in all their bald, naked, narcissistic magnificence.

My body of work, my corpus, my wordy effigy.

I should really burn them. But ice figures more prominently in my metaphoric life than fire. So they're doing ice time, prison lingo for time spent in isolation, in solitary confinement.

Most of the notebooks are black speckled composition books with unlined pale green paper, utilitarian, academic blank books. Some, which I bought when I couldn't find the proper speckled ones, have green cardboard covers. Two thirds of them are handwritten. The later ones have typewritten entries, on paper trimmed and taped to the blank pages. The tape is brittle and failing. The typed entries are beginning to yellow, detach and fall out, as if striving to attain some state beyond chronology, leaving behind big gaps in the record. Disorienting, dementing. The last volume is simply a black three-ring binder of word-processed entries.

And after that ? A computer file (9.01-12.03) named "Pue de Soi," journal finally reduced entirely to gas: electrons and stink. Cleaner, and oh so much easier to dispose of the evidence: just hit delete. What is it when solids go directly to vapor without the intervening liquid phase ? Sublime ? Yeah, right.

And between 1994 and 2001 ? Poems. Lots of poems. Again, the bodies pile up, viz. the six bulging thesis binders (1970-2004) still squatting in plain sight in my study,



even though the stack of little magazines where some of their poems have been published has long since been evicted to the back room.



I note with amusement tinged with unease that, on the floor of my room, in front of a low bookcase, is a pile of twelve photo albums, record of nearly a year of looking at weeds.

Logorrhea ? Syllogomania ?



Keeping a journal served to make me feel more real, in the same way that a mirror does. An admiration. It provided me with a reassuringly structured, narrative meta-self that cohered and made sense. It relieved the claustrophobia, the loneliness, of simply experiencing myself. It projected me outward, as in projectile vomiting, as in being too full of myself, as in having swallowed myself whole. It transformed me into an artifact in page after page of writing and rewriting, as if I were a tree continually shedding and regrowing its leaves.

There's something of this in public writing, too, a tawdry little psychodrama that goes on behind the text. My poems range from the frankly confessional to the impersonal. But having my words read is a little like being seen, being reflected in the mirror of the reader's eye. But at several removes. Like eye contact filtered through two pairs of dark glasses, or bounced off the surface of an intervening moon. The text is an emissary, a surrogate I send out into the world to do my dirty work. It's my bag man.

And what about all those weed photos ?



You'd think they'd be the least personal, most objective of all my accumulated artifacts, where the explicit self is at its most covert. But aren't they, after all, just a creepy, Jeffrey-Dahmer like invitation to come inside me and look out at the world through my eyes ?

Remembering John Mack

(Photo: Stuart Conway)

When John Mack's face flashed on the TV screen of the 11 o'clock news last night I had the same instantaneous, wordless intuition that I had when Anne Sexton's had decades ago -- that he'd died. I was correct. He was run over by a drunk driver in London on Monday night. I was shocked and speechless, and incredibly sad.

I'd always imagined I'd be surprised by his death some day -- he was, after all, slightly over two decades older than me, and apt to die first. In fact, I've long harbored the morbid expectation of encountering news of his death in the Boston Globe some morning, over coffee and toast. Where, of course, it was this morning. I was not prepared for the immediacy of his dear, familiar face amidst the vulgar prattle of the nightly news. And, to paraphrase the song, I always thought I'd see him again.

I was in therapy, then psychoanalysis with Dr Mack for decades.

Weeks after I'd begun medical school in 1973 I suddenly declared to my parents that I wanted to quit. They'd weathered their queer daughter's shyness and sullenness and even her harrowing dalliance with anorexia without calling in an expert, but this was the last straw. So I was taken to a kind psychiatrist of my mother's acquaintance, who, in turn referred me to Dr Mack.

On Thursday, September 27th, 1973 I wrote in my journal "I have to call a Doctor Mack in Brookline." Dr Mack died on September 27th. September 27th is also the anniversary of my car wreck. It's a strangely, arbitrarily, overdetermined date, yet still, like a dream, significant. Analysis is about interpretation, about meaning and significance. It's about uncovering meaning, creating meaning out of the stuff of one's life.

It's also about process. Dr Mack once called the therapeutic setting a "holding" environment -- a lovely metaphor for a safe and protected space in which one can confront dark and dangerous conflicts and impulses. The analyst guides one though the underworld, or at least that's how it felt to me. He was a wonderful guide -- tall, thin, slightly stooped, soft-spoken, dignified, handsome. I remember his hands -- long, pale fingers that always had bandaids on them. What were those bandaids all about ?

For long, bleak stretches of my life Dr Mack was a constant, faithful, supportive presence. I'll always carry with me the image of the shadowy basement office in his home -- his big, untidy desk, the ceiling-to-floor shelves overflowing with books and journals, and, of course, the couch. It was a dark, warm, cave-like space. And, out in back of his house, beyond the small, rain-scooped zen stone under a downspout, was a long deep garden. I called it The Garden, as in Eden, as in pre-lapsarian paradise, where knowledge does come, after all, and from which one is inevitably ejected. Holding and explusion coexisted.

Is that possible ? One of the most stunning and memorable moments of my treatment with him was long after the analysis was over. It was the mid 1980's, I was divorcing, had a small child, and had returned to face-to-face treatment with him.
And I was drinking like the proverbial fish. Time after time I would agree to stop, promise to stop. How can we possibly work, he'd ask, when you alter the basic stuff of your brain, the basic fabric of your mind and self, with alcohol ? But I would not, could not stop. So finally, after yet another broken contract, he gently pointed out that my attachment to drinking was more powerful than my attachment to him and the therapeutic process. Which we would, therefore, have to abandon.

I was truly expelled from the Garden.

And I was aghast. Aghast at my own infidelity. At the incredible power of the drug that had overcome my deep and fundamental connection with Dr Mack.

Two days later he telephoned to see how I was. It was completely unexpected. I was shocked, and profoundly moved. I'd assumed I'd blown it, ruined everything, would have no second chance. Deserved no second chance. It was the example of his constancy and care that helped me, finally, then and there, to stop drinking and get on with my life and resume our work together.

In 1992 I returned to complete my long-unfinished medical residency at Cambridge Hospital, the same hospital where I'd had some of my analytic sessions with Dr Mack many years prior. He still practiced there, and, in fact saw me for a series of sessions during a particularly stressful patch of my tenure as world's oldest medical resident.

He never sent me a bill.

This morning it struck me that the example of his therapeutic, physicianly constancy might, even now, offer me a key to my own conflicted life as a doctor.

One of Freud's enduring insights is that of transference: how the analysand relates to the analyst as if to a parent. Dr Mack spent many years hosting the imago of my powerful, dominant father. To this day I relate to the world in a slightly subserviant, reverential, daughterly manner. And yet today I'm remembering lying on the analytic couch in his office in Cambridge. It was on the second or third floor under a tall window that looked out upon a tree. Gazing at the tree I would think of the lullaby Rock a bye baby, in the treetop/when the wind blows, the cradle will rock -- he was both my paternal tree and maternal cradle, and today I feel orphaned. The image of tree and cradle, as homely as it is, is an image of peril. Of impending fall. Life is peril, impending fall --

When the wind blows the cradle will fall./Down will come baby, cradle and all.

Falling, midair, the baby is still cradled, still held.

Metaphor and transference aside, he was a brilliant man, compassionate, erudite, and accomplished in many spheres. He wrote a Pulitzer winning biography of TE Lawrence, was a prominent and effective anti-nuclear activist, and, later in his career, courageously explored the boundaries of psychiatry and spirituality. He died horribly, and way too early.

The world is richer for his sojourn upon it, and poorer for his loss.

And so am I.

Awesome

Go here NOW for amazing, breathtaking photos:

Marblehead Nature Log

Unquote

I opened the crisp, white envelope -- an interoffice missive from somewhere deep within the corridors of administration -- and extracted a handsome invitation, professionally printed on good quality cardstock, to the grand opening of the newly renovated ICU. I opened it. On the inside cover I read

"Without a sense of caring, there can be no sense of community."
-- Anthony J. D'Angelo

There it sat, italicized text in a graceful font, enclosed within quotes and dutifully attributed, floating beige on a blue background at the center of its own page. It was clearly a sentiment to be reckoned with, an utterance of great authority, which left no room for discussion.

Without X there can be no Y. Pristine as mathematics, crying out for symbols of formal logic.

It annoyed the hell out of me.

Who was this "Anthony J. D'Angelo" fellow, and in what context had he uttered this phrase ? Was he some sort of medical ethicist or philosopher of medicine from whose oeuvre someone had culled this proposition ? And what did it mean, anyway ?

What is a "sense of caring" ? Is it different than "caring" ? By the same token, is a "sense of community" different from "community" ?

Could he have said, for example:

Without caring, there can be no community.

But couldn't there be a community of the uncaring, bound by the motto "We just don't give a shit" ?

And, furthermore, can a "sense of caring" exist without actual care ? Or a "sense of community" exist without actual community ? As in an erroneous assumption that I am cared for, and a feeling of kinship with people who actually hate me ?

What about the reverse -- "Without a sense of community there can be no sense of caring." Does that apply as well ?

Faugh.

I knew where the quote came from, conceptually. Our hospital's own little slogan is equally fraught with deconstructive pitfalls:

Caring where you live.

Now obviously this is intended to promote the concept of medical services -- medical care plus the more ethereal "caring" -- available near one's place of residence. We are a group of community hospitals, after all, in contradistinction to the big, impersonal tertiary care facilities inconvenient miles down the turnpike in Boston. But "caring where you live" also means, does it not, "it matters to us where you live." Which of course it doesn't, other than maybe it did when the consortium downsized a while back and a whole hospital was set adrift to re-consort with a different community of community hospitals. But that's another story.

That ambiguity aside, the D'Angelo quote seems handpicked to echo both the "caring" and the "where you live" of our own little slogan. How did our PR team ever find it, and who is this Mr D'Angelo anyway ?

So I fired up Google.

And got pages of hits. The "sense of community/sense of caring" quote is everywhere. Am I the only person in America not currently uttering and living by this maxim ? Where have I been ? Has it replaced "in God we trust" on the money yet ? Why hasn't anyone told me about it ?

Next I Googled Mr. D'Angelo. Expecting to find, oh, maybe a medical ethicist, or some sort of medical pedagogue. But no.

He writes quotes. Ready made quotes. Lots of them, apparantly. Booksfull. I suppose one could call them aphorisms. But I won't. He's a youngish guy who embarked on the quote biz in 1995 at the age of 23, and now is director of something called the Collegiate EmPowerment Company, Inc..

Apparantly, upon graduating from college, he suddenly became inspired and these "quips and quotes," these "snippets of timeless wisdom," began to flow from him, quasi glossolalically, into his cassette recorder and from there into his first work, "The College Blue Book," and from there into several other similar inspirational volumes and into a host of self-improvement seminars. Including, to his credit and my surprise, a volume specifically for gay collegians. I noticed that on his company's website Nearly Everything's Capitalized. That must be part of the EmPowering Process. And that his company's maxim is: Helping You Take Higher Education Deeper. Which reminds me, for some reason, of our Dear Leader's infamous "Make the pie higher," and "Put food on your families." The "higher/deeper" dichotomy, clearly intended to provide a rhetorical flourish, seems, well, a wee tad silly. At least to my cynical ear.

It didn't help that I'd been reading Basho's haiku. They, with their clear, concrete, sensual images, are the antithesis of Mr D'Angelo's abstract exhortations. In fact, doesn't this haiku speak of Intensive Care more elegantly and evocatively than Mr D'Angelo's ponderous aphorism ?

From the edge of death--
these chrysanthemums somehow
begin to blossom


(Matsuo Basho, tr. Sam Hamill)

Riparians

I am not alone on the river path.

There was the turtle man -- tall, thin, with a gray ponytail -- who told me I must watch for the turtles. They're this big, he said, making a cirle with his arms in front of him.

There was the man on the moped, cheerful, older than me, a bit beat looking, who told me how once, drunk, he wiped out on his little bike and landed in the sluiceway.

There was the heavily accented man, middle aged, who explained that there were sweet berries that taste like yellow peaches near the soccer field. I found them. They looked like tiny, dusty plums. I didn't taste them.

Then there was the retired cop who got off his bicycle to tell me about the incredulity of the Audubon Society woman whom he'd called to report seeing a yellow headed blackbird. I am a retired cop he said, pleading his case to me, and I've testified in many trials. I know what I see.

And then there was the man, quite elderly, who told his birding stories -- I once saw five cardinals by the Moody Street Bridge ! -- with such urgency that he reached over and touched me, lightly, repeatedly, on the shoulder. But that was a long time ago. The birds were better then.

What about the woman with the camera ?

She listens attentively, politely, but is always a bit impatient to get back to her weeds.