Consider the Toad

Philip Larkin, in his poem "Toads," asks

Why should I let the toad work
squat on my life ?
Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork
and drive the brute off ?

He concludes that something toadlike squats inside him, too, next to his "wit" -- a definate need for security -- and he suggests that the two qualities live in symbiosis. The toad would not seem so burdensome if there were no wit. The wit would not be so acerbic if there were no toad.

In a later poem, "Toads Revisited," the speaker is walking through the park one afternoon, not working, taking the air with such blighters as

wax-fleshed out-patients
still vague from accidents

and, becoming fearful of strings of empty, aimless days, concludes

Give me your arm, old toad;
help me down Cemetary Road.

One certainly can't accuse Mr Larkin of being overly perky. I laughed aloud today as I discovered "Toads Revisited," recognizing myself in the idle "wax-fleshed out-patient.../still vague from accident..."

I've been out of work and in the vice grip of the Albert DeSalvo/Gregor Samsa collar for two months now. There's a little Larkin in me, for sure. There's some truth in the wit/work symbiosis.

Tomorrow I have another CAT scan, a c-spine xray in flexion and extension -- will my head fall off and roll across the floor ? -- and a trip to the neurosurgeon for his verdict.

Here are few lines from Po Chu-i to counterbalance Larkin's (and my) dysphoric angst:

...

Joyful people resent fleeting days.
Sad ones can't bear the slow years.

It's those with no joy and no sorrow --
they trust whatever this life brings.

"After Lunch," trans David Hinton




graphics © 1999-2003
www.clipartconnection.com

Feline Mystery

There's nothing like a houseful of cats, in our case, four, to create a mystery.

Yesterday we noticed that Manny, our 2 year old boy (well, castratus) kitty, didn't show for breakfast. His two passions are breakfast and out. We searched high and low, and finally found him in a closet. Very unusual. So we called the vet. Must rule out urethral blockage, they said, and advised we go to a nearby veterinary ER.

There was no blockage, but manny was breathing at 60-80 per minute.

They did an xray and some tests and concluded it was an asthmatic type reaction, and decided to keep him overnight.

Last night DK found chunks of fiberglass on the living room rug.

Backstory: our basement is half finished, and gives way to the unfinished cellar through a louvered door which closes with a hook-and-eye. The house is 113 years old, and the previous owners were not known for the robustness of their house maintenance. The front stone wall of the cellar was boarded over, poorly insulated, contained a broken window somewhere behind the wallboard, and last winter, got so cold that the water pipe into the house froze and split.

So we just had someone fix the window, repoint the concrete between the stones -- not an easy task, as the outside wall is under the verandah -- and pack in more insulation inside. He didn't replace the wall board, so it's basically insulation strips visible down there.

The last time I went into the "cellar" was Friday. It's a strict no-kitty zone. I saw no kitties accompany me, for whatever that's worth. DK doesn't think he went in there after me.

We THINK we saw Manny Friday night.

Saturday was when he began to act strange.

So after DK found the fiberglass on the rug upstairs, I went down into the cellar and, in the middle of the floor was a huge chunk -- 2 feet by 2 feet at least -- of fiberglass, of such heft that I'm nearly positive I would have noticed it immediately on Friday had it been there then.

So.

Did the kitty somehow get stuck in the basement, rip a chink of fiberglass out of the wall, inhale it and become ill ?

How did he get in ?

How did he get out ?

Is the fiberglass just a pink herring, and the kitty has simply become asthmatic ?

Was some other animal trapped under the verandah and somehow got into the wall and into the cellar ?

Poor kitty.

Poor us (seven hundred bucks later.) Not to mention the bazillion pills a day we have to insert into the kitty. And the new, byzantine kitty litter we must use.

Bad kitty.

The first thing Mannydid on returning home today was run downstairs and lie down in front of the louvered door.

I guess we've found his third passion -- fiberglass.

Looks like cotton candy... (cue Homer Simpson tape -- "Fiberglass, mmmmgggmmmgmgmgmgmeeooowww !!!)

Advent Eve

Darkness, cold, the winter coming on: all night the wind howled, and it howls still today. Last evening a loud, wind-driven rain suddenly rattled the windows. DK and I went out onto the porch to look and found it wild, warm: mid 50's, torrential rain, water sluicing downstreet, fog rising between houses, the spruce boughs whipped by wind. Today it's bright, and getting colder. Clouds in the west. Trees bare.

I have been thinking of Advent. I am trying to fathom Christ. The Dalai Lama taught: look to your own tradition. So I am looking back. The Christian images are at the neural bedrock, formed in childhood: manger, child, magi.

Advent looks ahead. So much in our life is aftermath: post-modern, post-911, post-Auschwitz, post-nuclear. But Advent is expectation, hope, waiting. Waiting for something that has been foretold, that we know will, has arrived. But it is expectation colored by all the aftermaths in which we live.

But truly, nothing has happened yet, in this moment, in this darkness, in this cold. And yet it has all happened, is happening. For now, there is nothing but the darkness and cold. We sit, open to it. Advent with and without hope, with and without expectation.

A fragment of a prayer: Come What may.


Meanwhile, An American Christmas, at the starter's bell, stampedes out of the gate.

Res Ipse Loquitur

I checked my "hit" monitor the other day -- it's amusing to see what google searches lead people here -- and one google search was "where's pharmawatch."

Pharmawatch is an Australian MD's weblog I'd linked to and wrote about , a wonderful and well-documented deconstruction of the often-sordid practices of Big Pharma -- their ethically shabby "trials," their mendacious and money-wasting advertisements, the thinly veiled doctor-bribery and biased "educational" activities of drug reps.

Read this

Pharma Watch

Then, for a perspective on the notice the site had received (British Medical Journal = Big, Reputable) , this

bmj.com Brown 326 (7395): 938a

Then savor the irony in the BMJ's review of PharmaWatch

"this site is a great example of the free speech ethic associated with the internet"

Unfortunately, it has now apparantly become an example of the intrusive, intimidating, free-speech-squelching power of large corporations and their lawyers.

They're watching us.

Never doubt it for a moment.

Scoptophilia/scoptophobia

I returned to the riverwalk and, on a whim, brought my camera.

I felt rapacious.

I rationalized it: I wanted an image of the beautiful nameless grass so that I could continue my botanical taxonomic search through the winter. Plus, storing up images mentally and writing about them is just as rapacious, so why NOT photograph ? After all, I don't physically collect attractive botanicals for Martha Stewartian purposes. My rule: no picking allowed. I winced, last weekend, when DK plucked an strikingly cobblestoned, still-green leaf from a bush. Ouch.

   
Photo: Jack Dykinga usda

Today I thought of the Ray Bradbury story that I read probably 35 years ago -- the one where a small boy gets a camera, and proceeds through his beautiful world taking picture after picture, then eagerly awaits the developed prints. He is wild with anticipation -- imagining he's captured and will own that beauty -- and is bitterly disappointed when the blurry, badly exposed photographs arrive.

Or something like that.

I'm no photographer. I have an old Minolta 35mm, and, a long time ago, taped a reminder on its back:

f1.8 lg. ap., narrow field
f22 small ap., deep field

I'm on my own when it comes to remembering to take the lens cap off, remembering to focus and deciding on the shutter speed.

My pictures are often, well...you can imagine.

But nonetheless I snapped away: the pale ruddy-brown, ocrea encased seeds I originally thought were wild buckwheat; the tangled masses of dead burcucumber between the footbridge and the railroad bridge; berries -- waxy red ones; larger, soft, orange-red ones; berries in bright red clusters. I shot several magnificent tree trunks, the railroad bridge close up and the footbridge from the riverbend -- its gentle arc and sole pedestrian reminded me of the Floating World of Japanese prints. I took a picture of a still-green broadleaf bush with dusty-blue juniper-like berries, also unidentified. And, of course, several pictures of the beautiful nameless grass: chest high, pale brown, tall spare seedhead panicles, airy and graceful.

I wanted to take a picture of the tent person's campsite, but I didn't. I feel intrusive enough when I peer into the brush and locate it. A voyeur. A trespasser.

A woman walking a beagle stared at me as I blundered out of the underbrush at a particularly tangled and thorny spot.

Which brings me to the second theme of my walk.

There's seeing, of course. Camera and all.

But then there's the matter of being seen.

Having a cracked neck and being in a hard collar has thrown my body into the foreground -- the already-aging, plunging-headlong-into-menopause, scrawny, osteoporotic body. With its grayer-by the moment hair, and saggier-by-the-second skin. Last time my hair was this long my colleague -- a paragon of bluntness -- took me aside and used the word "disheveled." Another colleague, more tactful, once left an LLBean catalogue on my desk, a gentle reminder that perhaps a few new outfits might be nice.

(Literary aside. About eleven years ago, on my 40th birthday -- go ahead, do the math, I dare you -- I was reading the last volume of Updike's Rabbit books. I came across a paragraph in which he describes the texture of the buttock skin of middle-aged women. Rough and sandpapery, if memory serves. It set the tone for the next decade.)

Then there's the matter of the collar itself. It's not a small thing. It pushes up my chin and cheeks into jowls. No, let me rephrase that: into fucking jowls. The bad hair conceals the collar a little, but it's still evident. And it makes me feel conspicuous in a way that disconcerts me. It draws attention to me. People look -- some overtly, some stealthily. I feel like a freak.

Before the accident I'd begun to tell myself, with some chagrin, that aging was rendering me invisible. I no longer have that probably-imaginary refuge. I am old AND visible now. An object. The opposite of a sex object, which incites attraction. I am an aging, broken, mortal object, kindling repulsion. Memento mori.

Excuse me, would you ?

I think I need to go read "Sailing to Byzantium."

Considered Lilies

S.Bauer USDA NASA/Hubble

Whenever I find myself fretting about finances, I find it useful to recall the gospel passage about considering the lilies. It helps me cut through the mental toiling and spinning and get back to the present task at hand which was, this morning, taking a shower.

This device would probably work less well if I were having bona fide financial woes, and not just wallowing in fretful, catastrophizing overdrive.

Which leads me to ask: could I actually live a life of complete self-sufficiency, a life reduced to the barest necessities. The life, perhaps, of the person I call the river hermit, the inhabitant of the tent in the brush beside the river where I walk ?

I thought of him as I was lying in bed last night, and as I was making the bed this morning. Alone in the dark, maybe with a lantern; alone in the cold, with the winter coming on. Likely forced to adopt his residence not out of spiritual adventure, but out of terrible, painful necessity. I have been trying not to romanticize the river hermit. Just calling him that romanticizes him, I know. Maybe I should simply say tent person.

I like to think that my self-sufficiency prepares me for extremity. In my catastrophic fantasies I am always alone, being self-sufficient. Throw in a husband or a son and the scenario breaks down, becomes impossibly complex.

I could, I suppose, get a tent and set it up by the river, but it would be an artificial experiment; I could always go home, or be rescued. But even in a freely chosen retreat, with a safety net, could I endure privation ?

I don't know.

The more important question, of course, is living my own life. Just as it is, right here, right now.

Nonetheless, I think the comfort I take from "considering the lilies" is more than a cheap mind trick that happens to work to cut through anxiety. I certainly don't "believe" that "God" will provide me with any particular set of goodies, through faith or works or even grace: nothing so economical. It's like reading Julian of Norwich's famous "all manner of things shall be well" as not a particularly temporal nor practically optimistic statement.

One starts by meeting with clear attention whatever arises in the moment. By seeing the greed, hatred and delusion that arise and obstruct clear vision and compassionate action. Sitting, we glimpse that we are like the lilies of the field -- part of the world's glorious raiment, its ten-thousand things -- at whose empty, resonant center, all toiling and spinning stops.

I wrote a poem a few years ago about considering lilies. I had, I think, encountered a Stargazer Lily and realized that the root of "consider" -- con-sidere --
contains a star. (cf. sidereal). As does "desire" (cf. desiderata.)

It's about the beautiful insufficiency of words.

Lola was a patient I had as a medical student in Worcester in 1976; she was an Eskimo, and incredibly beautiful.

The two ungainly German words in the poem mean, respectively, "stargazer," and "lily-of-the-valley."

The latin is from the Song of Songs, the beginning of the second chapter: lily among thorns, apple tree among trees of the wood: so is my beloved.

Poem is circa 1999.


CONSIDERED LILIES

Six-petaled, upright
as wedding bells swung to full arc,
white stargazer lilies
open to cold heaven
while their obituary kin,
lugubrious and waxen,
nod and seem to stare
at the fragrant, upturned earth
from which, to which.

Consider them both, then consider
the lilies of the valley.
Small, nearly vanishing,
they pool with shadows
in the woods’ hollows.
To see them, you must kneel
inside a rising fume
of humus and scripture,
your cloud of knowing.

As you consider these lilies
consider, too,
sterngucker, maiglöckchen
lest the L's enthrall
you from your one desire.
Flush them from your thicket,
all of them, albino
blackbird, Lola from Yellowknife,
her black eyes and black fringe,

musculus, skittering
under the skin and beds
of the darkest ward, skittering
between levity and phlegmon
between charivari and likewake,
into the oldest anaphoras
sicut lilium inter spinus.
sicut malum inter ligna silvarum,
desideraveram.

Always stars ! Have you noticed ?
No ? Look closer, then.
Love-blind and mute as lilies,
you arch and crane
toward the blistering pinholes --
do you know them yet ? and yet ?
Your beautiful crayons blaze star-to-star,
consider to desire, seduce to console,
as you want and want and want and never get.