From May 28, 2007
Memorial Day

A day for remembrance of those who have gone.  Behind us, the long chain of our ancestors stretches, link by link, into the fog of forgetfulness.  It goes from me to my parents, to their parents, and to their parents.  There my memory chain fades away.  At the age of four, I knew my great-great-grandmother and loved her tiny person, a true “granny” with gray hair in a bun, and print dresses and aprons and round lace Peter Pan collars.  For good or for ill - mostly good - I was so fortunate, I knew them all.

And now the chain goes forward from me to my children, to my grandchildren, to my great-grandchildren, into the future, which are also in the mists, which I know not  Six generations in my chain, from about 1860 to 2007, roughly 150 years so far, maybe 170, if I live out my life goal.  

The chain is there in catenary curves from one to another, as long as our memories hold the links .. “The depth of the future is a function of the depths of the past.”  [REF: Margaret Mead, 2/5/65]

“Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me.  ‘Be still,’ they say.  ‘Watch and listen.  You are the result of the love of thousands.’”

[REF:  “The Mankind Project”]

From March 6, 2007
The Egg Man

[REF: from “True Success” by Tom Norris, p. 243]

“When I was at Yale, …. I was introduced to a very elderly man … Bob Calhoun.  [It would be easy] to misjudge this old gentleman.  When he retired from his post as an internationally renowned professor of Historical Theology at Yale, he began to raise chickens and became the egg man for some of his former colleagues.  Once a week he would bring eggs to their houses, often just open the door, let himself in, deposit the eggs in the refrigerator, and leave without a word.

One day, a well-known Yale theologian was entertaining one of the most famous intellectuals famous Europe, … Rudolf Bultman.  The two men were at the kitchen table arguing vigorously over a point of interpretation concerning a Greek text.  Old Mr. Calhoun, dressed in farmer’s overalls, opened the back door, padded across the kitchen floor with nod, and quietly put his basket of eggs in the refrigerator.  He walked across the room, and hesitated a moment before going out the door.  At a pause in the lively argument, he quoted from memory the disputed passage in Greek, gave his own brief interpretation, and walked out the door.

The great professor Bultman looked stunned.  He turned to his host and said, ‘Public education in America must be amazing!’”   

from March 3, 2007
About “The Lymond Chronicles” by Dorothy Dunnott

(“The Lymond Chronicles is a series of six novels written by Dorothy Dunnett and first published between 1961 and 1975. Set in mid-16th-century Europe and the Mediterranean area, the series tells the story of a young Scottish nobleman, Francis Crawford of Lymond, from 1547 through 1558.”

It was a fortuitous discovery the day I stumbled into them.  I remember opening the first book in the series, “The Game of Kings,” to p. 22: “One hand on the standpost, he turned. … ‘Watch carefully.  In forty formidable bosoms we are about to create a climacteric of emotion.  In one speech - or maybe two - I propose to steer your women through excitement, superiority, contempt, and anger: we shall have a little drama; just, awful and poetic, spread with uncials and full, as the port said, of fruit and seriosity.  Will they thank me, I wonder?’”

And then, on p. 27: “Through the rustle of shock same the first cries of horror: from these rose a storm of exclamatory fright and abuse, and from that an orchestration of outraged feminine frenzy that tortured the very harp strings in the gallery.  Someone, losing her head, plucked at the small, stately figure. ‘Sybilla!  It’s Lymond!’”

Followed by p. 28, in which our hero’s describes his “scarey” intentions, using language normally reserved for cooking in the kitchen: “’Afraid?’ said the yellow-haired man and laughed.  ‘Forgive me, I should have warned you: I have a tendency to be bloody-minded.  Bruslez, noyez, pendez, ompallez, fricassez, crucifiez, bouillez, carbonnadez ces mechantes femmes. … Now, come along ladies. Leave your Telemachus along for a moment; she’s not dead.’”

Who could resist that!?  These are adventure stories for intelligent people. I was an immediate fan, and I hope you will be also.  The following is a review from “The Guardian,” by Sarah Hughes.)

__________

‘Lymond is back.” So begins The Game of Kings, the first book in my greatest literary love affair: Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles. I first discovered them while mooching around an empty classroom as a bored 16-year-old. There, among the dry textbooks and histories, was a tattered, much-thumbed book with a garish cover depicting a man and woman locked in passionate embrace. Intrigued, I picked it up. From the opening line, I was hooked.

Nearly 30 years later, nothing has changed. These are the books I reread through each pregnancy, the books I turn to for comfort whenever things get bad. I have owned four different sets, replacing each copy as they fall apart. Lines from all of them pop into my head at odd moments. They are the first thing (apart from my children) that I would save in a house fire, and the novels I would take to a desert island exile.

National Public Radio in the US once called Dunnett the literary equivalent of the Velvet Underground: “Not many people bought the books, but everyone who did wrote a novel.” Her influence can be seen everywhere from Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint series and Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse novels to KJ Whittaker’s False Lights.

What’s the magic? For a start, that first gaudy cover did Dunnett’s six-book saga about a 16th-century Scottish soldier of fortune a huge disservice. Yes, there is melodrama and high romance but the Lymond Chronicles are far more than a standard romp with sex and swords.

The story grips from the start: we are first introduced to Francis Crawford of Lymond as the disreputable youngest son of a wealthy and well-liked Borders family. The Game of Kings opens with his return to Scotland after years of exile, an unexpected homecoming that promptly sets off all manner of betrayals, both political and personal. Yet this high-handed, witty and dissolute adventurer is not quite what he seems; a large part of the series’ enjoyment comes in the gap between the general perception of Lymond as a treacherous villain, and the conflicting clues sprinkled throughout for readers to enjoy.

Not that Dunnett makes it easy. In addition to being a mistress of misdirection, she makes no concessions to potential ignorance, sprinkling her text with snatches of French, Spanish and Latin, obscure period references and classical allusions. Forget school: it was Dunnett who taught me about Richard Chancellor’s early trade mission to Moscow and the Knights Hospitaller and their time in Malta, and Dunnett who introduced me to the larger-than-life exploits of Piero and Leone Strozzi, the turbulent mutability of Ivan the Terrible and the machinations of John Dee.

There are complex and complicated female characters, too: the pragmatic Kate Sommerville and her forthright, hugely likable daughter Philippa; the magnificently malevolent, Margaret Douglas, countess of Lennox, niece to one King and later grandmother to another – and Lymond’s enigmatic mother Sybilla, the one person more adept than her son at presenting an image to the world.

Yet ultimately these books stand or fall with their leading man – and what a creation he is. Ruthless, sharp-tongued, capable of acts both subtle and shocking, Francis Crawford is arguably the perfect romantic hero, an intoxicating blend of Dorothy Sayers’s charming Peter Wimsey and Alexandre Dumas’s tormented Athos who at one point notes sardonically: “I have no pretty faults, only sometimes a purpose.”

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Over the course of six books he is traitor and mercenary, seducer and spy, confidante of tricksy rulers and a target for powerful men and women, most of whom spend their time trying to murder him, some more extravagantly than others. Driven by private despair, Francis ultimately finds himself forced into a reckoning with the kind of person he has become and the very different person he could be.

It all makes for melodrama of the most magnificent kind, filled with some of fiction’s most memorable set pieces, including a pulsating duel by the altar of Edinburgh’s St Giles’ Cathedral, a desperate dash through the Northumbrian countryside to unmask a traitor, and a brutal chess game in the court of King Sulemein the Magnificent in which the pieces are human beings and the price for being taken is death. Small wonder then that the creators of Poldark have optioned the rights and a television series is planned.

They would be wise to tread carefully, however. The Lymond Chronicles might be full-blooded adventures and feature a hefty body count (Dunnett rivals George RR Martin in her willingness to kill off characters) but they are not the rollicking bodice-rippers that that old dustjacket implied. Indeed, as Phillipa notes of their hero: “Whether romance existed in him or not, sentimentality had no place at all.” It is that lack of sentiment that transforms these novels from entertainment to obsession. While publishers can now claim Lymond is back, for some of us he never went away.

From March 5, 2007
Book: ‘The Lady in the Palazzo” by Marlene de Blasi

Moments in this book evoke memories of when I was in Italy.

“When an Etruscan cried, he held the [little vial-shaped terra cotta] vase up to his eye, collecting, they believed, from the melting of the soul, and so to lose tears was to lose one’s soul itself.  Then they would crush violets or rose petals and scent the tears, make a kind of perfume of them, use the potion to anoint the people they loved.  Thus giving up their soul for love.”  [p. 117]

“...As a race, we have a genius for disguise.  Each of us is a secret to the other.  Beware the simple person, who is rarely so.”  [p. 127]

“Knowing what to forget is as important as knowing what to remember.  It’s the same … as harvesting wheat.  Know what to keep and what to refuse.  There’s a great delicacy.”  [p. 129]

“I asked her, Tomassina, to choose a melon for me - for my lunch - from the small pyramid of them built up …She dismantles the pyramid, pulling and pinching at the stem end of each melon, shaking her head, gazing at me once in a while, hopelessness rising.  When she has inspected all of the navels of all the melons she looks at me, a surgeon with tragic news.  “I have nothing that will be ripe enough for one o’clock.”  Holding up one in the palm of her hand, she says “Perhaps this one will be ready by eight this evening.  Surely it will be ready by midnight.  But nothing will be ready by lunch.”  Speechless by her specificity, I simply nod … I need this woman in my life.  I need to learn more about melons and much more about timing and patience…”  

[p. 145]

From February 16, 2007
A few Useful Quotations

“America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone from barbarianism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.” [Ref: Georges Clemenceau]

“’My country, right or wrong,’ is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case.  It is like saying, ‘My mother, drunk or sober.’” [Ref: G. K. Chesterton]

“’Being strong is not how much you swear or swagger; being strong is not backing down.’” [Ref: Alice Vacchs, NYC DA for Child and Family]

“Something goes wrong all the time; what you do is fix it.”
[Gen. Gus Pagonis]

“Let us be painfully honest about it, … yes, they [Americans] are repulsive people, charmless, rude, cocky, mercenary, humorless, ugly, full of nauseatingly fake religiousity, and as odious as they are unsporting in defeat.” [Ref: Mathew Norman, columnist, London ‘Evening Star,’ Sept. 1999.]  
[Note: Swallow it.  It’s good for us.  The truth can hurt, but it keeps us humble.]

“A human being should be able to

change a diaper,

plan an invasion,

butcher a hog,

con a ship,

design a building,

write a sonnet,

balance accounts,

build a wall,

set a bone,

comfort the dying,

take orders,

give orders,

cooperate,

act alone,

solve equations,

analyze a problem,

pitch manure,

program a computer,

cook a meal,

fight efficiently,

die gallantly.

Specialization is for insects.”
[Ref: Robert Heinlein]

February 25, 2007
Processing in the Hard Times

Someone in the family said, “’I don’t know if I can keep going.  You have been through a much more difficult slew of difficulties.  How do you keep going?  What brought you through it?  What helped you cope?”

   It’s a hard question and hard to answer. I said, “I don’t know, different problems might require different solutions, but here are some ways which have helped me:

>  I go “inside myself” to process things, and this takes time before results form.

>  Sometimes I sleep more, which is a kind of refuge, a rest, and maybe helps the processing.

>  I keep a journal, which is my place to safely deposit my thinking, where I can go back if I need to remember something, and it relieves stresses of remembering, emotional turmoil, and promotes processing over a period of time.

>  I know that “processing” is happening when there begins to be “results” coming out from inside me.  Some of these are:

-  Dreams

-  Insightful meanings or understandings

-  Connections emerge between separate thoughts or events

-  Stories or poems or songs

-  Journal entries connecting earlier entries to later insights

>  Attitudes to note:

   -  Anxiety, feeling stress, disturbance, feeling overwhelmed, sadness, grief, excessive fatigue, disturbed sleep patterns

>  Coping methods:

   -  I start “recording” the situation in my journal, using the 5 senses.  I  try to capture what they tell
     me via my sight, what I hear, taste,  touch (emotions are part of touch=feeling), smell along with 
     any    “on the spot” thoughts or impressions along the way - sort of a “stream-of-conscious” style
>  Obstacles:

-  Events most fast and short term memory can’t hold much if the   journal is not available, so I               do the best I can.

>  Choices:

-  I view choices/choosing as examining options, but I think it is  important not to rush into

   action or judgment before wisdom is  applied.  Act as fairly as possible, so there are fewer

   regrets.

>  Resolution:

-  This may actually occur at any point in the process, or after some time has passed and the

   mind has a chance to sort the situation  out.  This is where the connections, insights, 

   meanings, and   learning occur.  This is where consciously or unconsciously, our 

  determination is made regarding our future path and behavior,  hopefully some way to 

  promote positive outcomes.

>  Personal Comments:  A journal can become a helpful aid at many stages of the process of “What do we learn from this?” Some of these aids are: recording raw data as events unfold so it won’t be lost or misinterpreted.  It is then available as long the journal exists. It also reveals the process as it happens, provides and archives valuable insights, motivations, connections, etc., to later events.  As such, it is a better and more accurate “history” than mere memory.  It promotes higher levels of self-awareness.  And it gives me a sense of peace.

From October 15, 2006
Insights from a State of Mind

   In the coincidental reading of several different sources, I ran into some unusual, and rather complex, accounts about the human  experience.  I don’t pretend to have any answers, but I found them very thought-provoking.

>  [from “Shakespeare Wars” by Rosenbaum, ch. 1, “Sept. 19, 1970: Arrive at Winchester, the hill where [John] Keats stood, inspiration for ode “To Summer.”]  “I arrive and found the landscape had not been altered: that one could still see exactly what Keats saw.  I could understand for the first time the line ‘white barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, /And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue.  I saw those stubble fields’.  I felt the ‘soft-dying’ end-of-summer melancholy Keats evoked with its intimations of immortality, of the autumnal harvest and the more final harvest of death to come.’”

>  [Re: Sonnet 44 or 45, on themes of absence and presence] “I read standing at the blackboard in the seminar room.  I had written out one of the sonnets on the blackboard and was leading the class through its flickering ambiguities.  I think it could have been Sonnet 44 or 45, both of which play upon the themes of absence and presence: how two unified as one in love can both be, and not be, apart (can both “two be” and not “to be”).  In Sonnet 45 the speaker tells an absent one how his thought and desire are ‘present-absent.’ How he’s there, one with the distant lover and be absent from himself, but to be absent from himself is to be two selves, one there and one not there, although the one not there is there with the absent lover, so really it’s one self at two different places… He’s not split so much as flickering in and out of being one and two selves.  Not just back and forth from being at one with- to being - the loved one, but ‘with swift motion, sliding,’ shifting back to being himself.  He’s not just being in two places at once, he’s two beings in alternation.  Two be and not two be. … this shifting, this flickering - back-and-forth effect, this dual prospect…involves embracing something more than a shift in meaning… but a shift in … understanding.  In effect, you are not merely reading alternative meanings into the poem [art, experience], the poem [art, experience] is reading alternative meanings, alternative identities, into you.” … “I recall banging the chalk in my hand on the blackboard, back and forth from ‘present’ to ‘absent’ in the phrase ‘These present absent wit swift motion slide’, and suddenly experiencing something strange.  In some peculiar but pronounced and dramatic way, my self, my identity seemed to be shifting, sliding back and forth from presence to absence, from being there in that classroom to being somewhere absent, looking back on my presence, and then with swift motion sliding back to where I was standing again. I was no longer reading alternative meanings into the Sonnet.  I felt like the Sonnet was shifting me back and forth between alternative selves, almost physically.  I was standing inside and outside myself.”

>  [from “A Summer All Her Own,” Rosanne Keller]
[p. 173]  “It’s the process that is important…Lose yourself in the process.  If you are constantly striving for perfection, it will always escape you… If the constant desire for perfection obstructed the artist’s process, … then striving for flawlessness in life would be counter-productive as well.”
[p. 178]  “Anna felt as though she were both in and out of her body.”
[p. 279]  “Happiness does not depend on interior circumstances.  It is a state of mind.  There is also true of loneliness.  It too is a state of mind.”
[