I have a photographic negative showing my grandmother, Fay Fletcher Jackson (before she married Gordon Keays Smith), standing on a Mount Hood glacier that mostly isn’t there anymore. This would be in the early years of the 20th century. She carries a small backpack because she is a very small person and wears heavy boots, thick leggings (no skirt), and a broad grin. She set no records, made no history, but she climbed.
That thing we do… remembering
I was writing a card to Bette and realized that most things do not matter… the passage of time, the work I still miss doing, the “accomplishments” I would like to detail—none of that really matters. What matters is beauty and people. People and beauty.
So here is beauty that I have seen in the past year.
I could have chosen photos of eagles or of highways or flowers. I could have chosen photos entirely of the people I love. I could have chosen other landscapes or birds. These images were chosen because they are what I have looked at early in the morning and thought: beautiful!
Thank you, John Keats. We only remember this stuff because it matters.
Ode on a Grecian Urn (1809)
by John Keats
Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
The truth isn’t always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
—Nadine Gordimer
I don’t know if any of this is true—that beauty is truth or that an urn can speak to any truth—but it is beautiful. And we do hunger for both beauty and truth.
May your day be beautiful… a blessing on your house.
Yesterday, which was meant to be our day of rest before the drive to Portland, the Christmas tree leaked.
I was reading an article from The Guardian on how to deal with Christmas get-together challenges. The author led with “the turkey doesn’t fit in the oven.” [I love that turkey is the English Christmas dinner centerpiece, even though what they serve is a “New World” food, not actually indigenous to Europe. So are tomatoes, potatoes, what we call corn, and many squash and chilis. Often an “ancient” European, middle eastern, or Asian recipe includes an ingredient that simply was not available more than a hundred or a couple of hundred years ago—hardly ancient. When Shakespeare mentions “corn,” he does not mean the New World maize but another grain, probably barley.]
The article about the holiday dinner was funny and also spot on.
Continue readingPre-pandemic, we followed a simple route from coast to the city at least twice a month. We left home early and returned before dark. We shopped at the Farmers Market, saw family, went to the music store, visited the nursery, and walked through Powell’s Book Store. We were always in a hurry because of weather and darkness and animals waiting at home. Our last dog and our last cat are gone now, but the other big difference is that now we have a place to stay.
Despite my better judgement, I have been reading The Washington Post news articles and comments about the shooting in Michigan. People keep asking why the school didn’t do more. I wish the answers were simple. This is not a day I am supposed to post, and you probably do not want to know.
My husband has repeatedly commented that I “dodged a bullet” when I retired in 2019, months before the pandemic. I wish it had been that clearcut: good then bad, Before then After. I wish that before the pandemic, my duties as a high school teacher had never required actions I found awkward or dangerous.
Students threw chairs at the wall (twice) and a padlock at me (once), they yelled at me and at classmates, fell asleep in their chair from lack of sleep and drug overdose. Kids worked long and often illegal hours to support family or pay their own dental bills, and parents called them from school to put in a shift during school hours, which violates state laws. Poverty was the overarching threat to their education, but there was no escape for kids from more affluent homes: One boy put hashmarks on my whiteboard for six weeks. I did not ask him why until he came in one morning and gravely erased them all: six weeks sober. A homeless girl who was welcome elsewhere was sleeping on dirt in a backyard shed in order to protect her mentally ill mother she refused to leave alone. It was a bad choice, but a compassionate and loving one.
Continue reading
“The Last Day of November” by Jack Ridl by Rattle
Jack Ridl
THE LAST DAY OF NOVEMBER
My wife is at her spinning wheel. She
first cleans, dries, and combs the fleece,
then dies the wool. She will spin yarn to make
a shawl, stocking cap, socks. She disappears
into her gentle quiet. I am a third of the way
through reading four books, but I don’t want
to read any of them. I want what I know you
want: to be happy, actually happy, to love
in a happy world. Today there was yet another
school shooting. Some students felt it coming.
Three kids who thought they were grown up,
dead. One more thought likely to die, did. The
others will live. The news dares to say recover.
Tonight we played Christmas carols for the first
time this season. Yes, ’tis the season. This morning
surgeons at three different hospitals awakened
assuming yet another routine day of rounds and
operations. When they were seventeen, did they
imagine advent would offer them the inevitable
impossibility of saving the assumption of a future,
that they would never again be able to say, “Happy
Holidays,” “Merry Christmas,” “Happy Hanukkah,”
“Happy New Year” without being caught in an ambush
of memory? Tonight thousands of parents will be unable
to sleep, or tomorrow, or on into ever. Teachers
who each day hope it will not, cannot happen again
will think again about construction or an office job.
And guns? They will sleep in the garage, a cabinet,
on the top shelf. They will rest and be at the ready.
No, I don’t want to read; I don’t want to hear again
about God’s mercy, the peace that comes from above
or meditation, Calvin’s endlessly facile legacy of blame,
the need for prayer and legislation. I am tired of pursuing
happiness. I want to breathe it in as ubiquitous as air.
And while we’re at it, I want the curriculum revised
to teach sentimentality, that it is not any more false
feeling than the unguarded synapses in the shooter’s brain.
Scholars, put away the safety of secondary sources. Sit
with your students, abandon the inhumane hideaway of
objective distance. Throw open your hearts. Let sentiment
break our shielded souls before another rifle and surgeon’s
words have to. My wife never asks for the meaning. She
sits in silence at her wheel twisting a lamb’s wool into
yarn to knit whatever it takes to keep another warm.
Our dog is asleep, head on his paws. The twin sister cats
curl together. I’m not going to pick up my books. I’m
going to begin to trim the tree wondering how many
five-year-olds will sit on Santa’s lap and when he asks
“What do you want for Christmas?” will answer, “A gun.”
—from Poets Respond
December 5, 2021
__________
Jack Ridl: “The news story is the school shooting just outside of Detroit. Our daughter is an art teacher. Her room is the first room after the huge entry at the school. Not a day goes by that this father doesn’t fear for her. She tries to believe all her students would never carry out a killing.” (web)
Rattle | December 5, 2021 at 3:00 am | Tags: Jack Ridl, Poets Respond | Categories: Poems, Poets Respond | URL: https://wp.me/p7dbSF-9xv
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