April cruellest month, lilacs out dead land, mixing memory desire
Part of the series of Haiku inspired by The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot and the article, ‘It takes your hand off the panic button’: TS Eliot’s The Waste Land 100 years on by Andrew Dickson.
Mr. Dickson asks, ‘Is it genuinely one of the greatest works in the language, or – as the poet once claimed – just “a piece of rhythmical grumbling“?’
Readers of this blog may remember that from time to time I struggle with the weight of effort of producing a daily Haiku and any thoughts I may have about the words and time that went in the Haiku that day.
This daily schedule of missing a day can bring on a personal mental paralysis wherein writing these entries becomes impossible.
I learned to deal with this by not dealing with it and let it go.
Then when I look at my register of entries and see blank days with no post, I will grab a topic or book or poem for a source and produce a series of Haiku to fill in those blank dates.
This is one of the great benefits of this effort being my blog and my blog, my rules.
It IS cricket because I say it is.
It is ‘according to Hoyle’ because I say it is.
Thus I have this series based on ‘The Wasteland.’
A thoroughly enjoyable connection of wordplay and source of endless discussion in the search for meaning.
For myself, I like that bit about a piece of rhythmical grumbling by Mr. Eliot so said Mr. Eliot.
I have remembered this story before in these posts, but it reminds me of a story told by the actor Rex Harrison.
Mr. Harrison recounted rehearsing a play by George Bernard-Shaw and that the company was having a difficult time with a certain scene when, wonder of wonder, Bernard-Shaw himself dropped by to watch rehearsal.
Mr. Harrison tells how great this was as they went to the play write and asked how did he see this scene – what was he striving for?
Bernard-Shaw asked for a script and read over the scene, read it over again and a third time, then looked up and said, “This is rather bad isn’t it.”
take time, understand once a week, moment to pause, reflect, consider
I happened to be reading the papers this morning off of my desktop computer instead of a tablet and came across the links at the bottom of the home page of The Guardian.
Readers of this blog will not be surprised that The Guardian (or Manchester Guardian) is my favorite source for news.
The stories are well written and for the most part adapted for Americans when it comes to spelling colour and theatre and centre.
And the history of the paper, that it was founded and endowed by a family back in 1850 or thereabouts so it would not have to depend on advertisers and could print the truth.
At least the truth as they saw it.
Across the bottom of the home page are links to other Guardian News options and one of the those options is the Guardian Weekly edition.
The blurb with the link states:
Take time to understand the week: Once a week, take a moment to pause, reflect and consider. In the Guardian Weekly we select the highlights from our newspapers to bring you a deeper, more rounded view of world events.
I thought about that.
And I thought that I should take time to understand my week.
And I thought that once a week, I should take a moment to pause, reflect and consider.
So I tried it.
I tried to understand my week.
I took a moment and paused, reflected and considered my week.
First thing that happened is that I threw up.
Then I got back in bed and pulled the covers up over my head.
I may stay there a while.
I am in zugzwang and I cannot get out.
Zugzwang, you might remember, is a term from chess.
You are in zugzwang when it is your turn and you have to make a move and every move you can make is a bad move.
The online dictionary defines zugzwang as “a situation in Chess in which the obligation to make a move in one’s turn is a serious, often decisive, disadvantage.”
I am reminded of the short story, “A Box to Hide In” by James Thurber.
The story ends with:
But I still have this overpowering urge to hide in a box.
Maybe it will go away.
Maybe I’ll be all right.
Maybe it will get worse.
It ‘s hard to say.
The story 1st appeared in print in The New Yorker in January 24, 1931.
90 years ago, 190 years ago, 1900 years ago.
As Mr. Thoreau said, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.”
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
As they say, I shall endeavor to persevere.
Here in a poorly formatted format is the story:
A Box to Hide In - James Thurber
I waited till the large woman with the awful hat took up her
sack of groceries and went out, peering at the tomatoes and
lettuce on her way. The clerk asked me what mIne was.
"Have you got a box," I asked, "a large box? I want a box to
hide in"
"You want a box?" he asked.
"I want a box to hide in," I said.
"Whatta you mean?" he said. "You mean a big box?"
I said I meant a big box, big enough to hold me. "I haven't
got any boxes," he said. "Only cartons that cans come in." I
tried several other groceries and none of them had a box big
enough for me to hide in. There was nothing for it but to
face life out. I didn't feel strong and I had this overpowering
desire to hide in a box for a long time.
"What do you mean, you want to hide in this box?", one
grocer asked me.
"It's a form of escape", I told him. "Hiding in a box, it
circumscribes your worries and the range of your anguish.
You don't see people, either".
"How in the hell do you eat when you're in this box?" ,
asked the grocer. "How in the hell do you get anything to
eat?".
I said I'd never been in a box and didn't know, but that
would take care of itself. "Well", he said finally, "I haven't
got any boxes, only some pasteboard cartons that cans come
in." It was the same every place. I gave up when it got dark
and the groceries closed, and hid in my room again. I turned
out the light and lay on the bed. You feel better when it gets
dark.
I could have hid in a closet, I suppose, but people are always
opening doors. Somebody would find you in a closet. They
would be startled and you'd have to tell them why you were
in the closet. Nobody pays any attention to a big box lying
on the floor. You could stay in it for days and nobody'd
think to look at it, not even the cleaning woman."
My cleaning woman came the next morning and woke me
up. I was still feeling bad. I asked her if she knew where I
could get a large box.
"How big a box you want?", she asked. "I want a box big
enough for me to get inside of", I said. She looked at me
with big, dim eyes. There's something wrong with her
glands. She's awful. But she has a big heart, which makes it
worse. She's unbearable, her husband is sick and her children
are sick and she is sick too. I got to thinking how pleasant it
would be if I were in a box now, and didn't have to see her
I'd be in a box right there in the room, and she wouldn't
know.
I wondered if you have a desire to bark or laugh when
someone who doesn't know walks by the box you're in.
Maybe she would have a spell with her heart if I did that and
would die right there. The officers and the elevator man and
Mr Grammage would find us.
"Funny, dog gone thing happened at the building last
night", the doorman would say to his wife. "I let in this
woman to clean up 10-F and she never came out, see? She
never there more than an hour. But she never came out,
see?" So when it get time for me to get off duty, I says to
Crimmack in the elevator, "I says what the hell you suppose
happened to the woman that cleans 10-F?" He says he didn't
know. He says he never seen her after he took her up. So I
spoke to Mr Grammage about it. "Sorry to bother you, Mr.
Grammage", I says, "but there's something funny about that
woman that cleans 10-F". So I told him - he said we better
have a look. And we all three goes up, knocks on the door,
rings the bell, see, and nobody answers
So he said we'd have to walk in. So Crimmack opened the
door and we walked in. And there was this woman, cleans
the apartment, dead as a herring on the floor, and the
gentleman that lives there was in a box.
The cleaning woman kept looking at me. It was hard for me
to realize she wasn't dead. "It's a form of escape", I
murmured. "What say?", she asked dully? "You don't know
of any large packing boxes, do you?", I asked. "No, I don't,
she said."
I haven't found one yet. But I still have this overpowering
urge to hide in a box. Maybe it will go away. Maybe I'll be
all right. Maybe it will get worse. It 's hard to say.
read for enjoyment that reading is a pleasure one of the greatest
Adapted from the line, “I must remind you here of something that I have already insisted upon, namely that I am very strongly of opinion that you should read for enjoyment. To my mind it is very ill-advised to look upon reading as a task; reading is a pleasure, one of the greatest that life affords, and if these books of which I am now going to speak to you do not move, interest or amuse you, there is no possible reason for you to read them.” from the essay, Books and You: A Dissertation Upon Reading by W. Somerset Maugham.
find the relation between incompatible and affinity
Adapted from A Letter to a Young Poet by Virginia Woolf Published by Leonard & Virginia Woolf at The Hogarth Press, 52 Tavistock Square, London, W.C.1 1932
That perhaps is your task—to find the relation between things that seem incompatible yet have a mysterious affinity, to absorb every experience that comes your way fearlessly and saturate it completely so that your poem is a whole, not a fragment; to re-think human life into poetry and so give us tragedy again and comedy by means of characters not spun out at length in the novelist’s way, but condensed and synthesised in the poet’s way—that is what we look to you to do now.
one small step for man one giant leap for mankind did step on the moon
What did Neil Armstrong say when he landed on the Moon?
I mean okay, after he said Houston …
What did he say when he first stepped on the Moon?
The writers at NASA crafted this great line that he memorized but when he said it there was a buzz of static and the world remembers that he said, “one small step for man …’ and then said, “one giant leap for mankind.”
The goofy thing is I was 9 and I distincly heard FOR MAN and wondered what the difference was between MAN and MANKIND.
But NASA issued the press release that said Mr. Armstrong said, “A MAN.”
Mr. Armstrong said he said, “A MAN”
As in “One small step for A man.”
Which works much better with “One giant leap for mankind.”
What is funnier is that the third man on the moon, Pete Conrad, the mission commander of Apollo 12, who was shorter than Mr. Armstrong, said, “That might have been one small step for Neil, BUT WHOOOEEEEE.”
I guess in a way it IS more important that Mr. Armstrong steps were out on to the moon.
And he was the first to do it and that isn’t going to change.
But I came across another Neil Armstrong footnote yesterday that I was not aware of and I read a lot of these ‘early days of NASA’ books.
Yesterday I went in pursuit of the song, Fly Me to the Moon.
The information I came across again and again referred to the the fact that NASA had adopted the tune as a sort of theme song for the entire space program.
I thought that was interesting but not worth mentioning.
Not worth mentioning until I went search for a you tube video of the song.
I said yesterday I found lots and lots of videos of different recordings of Fly Me to the Moon.
One of them was of Jazz Great Diana Krall.
Well gee whiz, a LOT of them were of Jazz Great Diana Krall.
But one had a very odd thumbnail graphic.
I would swear it showed, a piano and Ms. Krall set up … in a church??
I had to click on it and there it was.
At the memorial service for Neil Armstrong, Commander of Apollo 11 and first man to set foot on the moon, Diana Krall performed Fly Me to Moon.
And you know what?
That is just pretty darn cool any way you present it.
Entirely appropriate.
Such a very right thing to do.
So entirely unexpected.
Commander of Apollo 11 and first man to set foot on the moon and Diana Krall performed Fly Me to Moon at your funeral.
That’s a trifecta in any book.
ps – anyone making notes for when the time comes and my ashes are scattered in the out going tide, you can ask Diana Krall to come sing and she can choose the song.
