When we’re 80, let’s celebrate!

Or celebrate

however old we are....

By Tony Lavely

[Editor’s Note: Tony Lavely is the secretary of the Yale Class of 1964, and I was among those of his classmates blessed to receive an email from him last evening. With his permission, I am pleased to share his thoughts with our readers of all ages.]

Those born in 1942 will be celebrating their 80th birthdays this year. Some of us turned 80 earlier and others may not hit this milestone until later, but it’s a cohort celebration, nevertheless. Despite our aches and pains, it’s a time to reflect and be grateful for the bounty of our lives.

11 Years Ago Yesterday: Things as they were

By Moristotle

[Originally published on September 20, 2009.]

This morning, in that box in the garage, I found the freshman paper of which Vendler’s review had reminded me [“Things as they are,” September 19, 2009]. It was about an inch down in the stack, titled simply “The Necessary Angel.” In the inch above it, I was astonished to find even some papers I’d written in high school. If I needed any documentary evidence that I really did take seriously “the world of the mind that began to be revealed to me in high school,” I’d say that I have found it – I mean more by the fact that I’ve kept the papers than by the fact that I wrote them, for presumably my classmates were writing papers too. But could they, too, today, lay their hands on them?

11 Years Ago Today: Things as they are

By Moristotle

[Originally published on September 19, 2009.]

This week I was reminded by a review in a recent New York Times Book Review (August 23) that my freshman year in college I wrote a paper for Philosophy I on a book of essays titled The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination, by Wallace Stevens (1879-1955). The review, “The Plain Sense of Things,” by Helen Vendler, was of a book of Selected Poems of Stevens, edited by John N. Serio.

The order of "The Idea of Order..."

Early blue and white ware,
first half of 14th century

In Wallace Stevens's poem, "The Idea of Order at Key West," the narrator and his friend Ramon Fernandez listen to a woman singing in imitation of the sea, the narrator reflecting on the metaphysics of the situation before they turn back toward the town and the narrator asks his friend why the lights being turned on as night descends seem to demarcate the vista, at which point the narrator realizes that it's because of their "rage for order"—the same rage that prompted the woman to sing.
    The poem's seventh (and last) stanza:

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker's rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

Stevens's act of making the poem sprang from the same rage. The poem expresses a human's drive to understand and represent what he or she experiences.
    As I understand the "rage" Stevens was talking about (the biological promptings of the human brain; in the poem, the sea has no such promptings and is therefore not singing), my blogging springs from the same source, and so, I think, did the idea yesterday (even if a joke) that the blue & white porcelain pen had magical properties.

By the way, the hypothesis about the pen has already been falsified, alas. This morning, I erred in attempting the third Sudoku using the pen...But there is, I suppose, the "magical" possibility that the failure was really the pen's indicating to me that my interpretation of "The Idea of Order at Key West" is also wrong. Could that be the true way to order my experience here?

A magic pen?

Early Chinese
blue and white porcelain,
manufactured circa 1335

This morning's kitchen tenor was distinctly different from that of yesterday's. It was a bit glum. The "aliveness" I reported yesterday was missing from today's thoughts parading before my consciousness. Had I insufficient sleep last night, or less effective—something as simple (and complex) as that?
    Harris did write in Free Will that:

It is one thing to bicker with your wife because you are in a bad mood; it is another to realize that your mood and behavior have been caused by low blood sugar. This understanding reveals you to be a biochemical puppet, of course, but it also allows you to grab hold of one of your strings: A bite of food may be all that your personality requires. [emphasis mine, p. 44]

A bit more or better sleep perhaps?
    But then, immediately after breakfast, while diligently starting up my computer and seeing the Library of America's Collected Poetry & Prose of Wallace Stevens, I remembered my intention yesterday to read today the poem "The Idea of Order at Key West."
    As soon, then, as I'd finished both of today's Sudokus (from the newspapers left on our driveway), I read it. And instantly my glumness vanished in the reader's delicious sense of having gotten it, having in this case gotten something supposedly difficult to get, for in Wikipedia yesterday I had read of the poem that it

is philosophically complex. Stated by critics as “perhaps impossible to interpret fully,” the poem “affirms a transcendental poetic spirit yet cannot locate it.” One critic has deemed the poem as "desperately" ambiguous, containing unresolvable difficulties.

What critics? Hardly ever have I read a "difficult poem" whose "meaning" seemed so readily discernible.

    I'll give you a day to read the poem too, before I summarize what I think it "means." The poem's first (of seven) stanzas:

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

In the meantime, a note about the Sudokus.
    To do them (I always use a pen) I deliberately used a beautiful new pen given me yesterday by a friend—a blue and white porcelain pen from China. Literally from China, for my friend had purchased it there and brought it back after her visit with family and friends in and about Nanjing. (She also provided a link to a Wikipedia article about blue and white porcelain, from which I obtained the photo.)
    Using the beautiful and beautifully flowing new pen, I correctly (and quickly) completed both Sudokus. And into my mind popped the idea that perhaps I am the beneficiary of a magic pen?
    On the hypothesis that my new pen might indeed be a magic one, how many Sudokus need I complete with it to more or less prove the hypothesis? (Or how many difficult poems need I understand after using it?)
    Note that proving the hypothesis is a good deal more challenging than disproving it. To disprove it, I need fail to complete only one Sudoku (or fail to "get" only one difficult poem?). But could I ever prove that it's a magic pen?

Sunday morning

We took a quiet walk this morning through an older neighborhood just a quarter-mile from our back yard—but over the creek and "in the county" from us "in the city limits."

Because it was Sunday, the walk reminded me that we plan to visit Key West later this year. Only three degrees separate the walk and Key West, three links in the memory chain from the one to the other.
    Sunday morning—at any rate, a quiet one outside rather than inside cleaning up the kitchen while my wife and Siegfried go walking alone—sometimes puts me into a spiritual mood, or at least a deeply reflective one. And what else is a "spiritual mood" than a deeply reflective one? (Well, sometimes it's hardly reflective at all, just a feeling of "being at one.")

    Anyway, this morning's mood led directly to the poem "Sunday Morning," published in full in 1923 (and, I just learned from Wikipedia, "now in the public domain").

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights...
...
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?

    It was a quick step from there to Wallace Stevens, the poem's author. Or maybe I thought of him first, and then of his poem.
    And thence to Key West, which Stevens visited numerous times from 1922 to 1940, where he generally lodged at Casa Marina, which opened in 1920. (We don't have reservations there.)

Harry S. Truman and Ernest Hemingway have historic sites in Key West, but so far I haven't discovered that Wallace Stevens has one (or Robert Frost, who tussled with Stevens there a time or two). I may have to take Stevens with me, in the form of his Collected Poetry & Prose in the American Library edition.
    It contains his essay, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination. I might read it again, see whether it speaks to me differently after fifty years.
    For a while on the walk I questioned my current plan (or recent plan, at any rate—the last time I told anyone it was my plan) to write a screenplay on the theme of animal rights. I wondered whether my spirit might be better served to try my hand again at poetry— birthed emblems of reflection (like most of Stevens's), or songs of feeling at one with one another human and with other animals and all life on Earth, and of the beauty of all, predator and prey alike.

Illustrated limerick

I removed the contents of a cardboard box in the garage this morning, the same one I'd peaked into in September 2009, hoping to finally say good-bye to most of the mementos, some of which I've held onto for almost sixty years. Right, there was a "class prophecy" I'd written and apparently delivered at my elementary school graduation, which would have been May or June 1954. Liberty School, out in the country west of Petaluma, California. Into the recycle bin.
    There were my note cards for my speech two years later, upon graduating as valedictorian (apparently) from Central [junior high] School in Tulare, California:

[Card 1] Tonight in unison, you have heard the graduating class recite the theme of the graduation, The American's Creed.
    Adopted by our government in 1918, The American's Creed was written by Wm. Tyler Page.
    Being a list of the things people believe, it is a statement to keep in mind and never forget....
    [Card 14] ...Communism flourishes in places of poverty and ignorance. If we keep our country's standards high, communism will have less chance of gaining control in the United States. We should help other countries in education and their home life.
    We also are fighting a never-ending battle against disease and the forces of nature....
    [Card 15] The United States is here today. But look what happened to Rome, to Greece, Assyria, and Babylon, one-time world powers. Where are they today?....
    [Card 16] We know all of our educational facilities are the result of tax payers' generous offering, the long-working [sic] hours of the unpaid school board, the never-finished job of our teachers, and the painstaking love and sacrifice of our parents. We feel greatly indebted to these people for their sincerity and perserverance [sic] in fulfilling their duties.
    I hope that you, graduates, feel as I do that we are obligated to these people to do something in return. I hope that you feel that you should strive to become the peace-makers of tomorrow.
    Do you "therefore believe it is your duty to your country to love it; to support its Constitution, to obey its laws, to [Card 17] respect its flag; and to defend it against all enemies"?

Well-indoctrinated eighth-grader. Recycled.
    And, of course, there were high school papers (in English, physics, and civics), and papers from college (including "The Necessary Angel," about which I'd written in 2009 and which I put into the recycle bin this morning), and papers from graduate school (including one in the philosophy of science, December 14, 1966, on whose title page Professor Errol Harris had written, "Refreshingly original; genuine philosophizing," and which I set aside to read again).
  There were two or three dozen photographs, a couple of sketchy journals from the 'sixties, and a few items of correspondence, including a letter from my grandmother Ada Voss, postmarked Hector, Arkansas and dated May 24,1964, the month I graduated from Yale, and addressed to me at 414 Yale Station, New Haven, Conn 06520:

Helo, dear good sweeat prety Marsie was i. glad to get your good letter bless your good heart to thank you thout of your Mama Voss bless you how i do wish you hear whitte me to night i get so lonely hear buy my self [my namesake grandfather, Morris Voss, had died in June 1960, right after I graduated from high school] but i stay busey most all time got a prety garden 8 head cattle mare one dog 3 cats quiet a few chickens so you i stay busey most all time but isent a day are night i dont thank of my good Marsie see we can thank of the Pass but we dont now the feauture wish you hear an [over] spend the sumer with me i would bee so glad i shure dont  no much news i havent eaven been to Russellville since the 29 lase Sept do you have the fim of me you tuck of me in the yard if you do i like to have it so whin you have time rite me  a gain i love you so much will sa good night till we meeat bey xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx i do love you Mama Voss rite me a gain can see you in mind pulling your little read wagion me you picking to matoes picking cucumbers on Porter Sandra place [my father worked for Porter Sanders, who provided a house on his farm outside Farmersville, not far from Tulare; my first experience with school was at Outside Creek Elementary School in Farmersville; I believe that was its name] We shur had a good time xxxxxx

I kept a few of these items.
    I also kept one copy (I found two) of a typescript of a sixty-thousand-word novel I'd written in 1974, a parody of Watergate titled The Unmaking of the President: A Bicentennial Celebration—it was going to be published in 1976, you see. It'll probably be discouraging reading, but two and a fraction pages of handwritten notes from David Obst (who had been Woodward and Bernstein's agent for All the President's Men) contained mostly commending comments, so why not take a look?

But most enjoyably, there were school projects, report cards, and home work of my son and daughter—all of it from San Jose, California, before we moved to North Carolina (in 1983).
    "Emmett Kelly," by Geoff Dean, Allen School, Sixth Grade, on which Mr. Cabral had written in red ink: "Date."
    "Ecuador," by Geoff Dean, Allen School, May 9, 1980, Mr. Howseman-Cabral, Grade Six.
    "The Human Ear," by Geoff Dean, on which his teacher had written "A+. Excellent, well written and illustrated."
    "Tobacco," by Jennifer Dean, May 9, 1980, Allen School, 4th grade, on which Mr. Miyugishima had penned, "Excellent report. I especially like your 'Tobacco Facts,' which is the 'heart' of your report. Glossary is also great."
    And a Time Magazine prophecy by Geoff.

I found a faded, wrinkled, blue-lined sheet on which my son had illustrated a delightful limerick that I guess he must have written about 1980, around age twelve—going by the drawing's similarity to one he did for a usability campaign I was involved in at IBM's Santa Teresa Laboratory at about that time.
    "Limerick," by Geoff Dean:

A girl on the flying trapeze,
Going through her performance with ease,
    Was suddenly frozen.
    Her partner had chosen
A terrible moment to sneeze.

Sunday Mass

In the opening lines of Wallace Stevens's poem, "Sunday Morning":

Complacencies of peignor, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
[p. 53, Library of America edition
of his Collected Poetry & Prose]

On our walk this morning, back in Hillsborough on the Historic Occoneechee Speedway Trail, the signs that marked the end points of the trail (HOST ENTRANCE, HOST EXIT) mingled to remind me of that ancient sacrifice.
    "So many hosts," I remarked to my wife and Siegfried as we were leaving, "we've been to church."

[I didn't realize until later that "HOST" was an acronym.]

An inspiration to generations of...readers

On Sunday, I reported that the dust jacket for the Library of America's edition of Wallace Stevens's Collected Poetry & Prose stated that his "poems...have remained an inspiration to generations of poets and readers." Dust-jacket hyperbole aside, one might ask what is inspirational to readers in the poem "The Snow Man" (quoted on Sunday), with its final stanza:

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

It should be obvious that the brilliant play on "nothing" would be an inspiration to poets. But what about readers not looking for verbal brilliance but emotional assurance, consolation, or uplift?
    I suppose that most readers would find nothing inspirational in "The Snow Man." They're more likely to find it in words like Robert Browning's

God's in his Heaven -
All's right with the world!

or Maya Angelou's

I've learned that no matter what happens, or how bad it seems today, life does go on, and it will be better tomorrow.

—that is, in comforting lies.

How is a reader to respond to uncomfortable truths? It so happens that I've been wrestling with this on my own behalf for awhile—in the face of my approaching annihilation and there being no God to resurrect me and no heaven to go to. It does make me sad sometimes.
    But then, as much of late, I think on what I treasure: my wife, our children, our dog, our home, good writing, good films, good friends, my job. However old the universe, or how huge or cold, and however next-to-nothing and near to dying I am, yet while I have these things, I have something to gladden me. They're even more to treasure for being brief.
    Ezra Pound's statement from the Pisan Cantos always thrills me to recite:

What thou lovest well remains,
                            the rest is dross
What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage

But even Pound seems to lie, for what I lov'st shall be reft from me. My wife might precede me in death, though likely not. Siegfried (our dog) might survive us, but Wally (his predecessor) did not. I didn't even mention my health, but it's going to worsen, perhaps to the point where I can't hold a job, or even to where I can't appreciate a book or a film. And it will all be reft from me, in any case, when I die.
    Poems like "The Snow Man" don't inspire by comforting but by forcing us to deal with it, by recognizing what we love, and loving it while we can.

Imagining I'm alive

On my commute this morning, I came across a description in the September 7 New Yorker that is a fair description of my blogging. It's Jane Kramer on the late, long essay "On Vanity" by Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)¹:

It is a meditation on dying and, at the same time, on writing—or, you could say, on writing oneself to life in the face of death, on getting "lost" in words and in "the gait of poetry, all jumps and tumblings" and in the kind of space where "my pen and my mind both go a-roaming." ("My mind does not always move straight ahead but backwards too," he says. "I distrust my present thoughts hardly less than my past ones and my second or third thoughts hardly less than my first.") And it draws pretty much the whole cast of characters from his library into the conversation....

The phrase "writing oneself to life" echoed a phrase I'd used a few days previously in an email to Joe:

If my mind isn't sparking, I feel dead. If it sparks a bit, I imagine that I'm alive. My first year working for IBM...I kept myself alive only by reading, reading, reading....

The flint of my mind is sparked by being struck by one stone or another of what I read, and my blog posts tend to be the kindling that the spark has set ablaze.
    Is it ironic that so many of my posts, produced as "writing myself to life," allude to or squarely confront my death? Only if it was ironic that Montaigne's "meditation on dying" was at the same time (to Kramer) a way of keeping himself alive in the face of death.

Previously unnoticed juxtaposition

It just struck me, the juxtaposition of my blog profile's "about me" quote from Emily Dickinson:

I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you—Nobody—too?

and the final stanza of Wallace Steven's poem "The Snow Man," which I quoted yesterday:

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

The size and age (and average temperature) of the universe, the brevity of our lives, and the finality of death do have a way of emphasizing our nothingness.
______________

1. "Me, Myself, and I," by Jane Kramer, in the Literary Lives column, p. 39 of the September 7 New Yorker.

Things as they were

This morning, in that box in the garage, I found the freshman paper of which Vendler's review had reminded me. It was about an inch down in the stack, titled simply "The Necessary Angel." In the inch above it, I was astonished to find even some papers I'd written in high school. If I needed any documentary evidence that I really did take seriously "the world of the mind that began to be revealed to me in high school," I'd say that I have found it—I mean more by the fact that I've kept the papers than by the fact that I wrote them, for presumably my classmates were writing papers too. But could they, too, today, lay their hands on them?
    Reading "The Necessary Angel" (about 2,000 words) wasn't a thrill. Dated May 19, 1961, it was written (typed, double-spaced) when I was early into my eighteenth year. No evidence that I was extraordinarily insightful or creative. Not badly written, but definitely a student's work. And no mention of the passage I quoted last night about reality's being "things as they are."
    My kind instructor, Professor James C. Haden, wrote a comment at the bottom (and on the back) of the last sheet that I suppose could have been the main reason I kept the pages:

I am immensely impressed by the subtlety and skill with which you pieced together an overall view of what Stevens was saying or trying to say [emphasis mine] about the nature of poetry. This is a tough job which you have done well. I do wish that you had paused now and then to explore the special meanings which Stevens' [sic] rather poetic utterances gave to such words as reality. This, in effect, is asking yourself why he says just what he does. It is a job worth doing, if only to discover whether or not his view of reality differs in any marked degree from yours. Also, it might have been helpful to look at some of his poetry, to see if it fits his own theoretical pronouncements. [Apparently I had not read any of Stevens's poems.] So there is still an interesting task ahead of you if you want to undertake it.
    I wish you all luck in your future studies. I have appreciated your thoughtful approach to our work of this year.

In re-reading that as I typed it here, I felt a shiver in my limbs—a shiver at the life I didn't live because I dropped out of my doctoral degree program in philosophy five and a half years later (and subsequently spent thirty years at IBM), a shiver at the possibility that I might yet undertake Professor Haden's "job worth doing" and that "interesting task."

I can begin by reading "The Snow Man," which I find on p. 8 in my Library of America volume. It was an early poem, published in Stevens's 1923 collection, Harmonium:

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Thank you, Helen Vendler, for the evocative review. And thank you, too, for that television series of about twenty-two years ago about American poets, "Voices & Visions." I still have my videotape recordings. Watching the Stevens program again will be enjoyable homework.

August 13, 2011. I looked in the box again.

Things as they are

This week I was reminded by a review in a recent New York Times Book Review (August 23) that my freshman year in college I wrote a paper for Philosophy I on a book of essays titled The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination, by Wallace Stevens (1879-1955). The review, "The Plain Sense of Things," by Helen Vendler, was of a book of Selected Poems of Stevens, edited by John N. Serio.
    Vendler mentioned that the Library of America, "in 1997, gave us all of his poetry and some of his prose." I thought I had purchased the volume, and this evening I found it in my library. I was surprised to find that I had to remove its shrink wrap to confirm that it included the essays (pp. 637-751). I knew that I found Stevens's poetry difficult, but still in shrink wrap! The dust jacket includes the characterization of Stevens's "body of work of astonishing profusion and exuberance, brilliant poems that have remained an inspiration to generations of poets and readers."
    I couldn't remember whether I'd read any of Stevens's poems for that paper on The Necessary Angel, but I think I have the means to find out, for incredibly I think that I still have the paper. I can picture the box, in the garage, in which it would be. I'm too tired to look tonight, but I will tomorrow (I did), to see what reflections I might have made on a passage like:

The subject matter of poetry is not the "collection of solid, static objects extended in space" but the life that is lived in the scene that it composes; and so reality is not that external scene but the life that is lived in it. Reality is things as they are.

That seems pretty clear to me now, except for the final sentence, which jumps abruptly from the preceding sentence. It might simply be saying the "life that is lived" (reality) defines what is for us (subjectively), not the physical objects among which it is (objectively) set. I think that's essentially what I was saying to my grand nephew Joe the other day, in response to his referring to some anecdotes I'd told him about his family as "an epic story":

I'm glad you enjoyed the "epic story," though of course it's hardly that, just a few snippets (which alas is about all I have, for my sense of family narrative was always, from my early years, subordinated to the world of the mind that began to be revealed to me in high school [emphasis mine]).

That "world of the mind" had become "the life that I lived" within the scene set by my family circumstances, and realer for me than those circumstances.
    One sentence in Vendler's review made me think that I am (and perhaps was, at least incipiently, even as a freshman in college) much closer to Stevens than I'd realized:

Stevens’s conscience made him confront the chief issues of his era: the waning of religion, the indifferent nature of the physical universe....

    If I applied myself to reading the pertinent poems (Vendler mentions "the saddest of Stevens's poems, 'The Snow Man,' in which a man realizes that he must make something of a permanently wintry world of ice, snow, evergreens and wind, attempting to see 'nothing that is not there and the nothing that is'"), would I find a writer who voiced in poetry my own thoughts and feelings the way Sam Harris, for example, voices them in prose?