gwayland

WINDSWEPT

We are windswept in 2022. Doors are slamming shut all about us.

We stand on an open, windswept plain, questions of the most intimate and critical nature swirl in a vortex — celibacy, friendship, marriage….

Those, at least, are the questions swirling about my individual consciousness at the moment — admittedly essentially spiritual/religious interpersonal matters.

The storm has been raging for decades….around me, around multitudes. But we are all individuals, ultimately alone before whatever earthly or (for those who believe such things) heavenly realities that judge and govern us.

So it was, forty years ago, that I read what someone wrote (rather heavy stuff) — and I pondered it too lightly, and not nearly long enough. But I never forgot it.

I read:

In the tradition of Catholic Christianity, there is a tension between celibacy freely chosen as an image of God’s sacrificial life and marriage freely chosen as a different sort of image of that same love. Celibacy looks to the eschatological* meaning of that love, matrimony to its incarnational** meaning.

I never said it was light reading. Catholic stuff, too, repugnant to multitudes.

Secondly, friendship… is not alone a strong enough word to carry the meaning of marriage. The married have experienced other friendships. The friendship of marriage is of a different order indeed: searing, intimate beyond description, full of mystery and terror, excruciatingly painful, profoundly suited to our nature. ***

Now, that’s peculiar. Pain, suited to our nature. Hmmmm.

By the way, the above is from…

Michael Novak (1933-2017), Catholic philosopher journalist, diplomat, writing in the fall, 1981 issue of the journal Communio, which had been gifted to me and was devoted to the subject of the relations between the sexes. Novak’s contribution was entitled, “Man and Woman He Made Them.”

I’ve always enjoyed Novak’s writing. I think I mentioned elsewhere in this blog that I was once reading a slim volume of his, called. The Experience of Nothingness as I lay recovering from my first kidney stone episode in Doctor’s Hospital in Lanham, Maryland. I think the male nurse attending me was wondering, based on that title, about my overall mental state. Hope that I didn’t scare him too badly. That was 1983, several kidney stones ago. I want no more stones. But I do want to understand the nature of our modern….nothingness.

And I read the treatise on men and women so long ago, forty-one years to be exact. Tom Brady was a toddler, probably barely able to throw a football. A Hail Mary was still just a prayer to his apparently Catholic parents. There was no super model spouse as yet to affirm to him that — Man and Woman He Made US. (Don’t know why I picked on poor Tom as my benchmark.)

But I digress, sort of. I like and admire Tom B. but, come to think of it, he’s my benchmark because he’s my gold standard for what the average, decent and accomplished family man will accept and believe. (And as I update this on a September afternoon in 2023, Tom and his supermodel wife have been divorced for some time and his stellar NFL career is over. Divorce and a subsequent broken family and shared custody, and the forced acknowledgment of age’s onset and accompanying physical limitations — they all might be seem, in our time, as more of what the average, decent, accomplished “family” man is swept — or, windswept — into accepting and believing.

And, no matter how earnestly we undertake them, many-to-most of us born after the atomic year of 1945 no longer believe either permanent marriage or permanent celibacy will be possible for us. Friendship seems to thrive. But how genuinely? How real or intimate are our friendships?

I don’t know what Tom Brady believes. His earned fame and fortune might invest him with the capacity to insolate himself, at least publicly, from caring one way or another about these things or, God knows, publicly talking about them — and maybe that’s the best philosophy. Live, eat well, don’t take yourself too seriously — but take life seriously. (Here I guess I’m putting words and ideas in Tom’s head. And here’s another truth: we don’t really know other people, much less what their thinking.)

Footnotes on the above:

*Eschatology: From the Greek, eschatos (“last things”, i.e., death, resurrection, immortality), logos (“knowledge of”)

**Incarnation: The religious doctrine or belief that God will or has embodied Himself in human form.

***I first read this Novak treatise when I was 34. A son was born to me that fall. Out of wedlock. So, I was reading in one universe, living in another.

I was not, nor have I ever been, married. Friendship is not marriage. Cohabitation is not marriage. Man and woman — woman and man, if you will — He made us. Parents are a man and a woman, and they are married, though they may be divorced. They have made a convenant. They have entered into a state implying obligations, toward one another, toward the children, toward society.

They are a family. Modern philosophy is obsessed with the problem of the individual and the state. Novak feels we have, for the most part, “systematically” neglected the family and asserts that “human experience is primordially familial.” Mother, father, offspring.

I chose, back in 1981, as, ultimately, did multitudes, to try to stand apart from all this — to believe it in abstract, but not believe in necessarily was real or applied to me, or, God knows, everybody.

Thus He made us. Man and woman.

No, many no longer believe this., if they ever did. We think we’ve moved on. This assumes God has moved on, too.

Celibacy. Friendship. Marriage.

You can chose God, or the Zeitgeist, Novak, Lord rest his soul, wrote in that same essay….

The Zeitgeist (spirit of the world) is nearlay always both wrong and arrogant. The pendulum of history customarily swings too far. To find the just measure, it is wise to lean against prevailing winds.

But for now, we are windswept.

Hold onto your hats.

Or, if hatless, your souls.

EARLY JANUARY

Early January can be a bleak and somber hour of letdown, a sudden stark plunge out from under the canopy of festive Yuletide nights full of commemorative lights into harsh daylight and reality, shorn of light, save harsh winter light low on the horizon. There is a kind of Cold Turkey quality to it.

I just coiled up a string of lights from out front and hung them in the shed. Will I own this shed or this place or be putting those lights out in front this place next year? The glow of them had outshone anxiety for the future, briefly. Small wonder some people leave their lights up all winter — and that Christmas Shops are popular, even in July.

In recent years, freedom from anxiety, some of it self-inflicted, has never been a given. But I pray for health and emotional and material progress, and some good jokes to tell, and God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen and Gentleladies, now and the whole year through.

I haven’t put away the crech yet. I’ll wait for the formal date of epiphany and the traditional arrival of the magi. A hard coming they had of it, writes Eliot of those faith-led astrologers, just the worst time of year/ for a journey, and such a long journey…

The snow is coming up north. We never sing, or dream, of a White January.

On three occassions in my professional life as a television reporter, I have been called into managers’s offices for what I felt were infuriatingly unfair adjustments or assessment of my work. All three were on or about January 7th. I’ve blocked out two of them and am busy erasing memory of the last one. But, again, they came in early January and were a stain on my life that had been so soothed days before by holiday bliss.

It’s all okay, I ended my career with wide respect from colleagues and am feeling great love for the trade I left behind seven years ago.

But what have I been doing these seven years? Well, writing here, at least for part of it. I’m a writer. Writer’s write, as a late professor, Edward Clark, was to often remind me. I need to write more, and better. That’s my –no, I won’t call it a Resolution. It’s a hope — and resolve. It is a professional, dare I say, artisitic aspiration.

But, back to January….

Much ado will be made of this January 6th in light of last year’s January 6th Capitol riot. There was, in a sense, a kind of national Epiphany in that early winter event, its meaning or full long or short-term import unclear amid a blizzard of partisan sniping.

I leave that to God and the modern magi to sort out.

I’m still sorting out early January….

I remembering, years ago, hearing right after the holidays a brief, unremarkable radio new report of the death of a famous actor and major Hollywood figure. It felt, to my young teenaged mind, like the announcement of the return of adult life as usual — no more festive lights or Christmas music (though some lights might had lingered) that allowed us all to be children or, at worst, teenagers. It was once again time for sorrow, war,and the gray light of day. From divine birth to human death — again.

Tragedy reborn. Business as usual.

It’s not that I had any particular love or admiration for this particular actor who died that long-ago early January. I guess it might have occurred to me that he was probably sick all through the holidays. And that was sad.

The actor’s name was Dick Powell — fairly famous actor, director, singer, producer through the years of my early life. I’d seen him on television from time to time. He was only 58 at the time of death. I’ve checked — he died January 2, 1963.

The big crystal ball had dropped in Times Square, the crowd had roared and gone home — and somewhere in the instantly busy world, the once very famous, now nearly forgotten man named Dick Powell died.

That’s life.

The cause of death was cancer. John F. Kennedy, native son of Massachusetts, was President. He was only 46 and riding high after having successfully confronted the Soviet Union over missiles in Cuba. Wife Jacquiline, like her husband, a young and popular figure, was probably pregnant by then. New life was on the way.

The baby would be born that summer in resperatory distress at Cape Cod hospital. Fellow teenagers hanging out on a summer’s afternoon by the First Boston Ten Pin Bowling Alley, told of hearing the armada of sirens as the ambulance carrying the baby sped nearby on the Southeast Expressway en route to Massachusetts General Hospital. The baby — Patrick Bouvior Kennedy, member of one of the most famous families in the world — would die, despite frantic efforts to save him, at one of the best hospitals in the world. (Had there been helecopter medflights and advanced pediatric medical procedures available in 1963, might he have been saved? )

News reports showed the obviously emotional wrung-out young President and his wife, the First Lady, leaving the hospital. There was commentary that a sad chapter was ending for them.

Another cataclysmic chapter would very soon follow.

In November, the President would be assassinated in Dallas. The life of the world would be altered utterly. The baby Kennedy, buried at a family plot in Brookline, would be quietly disinterred and laid to rest with his father at Arlington National Cemetery.

My 53-year-old father witnessed all this in sorrow. He was healthy that prevous Christmas of 1962. But he, like the departed Dick Powell before him in Christmastime, would be dying of cancer by Christmas, 1963 — and would die on Memorial Day, 1964. He would have been 55 on June 11, 1964.

It is January 3, 2022. I should have been thinking of Dick Powell yesterday. I’ll pray for him today — for the repose of his soul, a good Catholic thing.

And for my father — and for former colleague Bill Campbell who died on the last day in January on or about 1976.

And you know what? January is a new beginning for us, the living.

A hard coming we had of it…

And the magi went home, “with an alien people clutching their gods…” The poet tells us “they should be glad for another death.”

But, boy! in the meantime, did they have a good story to tell!

And we’re all listening, this January, and every January.

IN PIECES, IN UNLIT ROOMS

New year. New year. Nothing new. Forever old, forever new.

Something borrowed, something blue.

Diane near tears, no, in tears New Year’s Eve because she does not want the other goldfish to die. We both have COVID. Half the world, at the moment, has COVID. Perhaps it is the little misery inculcated by the virus that makes her tearful and unhappy, not merely the life of a goldfish. I feel it. And I don’t want the goldfish to die, either.

There were two goldfish in the AquaGarden mini-pond. They were the two out of four that survived, the other two disappearing instantly. Disappeared in the five-gallon ocean. Where did they go? Into the abyss.

The remains of one turned up when I probed the waters deep in the dark rear of the small bowl-shaped tank, feeling blindly, because the area is covered by the plastic semi-circle wedge of garden above it, from which spills a little waterfall. That’s why I wanted this aquagarden — for the sound of that waterfall out there in the Florida room.

I wanted a piece of the fabled Garden of Eden in my Florida room, with its little bar of subaqueace light, like a ray of penetrating midnight sunlight, even in the unlit room.

I am going on — on the first day of the near year — about two fish in a plastic bowl of water. Somehow, it seems fitting. Should I write of the wildfires sweeping Colorado? Of the virus? Indirectly, I am. I am speaking of, writing of, the fear and despair it is possible to feel along the smallest ranges of our paltry existences. We express it, unawares, when we speak of the smallest things.

The nature of despair, said the Norwegian philosopher, is that it is unaware of being despair.

God, I’m in pieces today. I fear I’m about to waste another year.

Wait…as the carol asks, ‘do you hear what I hear?’ It will seem a fake and cringe-worthy deus ex machina…but…

I hear bells. I hear the bells of the consecration from the television mass playing in the other room.

William Carlos Williams:

Tho’ I’m no Catholic

I listen hard when the bells

in the yellow-brick tower

of their new church

ring down the leaves

ring in the frost upon them

and the death of the flowers

ring out the grackle…

O bells

ring for the ringing!

the beginning and the end

of the ringing! Ring ring

ring ring ring ring!

Catholic bells –!

I kneel. The world would see a fool, if it could see me, kneeling to bells. At the very idea of — incarnation. God Incarnate. One God in Three Divine Natures. Kid’s stuff.

Baltimore Catechism. Who made us? God made us? Who is God? God is the Supreme Being who made all things.

This is under Lesson 1: The Purpose of Man’s Existence

(Oh, yeah? What about “Woman Existence?”, I hear someone, a man, formerly a woman, but now married to a woman who was formerly a man, snidely bellowing in protest from out of the dark galleries of 2021, now ever darker in 2022.

Hoc est enim corpus meum

Religion is for fools. A radio reporter colleague of mine, now semi or fully retired — and a very decent guy — once uttered, in passing, that religion is for sheep. I happened to learn later that his daughter was going to divinity school.

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi…

The pope, the holy father, the boss has gone to war with those who pray Latin at mass, traditional people. He’s obviously, by slow measures, wants to cancel their tradition. We wants us to be modernists. He is spreading despair — the holy pontiff, smiling, spreading despair and division in the name of God. The world loves him, but wonders why he fails to change everything, bring the whole rotten Catholic house down, since it is clearly only some cruel, anachronistic resurgent soviet empire in need of repurposing as a kind of Red Cross or club. He needs to say gender is a choice. He hasn’t, and won’t. He’s Catholic, after all. Every fool is a Catholic, right?

The smaller of the two goldfish is, perhaps, dead somewhere in that murky pool below fake lilly pad and rocks I bought at the Florida rock and garden store. (One must BUY rocks in Florida.) The water may have grown toxic, maybe killing the fish. Perhaps global warming has come to the Florida room, killing off species.

Diane loves the fish. She loves the birds. She is a loving person. She loves me, even though I ignore her like the vilest of sinners, like some cold fish. I guess I model my religion by being insufferable.

Happy New Year.

Fish in the little artificial pond, birds that too seldom visit the almost exhausted feeders out in the scrub of the little back yard — here is sorrow, perplexity and despair.

The choir is singing in the other room.

Robinson Jeffers wrote in 1928 in the poem “Meditation on Saviours” (sic), I pledged myself awhile ago not to seek refuge, neither in death nor in a walled garden,

In lies nor gated loyalties, nor in the gates of contempt, that easily lock the world out of doors.

What does he mean? It doesn’t sound good. Poets can be so deliberately and passionately ambiguous. But I guess that’s life. What’s clear? Life’s an ambiguous poem that we all wish went, simply, roses are red, violets are blue, the goldfish swim in brown, dirty water — and I love you.

Isn’t reading a poem or living a life a leap of faith, a leap into the abyss? What’s an abyss? Webster calls it anything too deep for measurement. Sounds about right.

Jeffers, when he invokes the name of Christ, calls His followers “apes.” Sounds about right where I’m concerned, anyway. Can someone make an angel of this ape that is you and me? Isn’t that the promise?

I see the monks, the world over, at prayer on this New Year’s Day, which the Catholic Church, even its divisive, autocratic and quirky pontiff, observes as the Solemnity of Mary, The Mother of God. Who among the millions waking with hangovers knows that? Or cares?

Damn that church with its Mary stuff! Its Mother and Father stuff.

The apes of Christ itch for a sickness they have never known; words and the little envies will hardly

Measure against that blinding fire behind the tragic eyes they have

never dared to confront.

What the hell is old Robinson talking about? Damned if I know. But I feel, however ambiguously, an indictment poking out of the poet’s 1928 mind filled with the sorrowful rubble of bombed out cathedrals and temples. It was, after all, just ten years after that cataclysim — that abysmal (WORLDWIDE) War To End All Wars and just ten year before the start of the Next (WORLDWIDE) War. Virginia Woolf was in such despair over the march to a new war that she filled her pockets with rocks and drowned herself in a stream, in death joining the fish, ungolden, in their gray element.

…and the young Jew writhing on the domed hill in the earthquake, against the eclipse (Jeffers)

The infant Jewish child, the Savior, is still in the manger of my little creche. I must now put Him away, with the shepherds and magi. I must march into another year…

I must learn to write 2022 on the checks. And I must go and spend a great deal of money to fix a tooth that fell apart when I bit into a submarine sandwhich on New Year’s Eve. I must go back to the hard-driving “sponsor” who is pushing me through the “steps”. Up the steps, or down down the steps — to a cement floor somewhere at the bottom of that measureless — abyss?

In 1851, Matthew Arnold visited the famous Carthusian monastery in the French Alps — The Grand Chartreuse. Through Alpine meadows soft-suffused/ With rain, where thick ther crocus blows, / Past the dark forges long disused…..

Robinson Jeffers, not unlike me, would have preferred to stay out there with the flowers, not in the dark, prayerful interior of that retreat. Arnold, too. Can’t blame them.

But inside….

There were images of the suffering Son of Man on the walls and by the knee-w0rn floor

Noone, to this day, in that same monastary or wherever one finds Carthusian monks, sacrafices more, isolates more, prays more, works more in solitude and silence, producing the famous Chartreuse liqueur. How many monks? I don’t know. (I recall, in dimly remembered Cambridge day in my small redoubt, adding sweet Chartreuse to a solitary drunk, wishing to enchance it however slightly to something beatific. It didn’t. I recall darkness only.

It is a hard calling, a hard life, the monks life, that much of the world, like Robinson Jeffers, saw only as a tragic case of simean fools in slavery to an illusion.

Jeffers seems to embrace mortality, the inevitability of entropy, of the beauty of nature though it all, fish and fowl and plant must die, after which comes the the dark abyss — the grave unconscious depths that lie beneath the shining, roaring blue surface of the Pacific beside which he, Jeffers, lived and loved and wrote.

Arnold, contemplating that Alpine cloister, proclaimed, we are like children rear’d in shade/ Beneath some old-world abbey wall,/ Forgotten in a forest-glade…

Two apes unawars, perhaps. Three, counting me. Or, perhaps, we’re aware, as I am on this New Year’s Day – that January 2nd is coming quickly. I’ll watch some fellow, much younger apes play football on my electronic devices with their big screens and colorful images and voices simulating distant reality, real only in some remote way incomprehensible to me as I sit in my cloister, recovering from infection by a headline-making pathogen invisible to me — knowing I’m looking at paying over a grand to get a broken-down tooth crowned and that it sits right next to another tooth that fell apart years ago and also needs to be crowned for another grand, or more.

Right now, I feel like I’m just dripping paint on a canvas. My Pollock.

Salve Mater misericordiae/ Mater spei et Mater veniae…

Hail, Mother of Mercy, Mother of hope and of pardon, Mother of God and of grace, Mother full of holy joy.

Her feast. My failures to love, my faltering faith. God, forgive me. God, help me.

God, in 2022, I must trust in You. But I don’t really know You.

I believe you can pull me from the abyss.

There is nothing I can explain to the poets. My poet’s soul, my child’s faith flies me over the abyss — toward home….

We stand about in open spaces

And shiver in unlit rooms

T.S. Eliot, Choruses from “The Rock”

Oremus.

Pray for us.

NEW YEAR’S EVE (TIMES GONE BY)

It is New Year’s Eve again. I’ve marked the occasion, entirely inadvertently, by joining myself to the end-of-year headlines about a spike in the latest coronavirus variation — at this, the end of a second year of the pandemic. I came back from a Christmas trip to Atlanta with a miserable case of it, but, truly, on this New Year’s Eve morning, can say, gratefully, that the sickness that broke out on Monday has devolved, on this Friday morning, to something like a slight case of hay fever, nothing more. Thank you, God. Not that I didn’t hope and fully expect to avoid it, having been pretty careful. But there were one or two gatherings –one in particular –where I had reason to believe I’d been exposed. And this new strain, while manifestly less virulent, is apparently more contageous.

But I’ll go on taking medication, and relax today. What else is there to do, except, maybe, buy food — and try not to think about the future in which, in each new “future” I keep repeating the soul-killing mistakes and habits of the past? One can hope and pray for changes, and the courage to make them.

But I digress, as usual…

And, of course, I’m glad I got all three vaccines to keep the globe-trotting microscopic invaders from Wohan from finding my anatomy more hospitable.

Memory, now, begins to serve me again, as it does this time of year. My parents, Bill and Jo Wayland, had many struggles, being so different from one another. But they had a circle of friends — my father’s circle more than my mothers’s — with whom they shared their social times. I’m guessing it might have been New Year’s Eve, 1959 into 1960 (the beginning of that new decade that would sharply rupture our national history and self-understanding) when they held a New Year’s Eve Party at the house. Or perhaps it was 1960 into ’61. Memory is NOT serving me entirely here. Would that it were, for nostalgia commands a degree of accuracy before I can be comfortable with all the attendant details.

In any event, the party venue would have been our little house on Neponset Avenue, Dorchester. And I do mean — little. The ground floor portion, exclusive of the kitchen, accommodated the party’s full action and was not more than 300 square feet, if that. But this would be a modest gathering. Yes, they intended to dance – to music from LPs played on a hi-fi console. Of course, it would be to the vanilla strains of Lawrence Welk or Guy Lombardo or, at the wilder end of things, Glen Gray and his Casaloma Orchestra. I believe Glen had a number in his repertoire called, “The Casaloma Stomp”. But my parents and their friends were not inclined to stomp, or, very often, even tap their toes. No Count Basie, Woody Herman or Benny Goodman for them. (My father found Benny Goodman’s” One O’Clock Jump”, when I chanced to play it, tiresome, repetative and back alley exotic. It was jazz, and he deplored jazz, presumably for its visceral invitation to hedonism of the body and tonal anarchy of the soul. He liked, as he often said, “nice, smooth music.” I guess you’d call it, clean music. He and his friends were not swingers, except to the degree that Lawrence Welk swung, as he did from time to time — L.W. was a pro whose “champaigne music” arrangements featured flawless, disciplined, if overly bland harmonies that ingenously, now that I think about it, perfectly replicated the bubbles that floated around the studio during his telecasts — but, again, I digress. But one more thing, a musical footnote: my father loved “The Warsaw Concerto”, owned it as a clear red plastic 45 rpm recording, and listend to it often.)

I was in an upstairs room that New Year’s Eve evening — my relatively new bedroom, being the room my 21-year-old sister had abandoned when she was married the previous June, or, if my dating is wrong, perhaps two Junes before. But I forced to date this from 1949-into-1960 and hope I’m remembering well. Therefore — my sister Anne was living not far away, already pregnant with her first child. I expect she and husband, 23-year-old Joe O’Hara, were passing the night uneventfully, living very nearby. Brothers Bill, Doug and Ron still called the attic bunk beds above my room home. They were out for the evening, ages 26 (Bill) and Ron and Doug (twins, both twenty as of that December 12). They had their own friends. I, therefore, was, as of November 27, the family’s only teenager — again, all of this assuming I have the year right — 1960. (If it was 1960, my parents, the previous April 19th, had held a 25th wedding anniversary party for themselves at the house; perhaps it was decided that a second party in that intimtate space of the house they’d owned since 1941 wouldn’t hurt. And it seems to me I was still in elementary school, not graduating until June of 1961.

I sat in pajamas bathrobe after a bath, watching Jack Parr on the Tonight Show in black and white. I recall doing that. But I’m wondering, did I always have a TV in my room? I don’t think so. But I know that’s how I passed the evening. I was 13 at most, an innocent when it came to nightlife.

As the evening progressed, the boisterousness mounted below me. But these friends of my parents were never riotous in their pursuit of fun. Joe and ‘Lil Sullivan from nearby Newhall Street, Joe and Marge Clough from nearby Pearce Avenue (if memory serves me), Jim and Barb Allen, also from Pearce Avenue, Ralph Wheeler and his wife, who also lived nearby, once operated the small First National Store at Pope’s Hill where my father went weekly to get our “order” of groceries, Bill Lewis and his wife were from somewhere nearby…only Waldo Banks and his wife Katty came from far away — Malden, Mass. Unless Ed Deveney and his wife were there from Sharon. These were all members of my father’s card party as well. None, with rare exception, ever drank to excess. All were devoutly and charitably Catholic. They were transit train starters, contractors, salesmen, clerks, small business owners.

There was no Rockin’ New Year’s Eve in those days. The culture was still tame and adult-oriented. The baby-boomer generation, my generation, had yet to seize all the reins. At midnight, you’d hear Guy Lombardo and those oleaginenous saxaphones (that’s the only adjective I can come up with to describe them right now) blaring forth from the rooftop ballroom of — was it the Waldorf in New York? There would be a dance floor crowded with grandees in tuxedos and silly paper hats and shiny faces, glancing up either in emboldened inebriatioin or sober embarrassment at the live television camera as they swayed, stumbled or jostled about in time to the music, and there would be a mob in Time Square which would be large but, I suspect, nowhere as huge as, over time, it would become in that urban epicenter. While bright and light-clustered then, it still hadn’t acquired the sensory overloading brilliance and wattage of the era of racing, light emitting diodes, or, thankfully, the paranoia of the Age of Terror — and Jack Parr would have stood up to embrace his few celebrity guests, some, like him, long erased from the popular memory, as his bandleader and his orchestra spewed out Auld Lang Syne…and nowhere would you see that montage of carnal, uninhibited, face- munching kisses. And almost every ‘swell’ and super-celebrity who’ll fill the brilliantly colorful rocking and rolling fiber-optic “air” waves tonight had yet to be born on this black-and-white long ago night. (And Dick Clark is still dead, though he seemed eternal.)

And, on that night, my parents suddenly appeared together at the doorway of my bedroom and came in to wish me a happy new year where I sat in my little chair. I will always remember that. Dad, healthy that night, would be invaded only a few short years later by an aggressive prostate cancer. It mystified and privately depressed us all, not least of all Dad himself — that this should be happening to him at the very time he might finally have been gaining a little financial independence and traction — profit-sharing at his job, a new supervisory role at the coal and oil company that his employer of some forty years, Glendale Coal and Oil, had acquired.

We never spoke of the imminent death. He never fully confronted it. Who could, coming as it did at such a time? Only now, these many years later, after the death at age 78 of his daughter — the only one of his five children whose weddings he would be alive to attend — have I begun finally to mourn, contemplate and explore my feelings about that death of this devoutly Catholic man who seemed to lack the consolation of his faith as his end neared. My mother would live on until August 5, 1986, a sorrowing and solitary widowhood, but one in which the wives of those card-party husbands would be her steady and loyal support and companions, even if, tempermentally, they were worlds apart from this Irish-born, melancholy, often troubled and literate woman with the retiring and sadly unself-confident mind and soul of a poet.

Auld Lang Syne ….Times Gone By

That Robert Burns lyric doesn’t translate lucidly into English in the mouths of the millions who will chorus it tonight at midnight, giving way to Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York”, John Lennon’s “Imagine” (that Utopian twaddle from the mind of a Brit who trusted the New York streets until the moment he died violently on one of them), or whatever else is cued up on the Big Box Machines.

That anthem begins with an interogative: “Should auld (old) acquaintance(s) be forgot and never brought to mind?”

I guess the answer is, no. Bring them all to mind. Let them swarm, for in the cold, drab light of January, we shall be swimming once again in the bickering, unthinking muddle.

But for the balance of the day, I’ll be fighting off my virus and remembering — that party at 210 (those partying souls are long gone now) — and every moment of my life, and your life.

It is noon, exactly, December 31, 2021. Twelve hours left in the old year.

Happy New Year.

A TENNYSON CHRISTMAS

From “In Memoriam” in which, the poet, deep in mourning, over hundreds of stanzas, gropes for the light over three Christmases, as time slowly closes over the loss of a dear friend and faith slowly covers over his mourning. Christmas and a new year were the milepost at every painful turning. November is the month in which we especially remember the dead. December, and Christmas, are when we miss them the most.

FROM STANZA XXVIII

The time draws near the birth of Christ.

The moon is hid, the night is still;

The Christmas bells from hill to hill

Answer each other in the mist.

FROM STANZA LXXVIII

Again at Christmas did we weave

The holly round the Christmas hearth;

The silent snow possess’d the earth

And calmly fell our Christmas-eve.

The yule-log sparkled keen with frost,

No wing of wind the region swept,

But over all things brooding slept

The quiet sense of something lost.

FROM STANZA CIV

The time draws near the birth of Christ;

The moon is hid, the night is still;

A single church below the hill

Is pealing, folded in he mists.

A single peal of bells below,

That awakens in this hour of rest

A single murmur in the breast

That these are not the bells I know.

Like stranger’s voices here they sound,

In lands where not a memory strays,

Nor landmark breaths of other days,

But all is new unhallow’d ground.

FROM STANZA CV

Tonight ungather’d let us leave

This laurel, let this holly stand:

We live within the stranger’s land,

And strangely falls our Christmas-eve.

FROM STANZA CVI

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,

The flying clouds, the frosty light:

The year is dying in the night;

Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

FROM STANZA CXXXI (CONCLUDING)

That God, which ever lives and loves,

One God, one law, one element,

And one far-off divine event,

To which the whole creation moves.

1850

Just fragments in which earth and mortals regenerate, mid-way in a century that was struggling to retain the “old” faith. Tennyson, nonetheless moves from despair to hope. Tennyson is not my poetic soul-mate in many particulars, out of sorts — along with the likes of Charles Kingsley — with the important Oxford Movement, in which Saint John Henry Newman was about to remove himself, and lead other churchmen, out of the slowly sinking barque of Anglicanism.

But he knew Christmas for what it was and must always be for us, however great the darkness.

2021

MELVILLE’S CHRISTMAS

It was not Dickens’s Christmas, that’s for sure. The chapter in Moby Dick entitled, rather ironically, “Merry Christmas” has no holly or warmth of the hearth nor warm memories. The Pequod has just set out from New Bedford and our narrator Ishmael writes….

At last the anchor was up, the sails were set, and off we glided. It was a short, cold Christmas; and as the short northern day merged into night, we found ourselves almost broad upon the wintry ocean, whose freezing spray cased us in ice, as in polished armor. The long rows of teeth on the bulwarks glistened in the moonlight; and like the white ivory tusks of some huge elephant, vast curving icicles depended from the bows.

Did Melville’s Calvinism come between him an even the slightest bit of yuletide sanquinity? Or is this merely the harsh reality of the whaling voyage — assorted pagans and long-suffering, dour Christians thrown together in ice and danger and commerce? Scrooge would have been at home here, though perhaps terrified and seasick.

Contrast this cold, grim seaboard Christmas moment with Christmas Eve at old Fezziwig’s where The Ghost of Christmas Past has borne Scrooge so he might see again how the floor was swept and watered, the lamps were trimmed, fuel was heaped upon the fire; and the warehouse was as snug and warm, and dry, and bright a ballroom as you would desire to see upon a winter’s night.

And the dancing commenced — while aboard the Pequod, crewman Bildad, hands at the windlass, roared forth some sort of a chorus about the girls in Booble Alley, that being an early 19th Century sailors’ haunt in a depraved neighborhood of Liverpool — or so I have read.

And while Dickens’s Scrooge, in roughly this same era, was found awakening, a man reborn, to the glories of a London Christmas morning, Melville’s Ishmael , on his “Merry Christmas”, tells us the cold, damp night breeze blew…a screaming gull flew overhead…we gave three heavy-hearted cheers, and blindly plunged like fate into the lone Atlantic.

Oh, well…as Dickens has Tiny Tim observe, God Bless Us, Every One!

BRIAN WILLIAMS AND THE DARKNESS THAT MIGHT, IN FACT, BE “WOKE” AMERICA’S BLINDNESS

It seems that once prominent, briefly but apparently not permanently disgraced, and still popular news anchor Brian Williams has announced his retirement from broadcasting. In doing so, on his last night on the air, he issued a valediction on the state of the nation in which he said, in part ( or, perhaps, this is the whole of it)…

“I’m an institutionalist. I believe in this place. And in my love of my country, I yield to no one.But the darkness on the edge of town has spread to the main roads and highways and neighborhoods. It is now at the local bar, and the bowling alley, the school board, and the grocery store. And it must be acknowledged and answered for. Grown men and women who swore an oath to our Constitution, elected by their constituents, possessing the kinds of college degrees I could only dream of, have decided to join the mob and become something they are not while hoping we somehow forget who they were.They’ve decided to burn it all down with us inside. This should scare you to no end as much as it scares an aging volunteer fireman.”

Now, I have pondered these remarks (as transcribed and posted on Facebook by former colleagues in the news business). Many former news colleagues somehow find in them a crystal-clear indictment of –someone or some many unnamed someones (aka, “the mob”), many of them apparently elected officials. But what of the darkness he perceives spilling into “the local bar, and the bowling alley, the school board, the grocery store?” What’s he talking about? For my part I find it far too, no doubt deliberately, oblique to be more than a generalized indictment of some segment of the American populus and political class, offered in kind of a “you know who I’m talking about” over-the-back-fence bit of gossip to like-minded neighbors regarding other neighbors down the street. I say this while not denying the darkness –and division — abounding in the American neighborhood. I might have a different idea about its source. When he mentions the school board, for instance, is the darkness there being generated by the board members or the agrieved parents standing before that board? Also, he seems to be confusedly conflating their concerns and actions with those of unnamed elected officials.

But let’s cut to the heart of the matter. He’s fairly obviously talking about those elected officials and citizens who support or supported Donald Trump. And if he sees darkness, where does he see light — or enlightenment? I’ll bet we could guess. Perhaps Brian and many like him in the media are incapable of seeing how many middle class citizens feel their families and their values being darkened over by “woke” culture. Millions, but not all of them, sought refuge — or warded off the dreadful alternative (Hillary Clinton, et al.) by voting for Trump.

I fear the darkness Brian Williams sees might attributable to his own blindness.

Therefore, I could not resist adding my two cents to a Facebook thread in which multiple people were affirming Williams. Specifically, I made a reply — over long and probably unread. I was, at the outset, picking up on the skeptical observations made by some on that thread noting that Williams had lost his position as NBC main anchor after inexplicably but obviously lying about and over-inflating his actions while covering the Middle East War.

So I wrote:

We must not succumb to the fallicy of judging a person’s words on an ad hominen basis, i.e.,declaring them invalid merely because the person who spoke them is guilty of mendacity in some other area of their lives. But I think we need to cast a cold eye on the substance of this particular man’s testimonial and all the affirmations that follow in this thread, simply because so much is implied, certain terms and assertions probably deliberately ill-defined. For instance, the reference to joining “the mob.” Which “mob” is he talking about? Is it the one that stormed the Capitol, members of which are being vigorously prosecuted and whose motives rigorously explored in committee? Or is it the multitudes of thugs, arsonists and murderous vandals who pillaged and terrorized our cities last summer and who have largely gone unprosecuted and whose motives are more or less assumed to be uniformly justified if not noble?

The former mob action — on the Capitol — could be seen as an assault on Constitutional order and the peaceful transition of power,the latter — on American cities — as an all-out assault on the rule of law, and Constitutional order. Both are threats to the republic, and to democracy.

We’ve taken to using the “dog whistles” metaphor in our current national debates over assorted vexed issues. I hear in Williams’s words a dog whistle to only one side of the debate over Constitutional order.

I did not, in fact, “hear” or actually watch Brian Williams’ farewell; I have not seen him since he disappeared from the nightly news; didn’t know he’d been rehabilitated to this degree, didn’t care about him one way or the other. God love him, I wish him well. We all make mistakes. (Of course, I suspect we are quickest to forgive those puiblic figures with whom we agree politically. That goes for Trump and Trump supporters as well. Donald Trump’s actions, or lack of action — last January 6th was disgraceful and, in this instance, worthy of impeachment.)

I could be wrong here, and perhaps the elected officials Williams is singling out include the likes of Bernie Sanders, AOC and the rest of those office-holders whose idea of democracy seems decidedly skewed to the far left, even toward socialism. Of course, I think this highly unlikely. And I admit that another of my own predispositions kicks in when I hear oracular proclamations from “mainstream” (i.e. NBC, ABC, CBS) national news anchors who are almost without exception manifestly, if not overtly liberal and for whom, in my estimate, self-delusion and smug self-importance are occupational hazards. The same could be said, of course, for conservative commentator/anchors. And my own judgement might be unfair in Williams’s case, since I did not hear the tone in which his velediction was offered, or hear or read it in its entirely or in context. I’ll assume it was characterized by sincerity and humility. I speak here only of the verbal substance of what Robin (my Facebook friend) posted and and that, above, I have reproduced.

But my own final judgement is that this amounted to an only slightly veiled sortie on Trump supporters that leaves completely unsullied those who ravaged our nation this year in the name of “justice.” And, while I’m at it, here’s just one something the odious figure named Trump said that cannot be dismissed on an ad hominem basis merely because he said it — that a nation without borders ceased to be a nation. That, among many other issues, might have been on the minds of the multitude of non-rioting, non-violent citizens who turned out for HIS valediction and farewell, just as justice for George Floyd and reform of police might have been on the minds of millions who did not join in the wanton destruction of our cities this year. (Added note: the legitimacy of the last electon was also a major, in fact probably the preeminent issue rousing the main body of the more violent Capitol mob, and I disagree with them, while myself knowing reasonable law-abiding citizens who still question the results.)

So — a pox on the houses of all bad people on both sides, right? But let’s consider the possibility that the intense political/cultural hurly-burly besetting our nation right now might reflect the unavoidable sausage-making nature of democracy. With Brian Williams, we should remain “institutionalists” and lovers of America.

Again, good luck to Brian Williams. He endured disgrace, lost his exalted old position but nonetheless enjoyed an professional afterlife and redemption with multitudes. Things like that happen in America among the fair-minded.

But I’ll only add — he never in this valediction, so far as I know, scrutinized the role of the media in our current state of darkness and division.

That might be the source of the darkness — not at the edges, but in the heart of town.

DECEMBER STILLNESS

That is the name of a Siegried Sassoon poem — “December Stillness” — written the year my parents were married, 1934.

Puts me in mind of “Silent Night.” Silent night, holy night….

My parents have been gone for years.

Siegfried Sassoon was one of the World War I poets, along with Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen. He was the only one of the three to survive the war, Brooke dying from war-related blood poisoning, Owen from the guns a week before the Armistice. Sassoon also knew and was among those “soldiers…of death’s grey land…in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats…in ruined trenches, lashed with rain….” Yet he could manage to write, barely two decades after the universal cataclysm of that World War, of “December stillness, crossed by twilight roads” and tell us that he asked that stillness ( yes, he talked to the stillness) to “(T)each me to travel far and bear my loads.”

Religion, or a higher power, were largely swept out of Sassoon’s personal universe by the experience of the trenches, so far as I know. Or, raised by a Jewish father and Anglo-Catholic mother, he saw what, to his mind, were the “limitations” of religious faith.

Not all who saw war ceased to see hope, and see it in an Infinite Being.

But….

December, with its “grave diminishings of green and brown”( Siegried’s words). It is upon us now. I love December, because Christmas comes at the end of its Advent season.

I looked out early one Massachusetts December at the green surviving amid the bare brown of earth and bramble and, perhaps, traces of early snow behind what was my house then, a pleasant place in a pleasant town, more pleasant by far than what I call home now. I’ve escaped to the sub-tropics, an economic migrant.

(Why have I moved so often in recent years? What is this restless search for the “geographic cure”?)

There have been so many houses, so many homes in what still seems such a short time — but, really, so much time has passed, actually. There have been whole wars fought since that “brown and green” moment in Carlisle, Massachusetts. There has been, these days before Christmas in 2021, an unspeakable natural horror — a massively powerful, long-lasting tornado — that stripped away lives and structures in the dead of a Kentucky night — and the Illinois and Tennesee nights. Miles and miles of America’s heartland lies bare and ruined, plunged into “death’s grey land” and silence and darkness days before Christmas.

But in 1934, the year my parents found joy in marriage, followed by years of struggle, that stillness, that December stillness, spoke to the surviving war poet who would live to see another World War consume civilization. He lived, in fact, until the first day of September, 1967.

It was, he wrote back in that same year of 1934, the “love of life, when I was young/ Which led me out in summer to explore/ The daybreak world.”

A “daybreak world” that would be darkened, so deeply darkened by the most brutal of wars, civil and worldwide, all during a most bloody century.

But now, as those summer days of 2021 lead into these dark December nights, a welcomed stillness deepens here and there. Sometimes we have to be in a sanctuary to be mindful of it. A church, or chapel or our own little room.

True, there was little stillness in the long, violent, politically fraught summer of 2021. I cannot forget or cease praying for an end of that unwelcomed stillness in Kentucky that stretches for miles around now, through three states,in which structures and memories have been ravaged by the great violence of nature.

Still, in our current stillness, wherever we can find it, Siegried Sassoon would tell us, “The Daybreak World” abides. It awaits us, here, or hereafter, if we choose to believe it.

We call it hope. Many call it God. The words, the prayers, do not always come easily. God’s stillness, or what seems like His silence, vexes many in their strenuous groping after hope and peace.

Faith is the flame. It can be put out. Symbolically , really.

Meanwhile, we must travel far and bear our loads.

Oh, my!!

At the end of this long, sober,(even embarrassing) very lugubrious rumination, I must laugh a little. Even laugh out loud.

Mere trite meanderings. Siegfried must be chuckling along with me somewhere. I choose to believe so.

Time to head to the mall….praying as I go. Ho! Ho! Ho!

OUR HOLLY, JOLLY SALVATION

The history of salvation is not a small event on a poor planet, in the immensity of the universe. It is not a minimal thing that happens by chance on a lost planet. It is the motive for everything, the motive for creation. Everything is created so that this story can exist, the encounter between God and his creature.

Pope Benedict XVI, address at the opening of the 12th Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, October 6,2008

We must keep this in mind as the back story to all that “holiday” noise — how, Christmas-in-Christmas-out we hear Burl Ives’s splendid voice, like that of a rotund, fondly-recollected uncle who always played Santa Claus at Christmas, pouring down on us from the CVS Musak system.

He, Christ, the God Man, the Alpha and Omega — is coming to be born again in very squalid circumstances on a cold desert night.

It is often tough to go on clinging to that believe in this dark, hostile, yes, noisy age — an age that began over two thousand years ago where we have had, as Matthew Arnold noted in “Dover Beach” neither joy nor love nor light nor certitude nor peace nor help for pain…on a darkling plain.

Or So Arnold saw it, perplexed and skeptical as he was in a rationalizing, skeptical century now one and a half centuries away from ours.

Sing on, dear, late-lamented Burl though we grow weary of your musical salutation and well-wishing, because, Hark, the Angels are also Singing….

ADVENT IS UPON US

‘A cold coming we had of it,

Just the worst time of year for a journey:

The way steep and the weather sharp,

The very dead of winter.’

T.S. Eliot

Journey of the Magi

Our journey begins again today, this 28th day of November, 2021.

Everybody knows, even those of us who have lived most unadventurously what it is to plod on for miles, it seems, eagerly straining your eyes towards the lights that, somehow, mean home. How difficult it is, when you are doing that to judge distances! In pitch darkness, it might be a couple of miles to your destination, it might be a few hundred yards. So it was, I think with the Hebrew prophets, as they looked forward to the redemption of their people. They could not have told you, within a hundred years, within five hundred years, when it was the deliverance would come.

Msgr. Ronald Knox

Sermon on Advent