Category: Ruminations

Thoughts, often rambling, on events, past and present, sometimes morphing into fictive narratives meant to continue the theme of those thoughts. For instance, I travel off occasionally to the edge-of-Boston tavern called, The Last Mile. There may, over time, be other escapes.

THE PURPLE PENGUIN

Pandemic idleness can lead one into previously overlooked nooks and crannies of “the stacks,” meaning, in this case, my personal, neglected library of things published or posted, on paper and in cyberspace.

So it is that I learned, sitting here this afternoon, that late last year, the staff of a London aquarium — I don’t know which one — somehow deduced that two female penguins in their charge had come together as a couple. So they gave the pair an egg to hatch and decided that when the baby penguin was born, it would not be assigned a gender.  Instead of the  red or blue tag customarily used to indicated it as male or female, it would wear a neutral purple one.

However, according to “reports” ( one in The Washington Examiner among them) the aquarium staff admitted that future breeding of the baby penguin will be determined based on “the gender its biology determines.”

Biology determining gender? What a concept!

ISOLATION

We isolate now, reluctantly. The pandemic has plunged us into surreal global circumstances. It’s entering the history books. It is far from over.

Most of you know about Thoreau and his cabin. More of you might not know of Henry Beston who built a little cabin — a little house, actually –on the dunes of outer Cape Cod in the Twenties. It’s worth exploring and sharing his account of that nature-filled isolation in that twenty-by-sixteen dune dwelling not far from the pounding surf. He called it the Fo-castle. His book on his time in that house on the dunes is called, The Outer Most House. 

I recall the sadness when that little house that had withstood many storms was washed out to sea during the cataclysmic Blizzard of ’78. But a replica was built in its place, and a society of nature lovers and preservationists have sprang up long ago in Beston’s memory.

Bottom line here: we mortals have been known to seek out isolation and to have benefitted memorably from it. Just a thought. No, you don’t have to build a cabin. Just recall the diagnosis of Pascal, that many of our problems come from an inability to sit alone quietly in a room.

IT’S QUARTER TO FOUR, THERE’S NO ONE IN THE PLACE EXCEPT YOU AND ME…

And, in silence, spending the night by choice on the hard laminate floor of my study, unsoftened by a reasonably thick carpet, without much comfort from a comforter, some facts of one’s life — hard, uncomforting facts — become manifest in the darkness. So you sit up to write about them — and they vanish. Isn’t it always the way? But they are worth pursuing, as best you can remember them, by the dawn’s coming light — on this First of May.

THE GLORIES OF ISOLATION

Fr. George Rutler is an author and a priest of the Archdiocese of New York, pastor of St. Michael’s Church in the neighborhood still known to many as Hell’s Kitchen, though I’m told it has undergone significant gentrification from its bad old days. I’ve copied and pasted here his weekly message for Sunday, April 26, 2002 setting out the potential blessings — and, yes, glories and glorious spiritual opportunities — afforded us by our current isolation, which at time might seem more a bane than a blessing.

Read and enjoy and, perhaps, benefit.

Among logical fallacies, the argument from authority, “argumentum ad verecundiam,” means accepting a proposition because its source is authoritative, even though the matter is outside that source’s competence. Such a fallacy, for instance, might approve Einstein’s view on politics or religion because he was such an important physicist. However, precisely because of his inventiveness, it is not fallacious to accept as valid his assertion: “The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulate the creative mind.”
   Einstein was a remote disciple of the quirkily brilliant early nineteenth-century philosopher Schopenhauer: “A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.”
   There is some consolation in that at present, when “cabin fever” is an ancillary affliction of the coronavirus. One does not have to be a physicist or philosopher to know that while “it is not good for the man to be alone” (Genesis 2:18), there is a difference between cursed loneliness and benevolent solitude. The integrity of one’s spiritual life can be measured by understanding the difference. Thus Pascal, who was a Christian mystic and a mathematical scientist, famously said: “All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a room alone.”
   The Nazis locked the Dominican nun, Blessed Julia Rodzinska, in a cement closet for a year, and witnesses remarked on the radiance of her face. The Venerable Cardinal Nguyen van Thuan spent thirteen years in a Vietnamese prison, nine of them in isolation. I can attest to the serenity of three men I met who never were lonely in solitude. One was Bishop Dominic Tang of Canton, who spent seven of his twenty-two years in prison in solitary confinement. Cardinal Kung Pin-Mei of Shanghai was thirty years in prison, much of that time in solitary confinement. Father Walter Ciszek died in New York after five years in isolation in Moscow’s notorious Lubyanka prison and fifteen years in the Gulag.
   These names came to mind when I read of a CNN commentator, who has shown condescension for the Church and promoted an article calling for the abolition of the Catholic priesthood. He tweeted that, after some weeks in lockdown, during which he kept his lucrative job, he “crawled in bed and cried.”
   Saints in solitude often did not have a bed to crawl into, but they were with God, and would have been embarrassed for the Governor of New York, who said of the pandemic: “The number is down because we brought the number down. God did not do that. Faith did not do that.”
   Another governor, the fifth of the Roman province of Judaea, was told: “You would have no power over me if it were not given to you from above” (John 19:11). We know who said that.
Faithfully yours in Christ,
Father George W. Rutler

 

A TOKYO MEMORY

Last day of March, 2020. Middle of a pandemic. Trying to comprehend such an enormous thing — and such an enormity — as watching the only planet we know, and all of us who inhabit it, be menaced, from West Bengal to Time Square and everywhere in between, by a potentially deadly pathogen, something bascially as UNhuman as a coiling, twisting vine multiplying and creeping up a wall.

It is giving us all time to think, and remember — especially if you’ve been on this planet for nearly three quarters of a century, like me.

And what do I do? I stay confined — though tending to a sick companion; sick not with the dreaded virus but with an inexplicably  debilitating leg pain that has put her on a borrowed set of crutches following a painful trip to a clinic for an ultrasound and MRI.

And, with no “hook” to make it relevant, I suddenly scour the archives of my memory during this enforced leisure — and my letter file — and discover that I wrote a very accomplished composer some months back after chancing to see his credit at the end of the television series Biography. He wrote the music for that and, apparently, much, much more — and is a well-known composer of experimental and symphonic music as well. Continue reading “A TOKYO MEMORY”

CONFINED AND BRIEFLY CONFOUNDED

Hello, all. If you’re visiting here, welcome. But for the next 24 hours (it’s March 30 at 10:33 p.m.) I need to work in some new material here, especially about these anxious, seemingly endless days of self-quarantine and confinement. A pandemic demands daily engagement. I’ve been stalled. Not alone, I suspect. But the point of a blog, at least in part, is to banish our aloneness, right? I’ll be back.

ANCIENT GUM, ANCIENT FACE

I have recently read in the Health & Science section of the journal This Week that scientists have recreated the face of an ancient hunter-gatherer using DNA extracted from a piece of “chewing gum” that was spat out some 5600 years  ago. The lump of chewed birch tar was found at a site in southern Denmark, alongside pieces of wood and wild animal bones.

Before I convey what  further information was relayed regarding this bizarre but fascinating bit of anthropological news, I must, at long last, let myself be instructed (again) how to includes images and photographs in this site — probably not hard, but I can be a stubbornly slow learner. You have to see the lump of “gum” — and the reconstructed face of the beautiful hunter-gatherer to appreciate this.

Later…. ( like there’s anybody reading this blog. It’s becoming disheartening talking to myself on the web.)

GREAT MOMENT, BAD PANTS…

 

My son Barrett is getting married this Saturday in Charleston, SC. A beautiful couple, a great moment. I planned to wear my old blue pinstripe suit. But style-wise companions and associates convinced me that my suit is outdated and that it would make ME look outdated. So I bought a new up-to-date blue suit and had a nice seamstress at the mall take up the too-long pants. Trying the suit on later, I discovered that the pants still broke well over my shoes. Ugly! The old-guy-at-the racetrack look. I took them back to the seamstress She smiled and insisted they were fine, that if taken up any more, they’d be too short when I sat down. I did plan to sit down once in a while, so that made sense to me. But thereafter, it made no sense to all those style-conscious sartorial advisors of mine who, when consulted, told me my seamstress, God bless her, seemed oblivious to fashion advances in the pages of GQ and Esquire. The style, they said, is to be sleek and not too capacious (i.e., baggy) in the pants with the cuffs barely touching the tops of the shoes. All I can say is, they haven’t seen my shoes — black, bulbous things worthy only of Mickey Mouse. Perhaps it’s best if they get draped over like dead bodies. What this all comes down to is – I’m sadly out of date for such a cool guy. I must work on that. Meanwhile, my up-to-date, fashion-savvy handsome son – who was just a mere boy when I bought my antiquated formal wear – is having the biggest day of his still-young life and everybody will be looking at him and his lovely bride, not at the father of the groom. I’ll ask the photographer to crop me at the knees. And I’ll probably spend most of the wedding sitting down anyway. Apparently I have the right pants for that. And for the occasional dance number, I admit I’ll be a little self-conscious. So I’ll be dancing in the dark, while the new couple dances out into the light.

AS THE CROWS FLY…

It was a Florida warm day in which, in the mid-afternoon, I sat by a friend’s pool in the city of Palm Harbor. The sky was blue and cloudless, probably in deep contrast to the threatening storms of the north.

Suddenly, overhead, there were crows, a wide trail of them straggling, probably, over a mile or more, for just when I thought I might have seen the crow that was bringing up the rear there came another disordered strand of them, now and then a few circling away from the main body for some reason known only to God, nature and the minds of the birds involved. But ultimately, they, too, joined the movement (north?south? why, and where are they headed at mid-summer?)  and high, so very high overhead. Continue reading “AS THE CROWS FLY…”