Coronavirus Diary 1

The Control Myth & Coronavirus:

We like to be in control of our lives, and, of course, we learn soon enough that while there is a lot we can control, there is also much that lies beyond our power.  Events like personal illness and that of our friends and family; the chance occurrence of natural disasters; the incidence of accidents on road, rail, water, and air; and much else are examples of this.  Then a novel virus called SARS-CoV-2 that causes the disease COVID-19 seems to spell the end to all we hold dear like our valued freedom to go about our daily business unhindered.  Civilisation of all varieties, especially that of the rich Northern hemisphere, seems to be grinding to a halt, stymied by a microscopic nucleic acid, that to my mind looks like a beautifully coloured sphere with projecting spikes rather like a maritime mine from World War II.  Incredibly it latches its spikes into host human cells, gains access and multiplies almost totally unhindered in the bodies of the immuno-compromised.  Those are the unlucky ones with underlying diseases.  Others of the population vary from presenting with serious flu-like symptoms to being totally asymptomatic.  No wonder, then, that when modern computers and laptops came on the scene hackers were able to develop sequences of code aptly named viruses that could corrupt many programs developed by the smartest brains.  And my goodness, I’d imagine that as a so-called civilized people we have spent more on defending our technologies from viruses than on defending our own human bodies from microbe attacks.  After all, greed is practically the sole consideration of unethical capitalism.  I often wonder whether ethical capitalism exists at all?

The mystics of all religious and spiritual traditions have been gently reminding humankind for millennia now to “wake up,” “become aware” and stop living in the delusional world of limitless progress.  Their message has been smothered by the unruly din of accelerating progress-driven more by financial gain than the good of society.  Thankfully, there are some bright lights in the billionaire entrepreneurial world like Bill Gates who these days spends much of his time and money in philanthropic pursuits.  He is among the few, and, of course, it was he, who in a famous TED talk in 2015 warned the Western World that we had more to fear from a global viral pandemic than from any nuclear war.  In the place of weapons obliterating us from the outside, we would instead, especially the weakest amongst us, be slowly and painfully fragmented from the inside by a virus that attacks our very own bodies at a cellular level.

In short, the Western capitalist system has been delivered a severe body blow, knocked to the canvas by an invisible invader.  For a short while at least it will require hospitalization.  It will no doubt recover, but at the cost of thousands, if not millions, of lives. But the question remains as to whether it will get up and enter the fighting ring of human civilization and culture as a wiser and less greedy exploiter of the earth’s resources and, indeed, of the millions of poor souls in the less fortunate Southern hemisphere.  We can but hope that lessons will have been learned. Sic transit Gloria mundi.  (“Thus, the glory of the world passes away”)

Poems I Journey With 14

Emily Dickinson

After Gerard Manley Hopkins, I turn most often to the wonderful and wondrous rhythms of the poems of Emily Dickinson, another spiritual and mystical poet who also loved her periods of isolation and aloneness and even ascetic living like the Victorian Jesuit priest and convert. Dickinson was born in 1830 (fourteen years before Hopkins was born) and died at the age of 56 in 1886 when Hopkins was 42.  While their lives overlapped then for some 42 years in terms of linear time neither would obviously have been aware of the writings of the other given their personal and indeed the social circumstances of the day and indeed the fact that neither sought publication of their work.  But, I personally get a lot of spiritual sustenance from the poems of both great poets. Both were also most unusual is that they both broke away from the then conservative conventions of what poetry was deemed to be. While both are spiritual and mystical poets their work is correspondingly completely "sui generis," unique and authentic to the very syllable of their output.  As her poems are so short I will offer three short favourite poems from Dickinson's pen here below:

1. Hope is a thing with feathers

Hope is a thing with feathers—

That perches in the soul—

And sings the tune without the words—

And never stops—at all—

And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard—

And sore must be the storm—

That could abash the little Bird

That kept so many warm—

I've heard it in the chillest land—

And on the strangest Sea—

Yet, never, in Extremity,

It asked a crumb—of Me.

2.  Heaven

"Heaven"—is what I cannot reach!

The Apple on the Tree—

Provided it do hopeless—hang—

That—"Heaven" is—to Me!

The Color, on the Cruising Cloud—

The interdicted Land—

Behind the Hill—the House behind—

There—Paradise—is found!

Her teasing Purples—Afternoons—

The credulous—decoy—

Enamored—of the Conjuror—

That spurned us—Yesterday! 

A somewhat younger Emily Dickinson

3. My cocoon tightens, colors tease

MY cocoon tightens, colors tease, 

I 'm feeling for the air; 

A dim capacity for wings 

Degrades the dress I wear. 

A power of butterfly must be 

The aptitude to fly, 

Meadows of majesty concedes 

And easy sweeps of sky. 

So I must baffle at the hint 

And cipher at the sign, 

And make much blunder, if at last 

I take the clew divine. 

The Briefest of Commentaries:

I love Emily Dickinson's poems because they invariably give me a spiritual lift and a deep insight into the depths that simple things can have. I also like her unique writing style with dashes, which is completely unique to her and revolutionary, indeed, at the time she was writing.  She is simply unique, "sui generis" and so authentic. Who could not be moved by the image of a little bird?  It is at once so fragile and yet can fly to such heights and gain an overall view of things we humans are not privy to. Then the equating of hope - a complete abstraction - with that little physical image of a bird is simply mindblowingly powerful.  That equation or juxtaposition of two utterly different "objects" is so wonderful and wondrous that it strikes us immediately as being insightful. Hope, which we all need to keep going, is often as fragile as a little bird which we often doubt will be able to weather the storms of life. Where does that little bird of hope perch? Yes, in the very cage of our souls!  It sings a tune without words, the delicate and fragile tune of hope.  And that strange little fragile creature, that brittle bird of hope, never asked a single crumb of sustenance from its jailer, that is, ME and YOU and US!!

The second poem is about Heaven. However, no mystic will ever offer a cheap or cheapened image of that place or state or whatever we call Heaven.  Dickinson presents that reality as somewhat unattainable like the apple on the highest bough while we are mere children playing about the trunk of that great tree. There are hints also of Moses not being granted his wish to the Promised Land which has traditionally also been linked with whatever Heaven is, may be or could be. In fact, I like this poem also, and have placed it under the poem on Hope as Dickinson talks about the reaching of the apple being absolutely hopeless.  In that regard let me repeat its opening stanza for our contemplation here:

"Heaven"—is what I cannot reach!

The Apple on the Tree—

Provided it do hopeless—hang—

That—"Heaven" is—to Me!

The third poem reminds me of the sage advice, or at least the wise comment of Anais Nin (1903 - 1977) that the day will come for all of us "when the risk to remain tight in the bud is more painful than the risk it takes to blossom."  These words resonate with those of the entire poem and especially those of the first stanza. The growth of the little seed in the bud to full flower and blossom parallels the formation of the butterfly from egg to larva (caterpillar) to pupa (chrysalis) to adult butterfly:

MY cocoon tightens, colors tease, 

I 'm feeling for the air; 

A dim capacity for wings 

Degrades the dress I wear. 

Poems I Journey With 10

Archibald Macleish

Archibald Macleish (1892-1982) is a major modernist American poet and writer of the twentieth century, and I first discovered him through his critical writings, rather than through his poetry.  I have beside me as I write the first book I bought by him way back in 1978 when I was a mere twenty years of age.  That book is called Poetry and Experience (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961).  I remember being blown away by how easily he communicated to the reader his understanding of what poetry does and is.  In part one of that book, he discusses in a comprehensive way how poems work through sound, sign, image and metaphor.   In the second section of the book, Macleish treats of how what he has discussed in the first section functions in the works of Emily Dickinson, W.B. Yeats, Arthur Rimbaud and John Keats.  This book, consequently, would be a wonderful introduction to poetry appreciation for anyone wishing to learn more about how to read and enjoy it.

The Old Men in the Leaf Smoke

The old men rake the yards for winter
burning the autumn-fallen leaves.
They have no lives, the one or the other.
The leaves are dead, the old men live
Only a little, light as a leaf,
Left to themselves of all their loves:
Light in the head most often too.

Raking the leaves, raking the leaves,
Raking life and leaf together,
The old men smell of burning leaves,
But which is which they wonder – whether
Anyone tells the leaves and loves –
Anyone left, that is, who lives.

For me, it is the existential thrust of this poem that engages me as a reader.  I have already alluded to the psychiatrist Dr Irvin Yalom's listing humanity's awareness of its mortality as being one of the four great ultimate concerns in every human being's life.  Raking leaves is a perennial occupation for anyone with trees in their garden.  Growing up, it was one task I loved to do when I visited my country cousins and when I spent some three years as a would-be monk.  This poem uses the leaf as a symbol of the mortality of humanity and for the shortness and beauty of life.  I love the way Macleish speaks of "lives" and "loves" and "leaves" as they are, in effect, slight or partial rhymes as these words share the consonants "l," "v" and "s."  Such felicity of language enchants this reader, simple though this use of words is.

Repetition in the poem gives it a song-like sound.  As a country boy, I can almost smell the burning leaves as I have stood beside many a man burning dead vegetation in my time. Another riveting thing about this poem is its apparent simplicity that somehow draws us into the deeper mystery that life is.  It would seem that life is an amorphous mix of things in unity rather than a collection of random things.  When one rakes a garden one rakes many bits and pieces of vegetation and insect life and mud and clay together in a unity, and that unity in plurality suggests a mysticism at work in Macleish's sensitivity.  And this latter mystical sensibility is all too apparent to the perceptive and open reader.  Let's read the second stanza slowly and meditatively with the thoughts and sensitivities of this paragraph in mind:

Raking the leaves, raking the leaves,

Raking life and leaf together,

The old men smell of burning leaves,

But which is which they wonder – whether

Anyone tells the leaves and loves –

Anyone left, that is, who lives.

Mystically and linguistically leaves and lives and loves are all somehow magically one.  We are one with the poet raking them together as we live. On the one hand, then, this is a sad and depressing poem, and yet, on the other, this is a poem that suggests that we are part of the great cycle of nature, and we are ennobled by being part of it, never lessened, as, after all, we are the ones who do the raking.  We are the ones who do the maintenance on the garden.  We, in our turn, will become old men or old women, as the case may be, and we will surely smell of leaves and loves and lives.  Then, the beauty of the poem is that it does not state too much.  It connotes rather than denotes, and that is a wonderful device at the very heart of poetry.  Mystery, mystique, wonder and magic are always beyond capturing in prose.  They are more readily captured but never subdued or crushed in poetry.  That's why the last stanza defies paraphrase, which is surely anathema to anyone with a poetic sensibility.