The saint of Sienna

This came across my Facebook feed from a friend, and it gave me a chuckle:

On account of, although the picture correctly spells Saint Catherine’s home town with only one N, the Church of the Holy Comforter twice spelled it with two in their original post.

Although I can see why they might do that: Holy Comforter is located in Vienna, Va.

But then yesterday I was at a stoplight behind one of those mom-mobiles and realized that there is something that spells it with two Ns, the Toyota mini-van.

And then—you know me—I started wondering what the woman who brought the papacy back to Rome, and brokered peace between the warring cities of Italy might have done if she’d actually been Catherine of Sienna? You know—if she’d had one of these fully-loaded vans to take her places instead of a donkey. 

I mean, instead of saving the pope she might have become the pope.

Well, that one’s going to keep me going for a while.

"We must have British nipples"

I was very, very sorry to hear the news yesterday that Bob Hoskins has died of pneumonia. He was 71.

Most of the obits (at least the ones in the US) lead with reminding readers that Hoskins starred in the innovative Who Framed Roger Rabbit. And of course he was great in that film; you’d think he was born rumpled and tired in a wrinkled trench coat, the quintessence of the 1940s private eye.

But it does not get better than his performance in The Long Good Friday. He’s a London gangster who’s fought his way to the top but never considered how precarious that position is. Grain by grain, the earth crumbles beneath him, and it’s all made clear to you by his face.

I could never picture Hoskins as a posh bloke; if ever there was a representative of the Common Man, he was it. He more than held his own in every film, regardless of whether he was playing opposite Judi Dench or a flock of OTT ‘Toon weasels. He was also perfect as the Peter Pan pirate Mr. Smee, whom he played a couple of times. Oh—he was a great Badger in the live-action Wind in the Willows.

And…oh, hell; he was just aces.

Pilgrimage of poems: Shovel them under

Oh, my—here we are, already at the end of National Poetry Month.

I’m going to leave you with a poem by Carl Sandburg, the American poet who’s probably best known for his characterization of Chicago as hog-butcher to the world. But I’m giving you his take on war, which I came across in one of my anthologies of poetry from the First World War.

“The Grass”

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.

Shovel them under and let me work—

                                          I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg

And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.

Shovel them under and let me work.

Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:

                                          What place is this?

                                          Where are we now?

                                          I am the grass.

                                          Let me work.

Sandberg mentions two battlefields from the Napoleonic wars, one from the War Between the States, and then two from the Western Front of World War I. As it happens, I’ve been to both of the latter. To tell you the truth, I don’t know how anyone can visit Verdun without sitting on the ground and howling.

Now that I think of it—same goes for Ypres, where five separate battles were fought, mostly in seas of mud and decomposing human and animal body parts, between 1914 and 1918.

But when I first read this poem, the battlefield that came to mind was Vimy Ridge, a deceptively peaceful stretch of land close to Arras in France. The German army held that high ground from October 1914. They were attacked successively by the French in 1915, and then the British in 1916. The attacks were unsuccessful, but extremely costly.

Toward the end of 1916, the Brits were relieved by the Canadian Corps, which mounted an attack the following April. After three days of hard, hard fighting, they drove the Germans from the Ridge permanently.

For Canadians, Vimy Ridge has tremendous significance; to some extent it marked the beginning of a sense of national unity, because the men in the Corps came from all over the nation.

Following the war, the French government gave the high ground of the Ridge to the people of Canada as a permanent memorial to the sacrifices made there. It’s actually Canadian territory. Canadian students conduct battlefield tours—they spend six months there to pass on the history to visitors.

It’s very quiet there—grassy, rolling curves of hills and valleys. There’s a big 1930s art deco-style statue at the top of the ridge, into the base of which are carved the names of 11,285 Canadian soldiers killed in the war whose bodies were never located or identified.

I took a photo of some of the names because of the notation “served as”. The minimum age for volunteering for the Canadian forces was 17, so many younger boys enlisted under the identities of older men. When you see “served as” it typically means that the dead soldier was 15 or 16.

As I said, the site is grassy—so beautiful, you cannot believe it. And it seems so soft—until you realize that the indentations are craters from artillery shells. And that the forward observation trenches of the two opposing sides are about 50 meters apart. And you recall that this ground was fought over for three years.

One other thing about Vimy Ridge: the park attendants make it very clear that you can only walk in distinctly marked areas of the site. That’s because there are still unexploded artillery shells scattered about. They use sheep to keep that lovely grass cropped, because mechanized mowers could set off the ordnance.

The grass has so much work to do.

Pilgrimage of poems: All the troops in Lydia

We’re turning the WABAC machine way, way back for National Poetry Month today, and going to the island of Lesbos in the Sixth Century B.C.E., and the poems of Sappho.

Yes, that Sappho.

She wrote a lot of poems, but we don’t have much left of her work except a couple of poems and a fistful of fragments. That’s on account of in 380 C.E. the Christian church destroyed most of everything she produced.

Much of what we do have explores love, and specifically refer to Sappho’s lovers of both sexes. Many, many of them reference the goddess of love, Aphrodite. Here’s one that’s probably complete:

“Artfully adorned Aphrodite”

Artfully adorned Aphrodite, deathless

child of Zeus and weaver of wiles I beg you

please don't hurt me, don't overcome my spirit,

goddess, with longing,

but come here, if ever at other moments

hearing these my words from afar you listened

and responded: leaving your father's house, all

golden, you came then,

hitching up your chariot: lovely sparrows

drew you quickly over the dark earth, whirling

on fine beating wings from the heights of heaven

down through the sky and

instantly arrived - and then O my blessed

goddess with a smile on your deathless face you

asked me what the matter was this time, what I

called you for this time,

what I now most wanted to happen in my

raving heart: "Whom this time should I persuade to

lead you back again to her love? Who now, oh

Sappho, who wrongs you?

If she flees you now, she will soon pursue you;

if she won't accept what you give, she'll give it;

if she doesn't love you, she'll love you soon now,

even unwilling."

Come to me again, and release me from this

want past bearing. All that my heart desires to

happen - make it happen. And stand beside me,

goddess, my ally.

Here’s the scoop on Aphrodite: sometimes she brings happiness; sometimes not so much. So here’s another view of love—this one a fragment, but pretty substantial nonetheless. I really like her use of military images to frame the discussion.

“Some say thronging cavalry”

Some say thronging cavalry, some say foot soldiers,

others call a fleet the most beautiful of

sights the dark earth offers, but I say it's what-

ever you love best.

And it's easy to make this understood by

everyone, for she who surpassed all human

kind in beauty, Helen, abandoning her

husband--that best of

men--went sailing off to the shores of Troy and

never spent a thought on her child or loving

parents: when the goddess seduced her wits and

left her to wander,

she forgot them all, she could not remember

anything but longing, and lightly straying

aside, lost her way. But that reminds me

now: Anactória,

she's not here, and I'd rather see her lovely

step, her sparkling glance and her face than gaze on

all the troops in Lydia in their chariots and

glittering armor

Personally, I always favored Athena, but that's just me.

Pilgrimage of poems: Furnished souls

Yes, okay—I’ve already given you a poem by e.e. cummings this month. But that was for the series on poetry from the First World War.

Now I’m giving you a couple just because they’re wonderful.

As far as cummings goes, “All in green went my love riding” is positively un-cummings. It uses capitalization and standard poem format. And punctuation. It’s lyrical and ordered, anomalous from most of his other work. It was published in 1916, when he was 22, so it was before he started pushing the format envelope.

“All in green went my love riding”

All in green went my love riding

on a great horse of gold

into the silver dawn.

four lean hounds crouched low and smiling

the merry deer ran before.

Fleeter be they than dappled dreams

the swift sweet deer

the red rare deer.

Four red roebuck at a white water

the cruel bugle sang before.

Horn at hip went my love riding

riding the echo down

into the silver dawn.

four lean hounds crouched low and smiling

the level meadows ran before.

Softer be they than slippered sleep

the lean lithe deer

the fleet flown deer.

Four fleet does at a gold valley

the famished arrow sang before.

Bow at belt went my love riding

riding the mountain down

into the silver dawn.

four lean hounds crouched low and smiling

the sheer peaks ran before.

Paler be they than daunting death

the sleek slim deer

the tall tense deer.

Four tall stags at the green mountain

the lucky hunter sang before.

All in green went my love riding

on a great horse of gold

into the silver dawn.

Four lean hounds crouched low and smiling

my heart fell dead before.

Speaking as someone who’s read a lot of medieval poetry, this strongly resembles the world you find there—the beloved all in green, the natural setting, the deer, the hunting dogs as a sort of refrain, the lover struck dead with love. Definitely medieval.

Compare the lyrical lady of “All in green” with the ones in “the Cambridge Ladies”. Shallow, useless, brittle—you do not want to know these women. It’s hard to pinpoint the most damning modifier here—possibly “comfortable minds”; Jeez—is there anything worse than that?

“the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls”

the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls

are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds

(also, with the church's protestant blessings

daughters, unscented shapeless spirited)

they believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead,

are invariably interested in so many things—

at the present writing one still finds

delighted fingers knitting for the is it Poles?

perhaps. While permanent faces coyly bandy

scandal of Mrs. N and Professor D

.... the Cambridge ladies do not care, above

Cambridge if sometimes in its box of

sky lavender and cornerless, the

moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy

But you see why I keep coming back to cummings. He’s been with me since high school; I just cannot get enough of him.

Gratitude Monday: Yom HaShoah

As I mentioned yesterday, today marks Yom HaShoah, the commemoration of those lives lost in their millions during the Holocaust. At 1000 today, sirens throughout Israel wail, and the entire country comes to a halt for two minutes of silence. People stop driving, shopping, lecturing, giving closing arguments, preparing lunch, playing soccer. Indoors or out, they stop in their tracks (if they’re in cars, they get out and stand beside them) and spend two minutes thinking about a time when the unthinkable became not only thinkable but executable.

Two minutes, six million dead; that’s about 50,000 lives per second.

And I’m guessing that the primary purpose of those sirens is not Yom HaShoah; it’s to warn of present-day dangers to the survival of both Israel and the Jews. Which lends another layer of meaning to the custom.

So, today also being Gratitude Monday, what’s there to be grateful about in all this?

Well, I’m grateful that—with all the will in the world, and a good deal of the technologies at their disposal—the Nazis did not succeed in eradicating European Jewry. I’m really not very good with large numbers; I think in terms of each life—who that man was; what that child might have become; how that woman was going to work in a factory, be a research chemist, plant a garden. Each of those possibilities gone.

But not all of the potential was lost—for example, David Keller, who survived Nazi slave labor camps to come to the United States, raise a family, volunteer in the community and die a couple of years ago in Palo Alto, aged 89.

I’m grateful for the life of David Keller, and for the millions of men and women of the Allied armies, navies and air forces who beat the Germans back yard by yard to enable Keller and thousands of others to live out their lives.

I’m grateful for one of the most unlikely of Presidents, that failed haberdasher and product of machine politics from Missouri, Harry S. Truman, who (unlike FDR) felt that creating a homeland in the Middle East for the surviving Jews was both a morally and geopolitically correct stance. His recognition of the State of Israel in 1948—in the face of objections from his military and diplomatic advisors, not to mention the international opposition, starting with Britain—was probably the tipping point for getting that fledgling nation any kind of start at all.

I’m grateful that people like Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi did not flinch in recounting their experiences with the Final Solution. And that Victor Frankl used his experience to help us understand that the strength of our mental lives gives strength to our physical ones.

Remembrance of this past is crucial to our future, if we are not to replicate it. Because, as Anatoly Kuznetsov said, "Let me emphasize again that I have not told about anything exceptional, but only about ordinary things that were part of a system; things that happened just yesterday, historically speaking, when people were exactly as they are today."

Pilgrimage of poems: Burn me!

Yom HaShoah starts at sundown today and runs to sundown tomorrow. It’s the day set aside by the state of Israel to commemorating the nearly six million Jews systematically murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust in the 1930s and 1940s.

Nearly two hundred years ago, the German poet Heinrich Heine (as it happens, a Jew) wrote, “Dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen.” Freely translated, “Those who start by burning books end by burning people.” And there we have the entire history of the Holocaust. So I’ll give you two poems that speak to this.

We probably know Bertolt Brecht best as a dramatist, one of the bright lights of the brilliantly creative Weimar Republic in post-World War I Germany. But he wrote poetry as well, and here’s one that you should know:

“The Burning of the Books”

When the Regime commanded that books with harmful knowledge

Should be publicly burned and on all sides

Oxen were forced to drag cartloads of books

To the bonfires, a banished

Writer, one of the best, scanning the list of the Burned, was shocked to find that his

Books had been passed over. He rushed to his desk

On wings of wrath, and wrote a letter to those in power ,

Burn me! he wrote with flying pen, burn me! Haven’t my books

Always reported the truth ? And here you are

Treating me like a liar! I command you!

Burn me!

Brecht left Germany shortly after Hitler came to power in 1933, but he returned after the Second World War.

My second poem for the day comes from Primo Levi, whose work includes some of the most stunning writing I've ever encountered. Levi was a chemist who’d joined partisan forces near his native Torino and was caught by the Germans in 1943. He spent the next couple of years in Auschwitz. After the war it took him several months to make his way home, and he built a life as a chemist, husband, father and writer—essays, mostly, and poetry. But he never escaped; in 1987, aged 67, he committed suicide by throwing himself down the stairs of his family house.

He was extremely discouraged by the indifference of young people to whom he tried to explain the savagery of the Holocaust, and also worn out from caring for his aged mother and from the deprivations of Auschwitz. It is interesting to me that in every book of his I've read, he always refers to the camps by the German "lager". It's as though only the German word for a German invention was the right term.

The title of this poem refers to the opening word of a prayer that anchors morning and evening Jewish prayer services. “Shemà” means “hear”, or “listen”. The full opening line of the prayer is “Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.”

“Shemà”

You who live secure

In your warm houses,

Who return at evening to find

Hot food and friendly faces:

Consider whether this is a man,

Who labors in the mud

Who knows no peace

Who fights for a crust of bread

Who dies at a yes or a no.

Consider whether this is a woman,

Without hair or name

With no more strength to remember

Eyes empty and womb cold

As a frog in winter.

Consider that this has been:

I commend these words to you.

Engrave them on your hearts

When you are in your house, when you walk on your way,

When you go to bed, when you rise.

Repeat them to your children.

Or may your house crumble,

Disease render you powerless,

Your offspring avert their faces from you.

When I posted Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s “Babi Yar”, I included a quote from Anatoly Kuznetsov’s documentary novel about the massacre. It’s appropriate here, too, remembering the Holocaust.

"Let me emphasize again that I have not told about anything exceptional, but only about ordinary things that were part of a system; things that happened just yesterday, historically speaking, when people were exactly as they are today."