Justice thunders condemnation

Okay, after a month of imagery-through-words, let’s start off May with a visual.

Since it’s also May Day, comrades, I think it appropriate to express solidarity with the idea of self-determination and reducing the imperial aspirations of that Russian whackjob. 

I shot this right here in the Valley They Call Silicon. It was on a big Toyota SUV.

(Okay, look: I'm unable to verify that the English corresponds to the Ukrainian; Google Translate is certainly no help. I'm always worried about this sort of thing. There are "Welcome to Wales" signs in Welsh and English as you cross the Severn River. I wondered if the Welsh actually translated to "Drown, you English bastards!", but was never able to confirm.)

Power to the people!

April soft and cold: For he gave all his heart

We need someone with gravitas to close out National Poetry Month, and I can think of no one better qualified for that than William Butler Yeats. Because you know how I love Yeats.

In the past I’ve given you the apocalyptic and the historical (“Second Coming” and “Easter, 1916”), and one related to the First World War (“An Irish Airman Foresees his Death”). I’m going to dial it back to the eternal subject of poetry, love—the positive and the not-so-positive.

Yeats had a powerful passion for a woman named Maud Gonne—I mean, he was hopelessly in love with her. And she spurned him. As in, he proposed marriage to her four times over a period of ten years, and she turned him down every time. Even worse, she married the Irish nationalist John MacBride, who was an abusive drunk.

(After MacBride was executed by the British following the Easter Uprising in 1916, Yeats tried one more time. With the same result. Oh—and then he proposed to Gonne’s 22-year-old-daughter, who also refused him. Look, artists, poets—whaddya gonna do?)

Yeats had other affairs, and following his rejection by Gonne mere et fille, he married Georgie Hyde Lees (whom he met through one of his lovers). They had a happy marriage, with two children, but I’m thinking it wasn’t that full-bore heart-wrenching feeling he had for Gonne. It’s hard, after all, to sustain that kind of thing over time.

So it’s no real surprise to me that Yeats cautions us against rushing wholeheartedly into love. Even though, of course, he was unable to follow his own advice.

“Never Give All the Heart”

Never give all the heart, for love

Will hardly seem worth thinking of

To passionate women if it seem

Certain, and they never dream

That it fades out from kiss to kiss;

For everything that’s lovely is

But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.

O never give the heart outright,

For they, for all smooth lips can say,

Have given their hearts up to the play.

And who could play it well enough

If deaf and dumb and blind with love?

He that made this knows all the cost,

For he gave all his heart and lost.

And on that bittersweet note, National Poetry Month comes to an end. I hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as I have.

April soft and cold: And I love the rain

Let’s have something, well, poetic today, from the 20^th Century poet Langston Hughes.

Hughes wrote a lot about the black experience in America; many of those poems are very powerful. But I’m going for something that brings me close to something I miss very much, living here in the Valley They Call Silicon.

“April Rain Song”

Let the rain kiss you

Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops

Let the rain sing you a lullaby

The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk

The rain makes running pools in the gutter

The rain plays a little sleep song on our roof at night

And I love the rain

April soft and cold: Part of the mighty universal whole

Oscar Wilde was a giant of the literary set of the Gilded Age; the aesthetic movement practically was Wilde. These days he’s probably known more for his plays (I don’t suppose there’s an actor anywhere who hasn’t cut his/her teeth on The Importance of Being Ernest), fiction (The Picture of Dorian Gray being the most famous, but I love his children’s stories, chief among them “The Happy Prince” and “The Selfish Giant”), his scandalous life (which cost him dearly) and of course, his witticisms.

You want some acerbic riposte for a cocktail party? Wilde is your go-to-guy. If I could match him and Dorothy Parker in some kind of pay-per-view sarcasm slam, my financial future would be secured.

But Wilde also wrote poetry—yeah, not the best in the world, but still. The epic piece, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, was inspired by experiences while he was imprisoned for homosexuality. I personally find it grimmer than I want to deal with these days.

For all his flamboyant scandal-mongering, Wilde had an extremely well-developed moral compass, which is evident in both his fairy tales for children and his poetry. Try this one on for size.

“We Are Made One with What We Touch and See”

We are resolved into the supreme air,

We are made one with what we touch and see,

With our heart's blood each crimson sun is fair,

With our young lives each spring-impassioned tree

Flames into green, the wildest beasts that range

The moor our kinsmen are, all life is one, and all is change.

With beat of systole and of diastole

One grand great life throbs through earth's giant heart,

And mighty waves of single Being roll

From nerve-less germ to man, for we are part

Of every rock and bird and beast and hill,

One with the things that prey on us, and one with what we kill. . . .

One sacrament are consecrate, the earth

Not we alone hath passions hymeneal,

The yellow buttercups that shake for mirth

At daybreak know a pleasure not less real

Than we do, when in some fresh-blossoming wood

We draw the spring into our hearts, and feel that life is good. . . .

Is the light vanished from our golden sun,

Or is this daedal-fashioned earth less fair,

That we are nature's heritors, and one

With every pulse of life that beats the air?

Rather new suns across the sky shall pass,

New splendour come unto the flower, new glory to the grass.

And we two lovers shall not sit afar,

Critics of nature, but the joyous sea

Shall be our raiment, and the bearded star

Shoot arrows at our pleasure! We shall be

Part of the mighty universal whole,

And through all Aeons mix and mingle with the Kosmic Soul!

We shall be notes in that great Symphony

Whose cadence circles through the rhythmic spheres,

And all the live World's throbbing heart shall be

One with our heart, the stealthy creeping years

Have lost their terrors now, we shall not die,

The Universe itself shall be our Immortality!

Gratitude Monday: You just have to go

Once again, I am grateful for being able to participate in the Walk MS event held in a park in Los Gatos. I did it last year for the first time, and felt such a surge of gratitude that I knew I had to repeat it again this year, even though it meant dropping out of a Python class that I’m pretty interested in.

There were more than 1300 walkers this year, and I understand that they raised somewhere in the area of $250,000 for MS research. My contribution to that total was minimal, but it still felt good to make that commitment.

I did it completely on my own this year—didn’t see my walking partner of last time: Ron, the insurance guy. But then, there were 1300+ people there, so… Instead I plugged myself into my gym mix and sang along with Springsteen, Martina McBride, Bonnie Raitt and the Stones.

Look—I was moving at a good clip, and I’m unlikely to run into anyone who heard me. If I do, they won't recognize me in my non-walking clothes.

A couple of nice things for me: as I’d headed out with the first wave of walkers, I passed masses of dawdlers on my way back. Twice I got high-fived, which is a first. But, hey—who doesn’t like being high-fived when you’ve got “Baby, You Can Drive My Car” in your ears and you’re in the groove?

But also, this year the volunteers had made motivational posters and put them up along a stretch of chain-link fence. And I loved them.

I’m guessing that many of them were done by the high school kids who manned the water-and-snacks stands, and who applauded as you passed them. 

Let me just say that someone gets points for the appropriate contraction for “you are”.

The thing about these events is that I never see anyone looking anything but energetic and enthusiastic, even though there are many there who are in varying stages of MS. You cannot believe what a mood-lifter participating in this is, and I’m very grateful for that.

The high school kids lined up at the finish, to cheer us in like we were marathoners, and to give us our little medals, which I, for one, wore the rest of the day.

I am also deeply grateful for the fact that I can walk, under my own power, and that I look forward to being able to do so for some time to come. I am truly fortunate, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to do something that may help those who don’t look forward to this kind of freedom.

April soft and cold: Move him into the sun

For our last Monday in National Poetry Month, one from Wilfred Owen.

Given all the centenaries of last week—the landings at Gallipoli (nine month campaign with nothing to show for it but around 750,000 casualties on both sides by the time the Allies withdrew from the beaches they never got past), the first “successful” deployment of chlorine gas (which is still in use today), the beginning of the systematic extermination of Armenians by the Turks (still being denied by same)—I think that both the title and the content need no real analysis.

“Futility”

Move him into the sun—

Gently its touch awoke him once,

At home, whispering of fields half-sown.

Always it woke him, even in France,

Until this morning and this snow.

If anything might rouse him now

The kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds—

Woke once the clays of a cold star.

Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides

Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir?

Was it for this the clay grew tall?

—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil

To break earth's sleep at all?

Sick and tired of fighting

On 26 April 1865, General William Tecumseh Sherman ended the campaign that had taken him from Tennessee through Georgia and South Carolina at a small farm near Durham, North Carolina, when he accepted the surrender of Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston.

The two opposing generals had exchanged communications for a week or so. Following Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox, Johnston pretty much knew the game was up. Also, Sherman had been pursuing him through all terrains, even constructing corduroy roads to get through the Salkehatchie swamps to the tune of twelve miles per day. You’re not going to get away from someone like that, even if you’ve got full strength and a secure supply chain, which Johnston did not.

Although one of the all-time proponents of what we’ve come to call total war (he referred to it as “hard war”), when he knew he’d won, Sherman had no interest in exacting punitive terms. In fact, he proposed generous conditions both politically and militarily, as he’d heard Lincoln express. But Lincoln was dead, and President Andrew Johnson was in a Radical Republican chokehold, so Sherman had to retract his offer.

He was still fighting with Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton (who was pretty much the poster boy for Radical politics) about the legitimacy of his actions, when Johnston accepted the purely military terms, and the surrender was given on 26 April. The two armies could go home. The following month, Sherman wrote:

“I confess, without shame, I am sick and tired of fighting—its glory is all moonshine; even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, with the anguish and lamentations of distant families, appealing to me for sons, husbands and fathers…tis only those who have never heard a shot, never heard the shriek and groans of the wounded and lacerated…that cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation.”

Here are a couple of things about this event:

When Sherman died in February 1891, Johnston served as a pallbearer, standing hatless in bitterly cold weather. He caught a cold and died a month later from pneumonia. But the fiercest of enemy commanders had genuinely abandoned all enmity when hostilities had ceased.

And it has always been interesting to me that it was the soldiers, the Union commanders, who were kind and generous to the defeated, while the politicians screamed for blood, punishment and degradation. Sherman was right, 150 years ago, and today as well.

April soft and cold: If I had a shiny gun

You know how much I worship Dorothy Parker, so you know we would no more get through National Poetry Month without something from her than we would without Shakespeare.

Since yesterday we wandered through the love life of Catullus and Lesbia, let’s have Parker’s “From a Letter from Lesbia” today. In “Letter”, Parker skewers not only Catullus, but that whole poet-fixated-on-amour thing.

... So, praise the gods, Catullus is away!

And let me tend you this advice, my dear:

Take any lover that you will, or may,

Except a poet. All of them are queer.

It's just the same- a quarrel or a kiss

Is but a tune to play upon his pipe.

He's always hymning that or wailing this;

Myself, I much prefer the business type.

That thing he wrote, the time the sparrow died-

(Oh, most unpleasant- gloomy, tedious words!)

I called it sweet, and made believe I cried;

The stupid fool! I've always hated birds....

Moreover, from what I’ve read about Clodia (the presumptive Lesbia of Catullus’ oeuvre), she probably did hate birds.

Of course, one of the things I so admire about Parker is her ability to say exactly what I feel, but so much better. As in this one:

“Frustration:

If I had a shiny gun,

I could have a world of fun

Speeding bullets through the brains

Of the folk who give me pains;

Or had I some poison gas,

I could make the moments pass

Bumping off a number of

People whom I do not love.

But I have no lethal weapon-

Thus does Fate our pleasure step on!

So they still are quick and well

Who should be, by rights, in hell.

Parker was totally a meme before the first cat video.