The ghost of life: Blank and pitiless as the sun

When William Butler Yeats wrote “The Second Coming” in 1919, the world was still picking up the pieces after four years of total war, and was awash in the global influenza pandemic. But here we are, more than a hundred years on, and it feels like it describes this week.

I don’t know what more I can say about it.

“The Second Coming”

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The ghost of life: The bright, blessed day

It’s Friday of an absolutely grotesque week in the novel coronavirus pandemic of 2020, so we need to lighten it up a bit. What better, then, for my National Poetry Month entry than Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World”?

I’m choosing Eva Cassidy’s cover of it because she is an amazing example of grace in the worst circumstances. She sang almost until her death at age 33. Her very voice brings me hope and fills me with joy. We need her today.

The ghost of life: Men's first instinct

The jolly song called “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag” was written in 1915; we know it most for the chorus, which goes:

Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag, and smile, smile, smile.

While you’ve a Lucifer to light your fag, smile, boys, that’s the style!

What’s the use of worrying? It never was worthwhile.

So, pack up your troubles in your old kit bag, and smile, smile, smile.

It’s got a great beat; you can march to it; top marks for bringing out volunteers to the trenches of Northern France.

So when Wilfrid Owen wrote his poem called “Smile, Smile, Smile” in 1918, that was the reference. But he threw a bucket of freezing, muddy water on all the cheerfulness. In the first three lines—mentioning the Mail newspaper and introducing the empty jollified promises of the commerce set—he set us up for the post-war frenzy of consumption and return to status quo ante bellum in terms of who profits and who pays. In every possible way.

In a week where we’re learning the details of the taxpayer-funded multi-billion dollar bailout for the airline industry (while carriers dodge issuing refunds for cancelled flights); discovering that UnitedHealthcare Corporation had a bonanza first quarter of this year (what with members being afraid or unable to see their physicians but UHC still collecting full premiums and also forcing providers to cut their reimbursement rates by 40%); finding out that while working and middle-class citizens are waiting an extra week or two for their $1200 “relief” check (which banks are authorized to seize for debts) while the Treasury Departments prints the Kleptocrat’s name on them but anyone making $1M or more is getting a grotesque tax break out of the trillion-dollar bill negotiated with that gargoyle Mnuchin—well, “Smile, Smile, Smile” seems just exactly appropriate.

Undeniably, it’s an ill wind indeed that doesn’t blow profit in someone’s direction, whether you're talking total war or global pandemic.

“Smile, Smile, Smile”

Head to limp head, the sunk-eyed wounded scanned

Yesterday's Mail; the casualties (typed small)

And (large) Vast Booty from our Latest Haul.

Also, they read of Cheap Homes, not yet planned;

“For,” said the paper, “when this war is done

The men's first instinct will be making homes.

Meanwhile their foremost need is aerodromes,

It being certain war has just begun.

Peace would do wrong to our undying dead,—

The sons we offered might regret they died

If we got nothing lasting in their stead.

We must be solidly indemnified.

Though all be worthy Victory which all bought.

We rulers sitting in this ancient spot

Would wrong our very selves if we forgot

The greatest glory will be theirs who fought,

Who kept this nation in integrity.”

Nation?—The half-limbed readers did not chafe

But smiled at one another curiously

Like secret men who know their secret safe.

(This is the thing they know and never speak,

That England one by one had fled to France

Not many elsewhere now save under France).

Pictures of these broad smiles appear each week,

And people in whose voice real feeling rings

Say: How they smile! They're happy now, poor things.

Stick that in your old kit bag, at let’s see how much you feel like smiling, eh?

The ghost of life: Bacteria as large as mice

We’ve been fairly wallowing in pestilence and plague, so perhaps it’s time for something with a lighter touch for National Poetry Month. I knew Ogden Nash would not let me down.

A couple of thoughts:

First, there’s a strong thematic connection because the symptoms of the novel coronavirus are essentially those of the common cold: cough, fever, shortness of breath.

But second, this is just so quaint—the poet is berating a doctor who’s just made a house call. A house call! I mean, that’s like getting milk delivered to your doorstep in glass bottles.

And third, of course Nash would take the role of hypochondriac.

“Common Cold”

Go hang yourself, you old M.D.!

You shall not sneer at me.

Pick up your hat and stethoscope,

Go wash your mouth with laundry soap;

I contemplate a joy exquisite

I'm not paying you for your visit.

I did not call you to be told

My malady is a common cold.

By pounding brow and swollen lip;

By fever's hot and scaly grip;

By those two red redundant eyes

That weep like woeful April skies;

By racking snuffle, snort, and sniff;

By handkerchief after handkerchief;

This cold you wave away as naught

Is the damnedest cold man ever caught!

Give ear, you scientific fossil!

Here is the genuine Cold Colossal;

The Cold of which researchers dream,

The Perfect Cold, the Cold Supreme.

This honored system humbly holds

The Super-cold to end all colds;

The Cold Crusading for Democracy;

The Führer of the Streptococcracy.

Bacilli swarm within my portals

Such as were ne'er conceived by mortals,

But bred by scientists wise and hoary

In some Olympic laboratory;

Bacteria as large as mice,

With feet of fire and heads of ice

Who never interrupt for slumber

Their stamping elephantine rumba.

A common cold, gadzooks, forsooth!

Ah, yes. And Lincoln was jostled by Booth;

Don Juan was a budding gallant,

And Shakespeare's plays show signs of talent;

The Arctic winter is fairly coolish,

And your diagnosis is fairly foolish.

Oh what a derision history holds

For the man who belittled the Cold of Colds!

The ghost of life: we had no lambs

Ignorant gobshites have compared the novel coronavirus with seasonal flu in their attempts to deny the seriousness of this pandemic. Some whose ignorance is truly gobsmacking toss around the influenza pandemic of 1918 (or, as Cadet Bonespurs keeps stating, 1917) as though it’s a record for despair they aspire to break.

Here’s the horror of 1918: the flu attacked the young and healthy. The men who’d survived the trenches, the machine guns and the gas returned home to be mown down by the virus. It cut like a scythe through the flower of the future. You could be feeling fine at breakfast and dead by supper. It took out more people than four years of total war in Europe. And it did not care how rich you were. It went where it wanted and took what it pleased.

We have a ways to go before the dead are measured in tens of millions from COVID19, but unless you stay the fuck at home, it’s not going to care how much your investment banker sucks up to you.

Although, so far, I’m betting the hardest hit are those who are on the edges of society; the homeless, the poor, the uninsured, the out-of-work, the minimum-waged, the non-whites.

My entry for National Poetry Month today is from a contemporary poet, Ellen Bryant Voight, from a collection she published in 1995 focused on the 1918 influenza pandemic. The book is called Kyrie; the poem is untitled.

How we survived: we locked the doors

and let nobody in. Each night we sang.

Ate only bread in a bowl of buttermilk.

Boiled the drinking water from the well,

clipped our hair to the scalp, slept in steam.

Rubbed our chests with camphor, backs

with mustard, legs and thighs with fatback

and buried the rind. Since we had no lambs

I cut the cat’s throat, Xed the door

and put the carcass out to draw the flies.

I raised an upstairs window and watched them go—

swollen, shiny, black, green-backed, green-eyed—

fleeing the house, taking the sickness with them.

The ghost of life/Gratitude Monday: Treasure in the jewelled skies

Today I’m grateful for all the scientists in all the fields who are working all the hours God sends to find vaccines and treatments for all the viruses. They’ve been doing this forever, but you’re only noticing them now because of the current pandemic. Many of them are even doing it not to make squillions for big pharma.

So today’s National Poetry Month entry is a sonnet from…Edgar Allan Poe.

Yes, he’s bitching about science dispelling all the mysteries and myths, but I think he’s missing the point. Scientists explore, they pioneer, they open millions of new doors and pathways. They make the universe bigger even as they burst the bubbles of ignorance and superstition. Poe might whine about being prevented from speculating, but that’s a self-created limitation, IMO. He may well have been having a bad day. He had rather a lot of them.

“To Science”

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!

   Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.

Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,

   Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?

How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,

   Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering

To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,

   Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?

Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car,

   And driven the Hamadryad from the wood

To seek a shelter in some happier star?

   Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,

The Elfin from the green grass, and from me

The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

The ghost of life: Lilies shout glory

It seems so strange that in the heart of Spring we are cooped up indoors around the world. This is when we celebrate new life, rebirth; all is fresh-green and petal-colored. But here we are, pacing the floors, debating whether it’s safe to open the windows, plotting when and how to make a grocery run.

Millions are also logging on to virtual services to celebrate Easter—the resurrection of Christ—instead of gathering at sunrise in parks or in churches to sing joyful hymns and proclaim, “He is risen!” (Except for the evangelicals who defy both law and science.) And that, too, is weird—to not be surrounded by the music and the ritual; to express your hope and joy alone or with just your family. Churches can't even ring peals; can't pull the sallies with six feet of distance between ringers.

Well, that’s where we are. So here’s my entry for National Poetry Month for today, a haiku by someone named Mary Havran. I know nothing about her, but I really like this. Something different for a really different Easter.

“Easter lilies”

Trumpet shaped bloom

Good News sounds forth from tomb

Lilies shout Glory