The ghost of life: Constant hearses

Medical science—actual study, research, testing and the like—is largely what enabled the expansion of white society into Africa, Latin America and Asia. I don’t hold that against science—a lot of local people threw off the burden of diseases like dengue, cholera, malaria, typhoid and yellow fever because of these advances. Not sure you can blame the scientists for what the empire-builders did with their work.

Fun fact: the guy for whom Walter Reed Army Hospital was named was the one who in 1901 broke the back of yellow fever—building on the work of a Cuban doctor—by confirming that the aedes aegypti mosquito carried the bacillus.

Fun fact 2: Aedes aegypti also carries bacilli for Zika, West Nile, dengue and other stuff. That little insect is quite the vector.

Well, yellow fever has attacked the United States several times. It’s a major plot point in the movie Jezebel in 1852 New Orleans. And there was a terrible outbreak in Philadelphia in 1793, which left 5000 dead.

The American poet, polemicist, sea captain and newspaper editor Philip Freneau (1752-1832) lived through and wrote about this epidemic. The thing that strikes me is the priests fleeing their pulpits (and—by extension—their congregations) in terror.

Of course, we see their spiritual descendants in the so-called pastors of megachurches alternating their appeals for money with pitches for sure-fire COVID19 cures. Ugh.

(Look—this is not the best poem ever written. But the guy lived through yellow fever, and he still has a story to tell us.)

“Pestilence: Written During the Prevalence of a Yellow Fever”

Hot, dry winds forever blowing,

Dead men to the grave-yards going:

     Constant hearses,

     Funeral verses;

Oh! what plagues--there is no knowing!

Priests retreating from their pulpits!—

Some in hot, and some in cold fits

     In bad temper,

     Off they scamper,

Leaving us--unhappy culprits!

Doctors raving and disputing,

death's pale army still recruiting—

     What a pother

     One with t'other!

Some a-writing, some a-shooting.

Nature's poisons here collected,

Water, earth, and air infected—

     O, what a pity,

     Such a City,

Was in such a place erected!

The ghost of life: A land that's known as freedom

The first time I saw a police riot was on my parents’ black and white TV, during the 1968 Democratic convention where Mayor Richard J. Daley jammed his thumb on the scales of the democratic process to get Hubert H. Humphrey nominated. The cops clubbed and gassed anti-Vietnam War protestors outside the convention center while inside party hacks turned the cogs of machine politics. The nasty taste of everything to do with those events has stayed with me throughout the decades.

No cops were arrested, but the protest leaders who came to be known as the Chicago 7 (originally 8, until Black Panther Bobby Seale was first chained and gagged in the courtroom, then severed from the case and imprisoned for four years for contempt of court) were put on trial the following year. They were charged with—and in 1970 five of them were convicted of—crossing state lines to incite riot. Two years later a federal appeals court reversed the convictions because of the outrageous bias on the part of the trial judge, Julius Hoffman.

As I recount that history I think of the state of our Department of Justice, and the blatant racism that permeates most police forces throughout the country, and I wonder just exactly how far the fuck we’ve progressed in 50 years. Not far at all, it seems.

(Look—if you for one second believe that if scores of black men armed to the gills showed up at any civic center, much less a state capitol, and the cops wouldn’t mow them down with impunity, you are bloody delusional.)

Anyhow—today’s Friday, so for our National Poetry Month post today, I’m giving you Graham Nash’s “Chicago”. The first line describes Seale, and he goes on from there. The song is awash in irony and bitterness. 

And yet, and yet—there are two lines of hope: "We can change the world. Rearrange the world." Let's do it.

This version is by Crosby, Stills and Nash.

The ghost of life: Desire is death

Today’s the day we mark the Big Gun of English poetry, William Shakespeare. Much of Shakespeare’s life would have been spent amidst pestilence; smallpox, typhus, cholera were just some of the diseases swirling about. It’s surprising that his works aren’t more drenched with catastrophic events beyond the making of man.

King Lear was first performed for James I in 1606, following a summer in which bubonic plague ravaged the country and closed down much of the entertainment venues and shops in London. We don’t know that this influenced Shakespeare, but the landscape of Lear is a blasted wasteland for much of the play, so…

As per usual, Lear’s downfall is of his own making, but, man, does he take half the cast with him into madness and death. About halfway through the play, when the deposed king is wandering the moors, he rages…against ingratitude.

Huh.

King Lear, Act III, Scene 2

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!

You cataracts and hurricanes, spout

Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!

You sulph’rous and thought-executing fires,

Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,

Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,

Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ th’ world,

Crack Nature’s moulds, all germains spill at once,

That makes ingrateful man!

Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! spout, rain!

Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire are my daughters.

I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness.

I never gave you kingdom, call’d you children,

You owe me no subscription. Then let fall

Your horrible pleasure. Here I stand your slave,

A poor, infirm, weak, and despis’d old man.

But yet I call you servile ministers,

That will with two pernicious daughters join

Your high-engender’d battles ‘gainst a head

So old and white as this! O! O! ’tis foul!

Frankly, I’ve always thought that—more than other Shakespearean tragic heroes—Lear pretty much deserved what he wrought. I mean—the guy couldn’t see Regan and Goneril for what they were; or Cordelia, for that matter. The tragedy was that—because he was king—his follies turned into tragedy for everyone around him.

Anyhow, as is my custom for Shakespeare day in National Poetry Month, here’s one of his sonnets, in which he compares love to disease. ‘Nuff said.

“Sonnet 147”

My love is as a fever, longing still

For that which longer nurseth the disease,

Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,

Th’ uncertain sickly appetite to please.

My reason, the physician to my love,

Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,

Hath left me, and I desperate now approve

Desire is death, which physic did except.

Past cure I am, now reason is past care,

And frantic-mad with evermore unrest;

My thoughts and my discourse as madmen’s are,

At random from the truth vainly expressed:

    For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,

    Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.

The ghost of life: These lifeless things

As I understand it, Ozymandias was a Greek name for the pharaoh Rameses II; I do not know whether it refers to the Egyptian’s mama and combat boots. The only reason I know of him is because Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote a poem about the pathetic and pointless remains of a self-aggrandizing tyrant of former times.

Even in high school, the arid arrogance of the colossus’ broken old statue struck me. Back then, I didn’t know Ozymandias was real. Now that I do, I give him more credit than I did—Rameses the Great had chops. He was a warrior king, successful in battle. He brought wealth to Egypt. He built temples, tombs and art works. He’s also posited as the pharaoh of the Exodus, and apparently looked a lot like Yul Brynner.

Shelley does a bang-up job taking the piss here, and I’ve recently been struck by how applicable this description is to the current occupant of the White House. Cadet Bonespurs projects all the megalomania the poet documents, but with none of the accomplishments to give substance to the broken monument. We certainly recognize the wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command manqué. I really don’t much fancy thinking about his vast and trunkless legs, thank you very much, but I’d pay real money for a glimpse of a shattered visage half-sunk in sand.

As to looking on the Kleptocrat’s works—the destruction, corruption and misery that have been his focus since he first announced his candidacy—yeah, I do despair. We are in danger of becoming the wasteland that Shelley limns, boundless and bare around the decay of that colossal wreck.

“Ozymandias”

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

The ghost of life: The hot unwholesome wind

I’m not generally speaking a fan of Christina Rossetti, or any of the Pre-Raphaelites, tbh. Perhaps, when I’m (say) locked in the house for extended periods of time, I should revisit that.

But my entry for National Poetry Month today is Rossetti’s “The Plague”. She’s not specific as to the disease, but her depiction would be accurate for any of the pandemics in human history, including our current one. Even in “advanced” First World countries, we’re seeing human corpses being stored in refrigerated 18-wheelers parked outside of overwhelmed hospitals, and anonymous white coffins lined up in long ditches for either temporary or permanent burial.

As someone has said, history may not repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.

“The Plague”

‘Listen, the last stroke of death’s noon has struck—

The plague is come,’ a gnashing Madman said,

And laid him down straightway upon his bed.

His writhed hands did at the linen pluck;

Then all is over. With a careless chuck

Among his fellows he is cast. How sped

His spirit matters little: many dead

Make men hard-hearted.— ‘Place him on the truck.

Go forth into the burial-ground and find

Room at so much a pitful for so many.

One thing is to be done; one thing is clear:

Keep thou back from the hot unwholesome wind,

That it infect not thee.’ Say, is there any

Who mourneth for the multitude dead here?

The ghost of life/Gratitude Monday: A pilgrim in winter

It’s Gratitude Monday. But, also, Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, begins today at sundown. Today’s National Poetry Month entry combines both.

Born in Vilna (then part of the Russian empire, now Belarus) in 1913, Avrom Sutzkever wrote his poetry in Yiddish, whether he was in Vilna, Moscow or Tel Aviv. Active in Vilna’s arts and cultural scene, Sutzkever added anti-Nazi resistance work to his repertoire when the Germans occupied the country.

During an Aktion in 1941, Sutzkever escaped to the countryside and was hidden by a barefoot peasant woman named Yanova Bertushevitz; she and her husband kept the poet in their cellar and managed to smuggle food into the ghetto to his family. Eventually his worry about the danger to his protectors and his family led him to return to Vilna, but he did not forget her gift to him.

  

“1980”

And when I go up as a pilgrim in winter, to recover

the place I was born, and the twin to self I am in my mind,

then I'll go in black snow as a pilgrim to find

the grave of my savior, Yanova.

She'll hear what I whisper, under my breath:

Thank you. You saved my tears from the flame.

Thank you. Children and grandchildren you rescued from death.

I planted a sapling (it doesn't suffice) in your name.

Time in its gyre spins back down the flue

faster than nightmares of nooses can ride,

quicker than nails. And you, my savior, in your cellar you'll hide

me, ascending in dreams as a pilgrim to you.

You'll come from the yard in your slippers, crunching the snow

so I'll know. Again I'm there in the cellar, degraded and low,

you're bringing me milk and bread sliced thick at the edge.

You're making the sign of the cross, I'm making my pencil its pledge.

I think today of the people who protect their loved ones and their communities by staying home—in much better circumstances than Yanova and Sutzkever—and I’m grateful. In the face of fear and death, they are choosing compassion and life.

The ghost of life: break the grape's joy

If the reports of my colleagues and the posts on infosec Twitter are to be believed, people in quarantine are spending a good amount of time baking bread. This would account for the fact that flour shelves at grocery stores are frequently empty, and if you want to order a 50lb sack of the stuff online, you can expect delivery in late May.

So, for National Poetry Month today, let’s have a poem about bread. We last heard from Dylan Thomas in 2018, so he’s due. Let’s have his “This Bread I Break”.

You can read this on so many levels—literally on the process of what it takes to turn grain into bread and fruit into wine. It’s a commentary on humans pillaging the planet. It’s also an allegory of the sacrifice of Christ.

“This Bread I Break”

This bread I break was once the oat,

This wine upon a foreign tree

Plunged in its fruit;

Man in the day or wine at night

Laid the crops low, broke the grape's joy.

Once in this time wine the summer blood

Knocked in the flesh that decked the vine,

Once in this bread

The oat was merry in the wind;

Man broke the sun, pulled the wind down.

This flesh you break, this blood you let

Make desolation in the vein,

Were oat and grape

Born of the sensual root and sap;

My wine you drink, my bread you snap.

Turns out humans are utter crap at appreciating sacrifice of any sort, whether it’s the chicken they’re frying or the god they worship. And many of them are utter crap at making sacrifices, like staying the fuck at home to protect their health and that of the community.

Of course, many of them are utter crap, period.

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?