* Twenty-five Years

Irene O’Malley, Mother
1949-1987



I don’t know what to do with your death, Irene. It would be easy to stay in the anger: A young mother of four, wiped-out by a drunk driver, himself twenty-five and killed.

You and I used to debate the rules of life when we shared Carol’s 200-year-old, red farmhouse in South Royalton with your kids, Carol and her little boy. We both knew those rules are unfair, or, at best, random.

You, more than most people, knew who you were, Irene. You knew your power: Motherhood; creation ; nurturing. Your whole graceful body swayed gently with the message of your twinkling eyes: “All is well, Earth Mother is at work.”

And your work itself was motherhood. Nurse at the birthing center of a small hospital two towns over, you smiled calmly at the mystery of pain and blood by which Nature makes one into two, makes us each into the legacy of motherhood.

From that red farmhouse, and then from your own house on Windsor hill, you made your own children the special beneficiaries of that brimming motherliness with which Nature flooded you. Your little station-wagon, with baby-seat, was crammed with fishing rods, balls and bats and gloves, sled, skates and skis, depending on the season; a dozen bags of groceries and junk food, depending on the day; and some, or all, of your frolicking, boisterous brood (Patrick, Jonah, Jessica, Sarah), depending on the mother’s mission.
That little buggy seemed to wheel so gently, so naturally over the winding roads of our breasty Vermont. When I would see you drive past I would feel something special was Right in our little town: That Mother, that Nature, was at work.

You were not a silk and satin mother, Irene, even though you were softness and grace itself. You got under the car and changed the oil. You hauled bales of children’s clothes to the washer and bales of hay to the barn. In winter you thwarted frozen trough by hauling water in gallon jugs to the horses every day. If the electricity went out, you lit candles and made a game of coping with ten dark rooms and three staircases. You stoked a wood fire with the best of them, and all this with a smile and those twinkling eyes. Even in moments of exasperation your severest epithet loosed upon the world came out “Fiddlesticks!”

If dinner dishes didn’t get done it was because you knew what was more important: Cuddling on the couch with Patrick; fishing for Jonah; a drive to a friend’s for Jessica; or ice-cream down-street for everyone! Let’s go!

Dishes could wait till the kids went to bed. Dishes didn’t need a mother.

You’d sleep for an hour or so after the kids went to bed before you headed for the hospital a 10:30. You’d drive home in the morning at seven, get the kids fed and dressed and off to school and day-care, then –dog tired –you’d do your errands at the Post Office and bank, bidding the tellers good morning by announcing, “Good night, ladies, I’m going home to bed.”

When I came to live with you and Carol and the kids in the winter of ’85 the snow was a foot deep and the temperature below zero in South Royalton. I was recovering from watching life and death pumped into my mother in an Oregon Intensive Care Unit for four months, and the last thing in the world I wanted to do was think about hospitals. For me they were places of sickness and death.

You changed that. Birth, birth, birth; bringing forth, issuing into fullness ---these were the offices of your life, these were the beats of your heart.

Once I saw you pluck some lifeless thorns and grasses from the roadside and transform them into an elegant centerpiece for the big, varnished cable-spool we used as a round kitchen table in the red house.

Irene, you have been ripped up on the roadside and I could stay in the anger.

I could.

But anger would poison your legacy: Anger shrinks. Anger dries. Anger shrivels and starves. For you to live now, Irene, we must let you be born of this world’s blood and pain into the message of your new life in us: “All is well, mothering spirit is at work.”

With Love,


Paul

Paul Keane
Master of Divinity
Yale University


Class of 1980


South Royalton, Vermont
November 2, 1987

* Dog Due

The development of breed standards in the late nineteenth century was an explicit attempt to give dog show judges a basis for awarding places. It was an implicit attempt to create dog fancy as a sort of connoisseurship in which extremely fine points bore great significance to those in the know. There is of course a certain phoniness to any sort of connoisseurship, whether it is in wine tasting or the cultivated admiration of fine painting, but the highly arbitrary nature of dog breed standards  ---  and their tendency to change every few years --- carried with it the frank implication that this was phonier, or at least more arbitrary, than most.
(p.223)


The Truth About Dogs


by


Stephen Budiansky

* "Violence Against the Past": Baldacchino Barbarism

The Empire Strikes Back : 

Rome and Us

by

Adam Kirsch

The New Yorker,  January 9, 2012

"For Hughes, [Robert Hughes, author of Rome: A Cultural, Visual and Personal History] the most glorious example of such Christian reconstruction came in the seventeenth century, when Gian Lorenzo Bernini was given permission to strip the bronze cladding off the Pantheon's portico, in order to melt it down for the majestic baldacchino in St. Peter's.  This, too, was a kind of violence  ---a violence against the past, committed in the name of a present that believed itself more authentic, more powerful, even than the Roman Empire." (p.74)

"Indeed, the physical fabric of Rome is perhaps the best example of Walter Benjamin's dictum 'There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.' " (p. 74)




"But today, in a post-9/11, recession-battered country, what transfixes the imagination of American writers is the end of the Empire  --- the "decline and fall"  --- that Edward Gibbon made the central moral of the whole Roman experience."  (p.68)

* Nice doggie.

"The best advice I ever received for how to react if a predatorily aggressive dog like a pit bull goes after you is just to ram your whole arm down his throat and hope he  chokes to death: better that he gets your arm than your throat." ( p. 210)

The Truth About Dogs

by Stephen Budiansky.

* Feline Prostration: The Catican, Rome

My 

cat, 

Solstice,

prostrates herself five times a day 

over the dogs' enormous water bowl, 

always genuflecting 

toward 

St. Feline's Basilica, 

Catican City, 

Rome.

* JAMIE: Yale's "Signor Gonorrhoea," XVII

Remains of 14th Century Auchinleck Castle

Boswell's family estate, Auchinleck House; edifice replaced, 18th Century

Young  James Boswell circa 1760, future 9th Laird of Auchinleck

How the Mighty are Fallen

Fifteen years after James Boswell's death in 1795 from venereal disease and alcoholism at age 55 in London, an American preacher would write a sermon against the sin of dueling, after the Vice President of the United States, Aaron Burr, killed Alexander Hamilton, in an instance of that testosterone-laden barbaric practice of ritualized murder among males who feel their honor to have been damaged: The duel.

He entitled his sermon, 

"How are the Mighty  Fallen!" 2 Samuel 1:27 

The collection at Yale's Beinecke Rare Book Library of the papers of James Boswell,  author of what is universally acknowledged as the greatest biography of all time, The Life of Samuel Johnson, contains a manuscript which was not discovered until more than a century  after Boswell's 1795 death.  The  previously unknown mansucript London Journal 1762-1763 was not published until 1950, and then courageously by Yale, unsanitized, despite the intervening reign of prudery of the British philanthropist and censor, Dr. Thomas Bowdler ------ a prudery which it fortuitously escaped by being lost for 120 years.

Cutaway of Yale's Beinecke Rare Book Library 

On the first page of this racy two-year journal (1762-1763) the twenty-two year old future Lord of Auchinleck in Scotland, writes from London, where he has escaped the leash of his domineering parents, that he intends to write honestly and frankly in his journal, after his cousin, Andrew Erskine, assures him there is no danger of self-incrimination since "I fancy you will not set down your robberies on the highway, or the murders that you commit." (p.40)


Very soon thereafter, we are treated to proof of Boswell's candor up to Erskine's hypothetical boundary of crimes: "I picked up a girl in the Strand; went into the court with intention to enjoy her in armour [prophylactic sheath]. But she had none. I toyed with her. She wondered at my size and said if I ever had a girl's maidenhead, I would make her squeak." (p. 49+)


Foolishly, he falls in love with an actress, to whom he gives the pseudonym "Louisa"in his journal,  and  who Lust leads him to believe is a lady.


Indeed, she is sympathetic when he appears to be impotent after failing to "make a triumphal entry" : She philosophizes kindly, albeit euphemistically, "'People cannot always command their spirits.' " (p.116). 


 At this time in his youthful life in London, he is socializing with the actor Garrick and the writers Sheridan and Goldsmith.  He has not yet met Dr. Johnson.  He has made a pledge to Sheridan about gambling at cards "not to play for five years" (p 127)  betraying one facet of the compulsions which will retire him to what, for us moderns, is an early grave, at 55. He is a man of his word, however, and is often the only member of Lady Northumberland's guests who does not sit at table and play cards, making him a bit socially awkward. Pity he did not make similar pledges about alcohol and promiscuity as he did to Sheriden about gambling. 


JAN. 12 1863:


After finally arranging a night alone with Louisa, he writes, "A more voluptuous night I never enjoyed. Five times I was fairly lost in supreme rapture . .  Thus was this conquest completed to my highest satisfaction." (pp. 139-41)  On another occasion soon thereafter, "I strutted up and own, considering myself as a valiant man who could gratify a lady's loving five times in a night . . ." (p. 142)


On his next liaison with Louisa he "felt his passion for Louisa much gone. I felt a degree of coldness for her and I observed an affectation about her which disgusted me. I had a strong proof of my own inconstancy of disposition, and I considered that any woman who married me must be miserable."( p.145)


So  much for the vanishing Venus.


Six days after his January 12th victory Boswell writes " I this day began to feel an unaccountable alarm of unexpected evil: a little heat in the members of my body sacred to Cupid, very like a symptom of that distemper with which Venus, when cross, takes it into her head to plague her votaries."


On January 19th, "I felt the symptoms increase , which was very confounding and very distressing to me." (.153)


That evening " Jamie" (the name his cousin Erskine calls Boswell) attends the theatre and then has a warm supper at Lady Betty's. 


" The evening was passed most cheerfully . . .  When I got home, though, then came sorrow. Too, too plain was Signor Gonorrhoea."   By Thursday, January 20th "I rose, very disconsolate, having rested very ill by the poisonous infection raging in my veins and anxiety and vexation boiling in my breast. What ! thought I, can this beautiful, this sensible, and this agreeable woman be so sadly defiled? Can corruption lodge beneath so fair a form? Can she who professed delicacy of sentiment and sincere regard for me, use me so very basely and so very cruelly? No, it is impossible. I have just got a gleet by iritating the parts too much with excessive venery. And yet these damned twinges, that scalding heat, and that deep-tinged loathsome matter are the strongest proofs of an infection." (p.155+)


Poor Jamie. 


He spends five weeks housebound, as we moderns say, taking the cure.  Then, after confronting the good Louisa, his pistress,  (freudian typo?), he proceeds in ensuing days to take four or five other street women 'for concubinage.' 


On February 20th he reflects "What I am most anxious about is to get it entirely eradicated, that I may recover perfect soundness of constitution and may not bring a race of poor, sickly human beings into the world" (p. 197)  He dies 32-years later having brought five legitimate and two illegitimate children into the world.


Wikipedia notes that Boswell, who died of alcoholism and venereal disease, contracted  gonnorhea "seventeen times" in his life.


In 1793 at the age of 53, , two years before his death, the, by-then,  9th Laird of Auchinleck writes his close friend, Temple, that he had been drinking and been robbed  "The robbery is only a few schillings; but the cut on my head and the bruises on my arms were sad things, and confined me to bed in pain, and fever, and helplessness, as a child, many days  . . . This shall be a crisis in my life: I trust I shall henceforth be a sober, regular man indeed, my indulgence in wine has, of late years especially, been excessive . . . "  (kindle 140-143) Preface:  Boswell and Erskine's Letters


(How the mighty are fallen.)


But to return to the beginning of great things: 


On May 16th, 1763 , when Jamie first meets Dr. Johnson, we can be sure from his previous scrupulous self-honesty that we are reading a writer who pens the truth. Here are his first words about the man whose life he was to immortalize over the next three decades:


 "Mr. Johnson is a man of most dreadful appearance. He is a very big man, is troubled with sore eyes, the palsy, and the king's evil. [ That is, bears the scars of scrofula. What Boswell calls palsy was rather a number of convulsive tics] (p. 260+)


Johnson and Boswell would remain friends for the next twenty-one years until 1784.

On December 13 of that year, at the age of 73, Johnson died after "seizing a knife" and stabbing his own leg to relieve swelling.

(How the mighty are fallen.)

 "It may be said that disease generally begins that equality which death completes."  Samuel Johnson

______________________________________________________________

Bibliography

http://books.google.com/books?id=C6dd3DSM2FYC&dq=isbn:0300093012

* Springtime for Wagner and Israel

I'm all for sticking to your guns. 


 For decades  Israeli orchestras have refused to play a note of Wagner on Israeli soil on the principled proposition that Wagner was an anti-Semite and that Hitler admired his music and even used it in juicing up his maddened crowds into Sieg Heil allegiance and formation. In 2011 however an ensemble from an Israeli orchestra  played a Wagner piece at the Bayreuth Festival, a world celebrated musical venue dedicated to the works of Wagner and run,until recently, by his genetic heirs.


I think the Bayreuth Israelis have got it right:  Stick to your guns but stop pointing them at yourselves.


Why ignore the Bible simply because it was composed by writers who didn't blink at those who kept slaves and was, 1500 years later, manipulated to excuse and justify slavery itself?  


If Harriet Beecher Stowe had decided to boycott references to the Bible  when she wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, the White House might have actual slaves in it today instead of the great-great- grand-daughter of emancipated slaves presiding as First Lady of the Land.


Why deny your ears the beauty of the overture to Tannhäuser or the the entrance of the Gods' into Valhalla in The Ring, simply because the genius who wrote it had despicable prejudices which were broadcast  by a megalomaniac to justify the murder of six million Jews?


Better to study the music to see what in it fanned the fires of Hitler's megalomania, than to ignore the embers that might still be burning around the world. 


Know thine enemy.


Besides, Anna Russell, below, has made a howling satire out of Wagner's The Ring  which no civilized person should pass up.
















Said about Tannhäuser


Mark Twain


I saw the last act of "Tannhäuser." I sat in the gloom and the deep stillness, waiting--one minute, two minutes, I do not know exactly how long--then the soft music of the hidden orchestra began to breathe its rich, long sighs out from under the distant stage, and by and by the drop-curtain parted in the middle and was drawn softly aside, disclosing the twilighted wood and a wayside shrine, with a white-robed girl praying and a man standing near. Presently that noble chorus of men's voices was heard approaching, and from that moment until the closing of the curtain it was music, just music--music to make one drunk with pleasure, music to make one take scrip and staff and beg his way round the globe to hear it.


Mark Twain in a Travel letter from Bayreuth