IF I COULD UNDERSTAND A LITTLE MORE

• April is the cruellest month, breeding
  Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
  Memory and desire, stirring
  Dull roots with spring rain.
  Winter kept us warm, covering
  Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
  A little life with dried tubers.
  • T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (opening lines)

August is the cruelest month; April can just get over itself. These last few days (and, for me, weeks) have that shuddering death rattle that big American cars of the bad old days made when you turned them off. There may not be lilacs mixing memory and desire, but the zucchini are overabundant and tiresome with too much zest for existence in this existential climate. (I harvested a four pounder last night.)

While watering my dwindling and much neglected garden last night, I noticed the autumnal gold as an undertone to the sunset. Of course, before what passes for Fall and Winter here arrives, we have to go through some more blazing days of ridiculous heat and misery. The weather report for the week is brutal.

Living with my mother is a lot of listlessness. I seem to have an attraction or sensitivity to melancholy and the sad ridiculousness of life. I see myself giving in to the many shortcomings I have learned from her, not the least of which is procrastination and helplessness. (I do believe I have mentioned these before.) 

It's very hard to know "where" she is in her thinking. Perhaps my negativity and bullying have made her retreat even more. She has moments of engagement and being very present. Left to her own devices, she sleeps, not because she is unwell, but because she doesn't know what else to do.

I don't know if I can write myself out of isolation and my personal systemic despair. I generally feel somewhat better when I am in regular touch with this writing and you. Since the Fall of the American Empire became so clear to us last year, many of us feel a constant stress and anxiety about our powerlessness. And a kind of hypnotized inertia at the sight and experience of so much stupidity, hatred, greed, and sociopathology. 

Don't you sometimes yearn for the illusions and hopes of your younger years? Possibilities for redemption and such? At least youthful naïevetè could power you through things. 

My Kermit Place Readers of Brooklyn chose Middlemarch as the summer read. Having read it many years ago, I did not apply myself to re-reading with much enthusiasm. However, I did buy a new copy and desultorily dragged it around. And then it snagged me. SO. MUCH. FUN. Admittedly, it requires more attention than most books I read, but so well-rewarded. Very much worth all the effort. It's very very witty and wise. A selection of my book-darted favorites:

"Oh, I am not angry except for the ways of the world. I do like to be spoken to as if I had common-sense. I really often feel as if I could understand a little more than I ever hear even from young gentlemen who have been to college ..."

"Oh, I have an easy life—by comparison. I have tried being a teacher, and I think am not fit for that: my mind is too fond of wandering on its own way. I think any hardship is better than pretending to do what one is paid for, and never really doing it."

"... but whatever else remained the same, the light had changed and you cannot find the pearly dawn at noon."


"On both occasions Fred had felt confident that he should meet the bill himself, having ample funds at disposal in his own hopefulness. You will hardly demand that his confidence should have a basis in external facts; such confidence, we know, is something less coarse and materialistic; it is a comfortable disposition leading us to expect that the wisdom of providence or the folly of our friends, the mystery of luck, or the still greater mystery of our high individual value in the universe, will bring about agreeable issues, such as are consistent with our good taste in costume, and our general preference for the best style of things."

"With a favor to ask we review our list of friends, do justice to their more amiable qualities, forgive their little offenses, and concerning each in turn, try to arrive at the conclusion that he will be eager to oblige us, our own eagerness to be obliged as communicable as other warmth. Still there is always a certain number who are dismissed as but moderately eager until the others have refused; and as it happened that Fred checked off all his friends but one, on the ground that applying to them would be disagreeable; being implicitly convinced that he at least (whatever might be maintained about mankind generally) had a right to be free from anything disagreeable. That he should ever fall into a thoroughly unpleasant position—wear trousers shrunk with washing, eat cold mutton, having to walk for want of a horse, or to "duck under" in any sort of way—was an absurdity irreconcilable with those cheerful intuitions implanted in him by nature. ..."

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Enough I suppose for the moment. Janet is rattling around, wanting to talk to me. This is why writing is a challenge: I prefer to write in the morning, but I get interrupted and then must chase her around to get her out the door. Enough excuses. Where there is a will, we do hear there is a way. And then there is this.

I leave with still another quote from a book I picked up, not sure where I heard about it, Young Radicals in the War for American Ideals. The author is co-author of Hamilton: The Revolution so it has a light rather than an academic touch. 

"After all, it is one of the principals of our nation (as of this writing, anyway) that Americanness isn't a function of race or religion or country of origin, but a willingness to join in a common national project, to uphold certain democratic ideals. In each generation, new conditions make us interpret those ideals in new ways. We are always reconsidering what equality means, how freedom may be used, and what we owe to one another. But the ideals themselves persist.

— Jeremy McCarter