Stone Mountain: Late May

 The clouds were on the mountain, whisps of gray blending into the stone face. The mountaintop was hiding.

The forest below was dark and loud. Dark because the sky was low and the canopy is now dense. If you were taking photographs, you’d have to use a flash. Loud because every rivulet, run, creek and stream was singing.

I’m not sure the Big Dog was ever out of earshot of running water. When he was a puppy, Gunter, a German shepherd, decided that running water was running amok — it was something that needed to be herded and nipped into better behavior. He’s 8 now, between mature and old, and still chastising running water. He reminds me of Xerxes, who ordered his soldiers to whip the waters of the Hellespont.

We also heard, but never saw, a pileated woodpecker. Their calls are unmistakable.

One of the sounds we didn’t hear was the barking of squirrels. The Georgia Piedmont is wonderful habitat for squirrels, and when I finally noticed the absence of squirrel racket I wondered when we’d see a raptor.

The answer: Almost immediately.

It flashed by on a slalom through the trees, so I didn’t get a good look. I’d guess it was a Cooper’s hawk.

From one invasive to another

 The oakleaf hydrangeas are rioting all around Stone Mountain. Hydrangea quercifolia is showy: it’s a big bush — taller than I am — with cream flowers. It’s also a native.

Seeing the blossoms in the forest makes me wonder why people who love showy flowers were dissatisfied with the natives and imported plants we now consider invasive.

If you look on the forest floor, you’ll find young empress trees, Paulownia tomentosa. Picture a belt-high shrub with leaves the size of platters, rather than dinner plates. Young bigleaf magnolias have enormous leaves, but they are oblong. The leaves of empress trees are hearts.

Empress trees have a mixed reputation in the Piedmont. Some gardeners love them for their spectacular flowers. Jimmy Carter grew them. Others revile them as an invasive species that takes resources from the natives. Connecticut banned them.

I don’t know what to make of the controversy. 

The trees came from Asia to Europe in the 1830s and to the United States a decade later.

They are naturalized in the Eastern United States. They have been on American soil longer than many human families.

The fossil record shows Paulownia was once in North America but died out before Homo sapiens arrived. It’s puzzling when one invasive species encounters another.

I still don’t know what, if anything, to do about Paulownia. But if you are trying to understand how these trees got to the United States, I’d recommend the work of Dr. Whitney Adrienne Snow, a history professor at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas. Her work strikes me as a model.

• Sources: Whitney Adrienne Snow, “Ornamental crop, or invasive? The history of the Empress tree (Paulownia) in the USA”; Forests Trees and Livelihoods, 24:285-96. It’s here:

https://cdn.worldtree.eco/wp-content/uploads/Snow-2015-Ornamental-crop-or-invasive-The-history-of-the-Empress-tree-Paulownia-in-the-USA.pdf

The North Carolina Extension Service has an article here:

https://plants.ces.ncsu.edu/plants/paulownia-tomentosa/

Trying to stop the flow

 Recent notes perhaps belabored the point that breaking the connection between people and the land is a bad idea. The suffering caused when native peoples were driven from Georgia under the Indian Removal Act of 1830 was unimaginable.

The stories in history books and memoirs are horrific. But a line from a technical report about the state’s mineral springs struck me with the force of poetry:

 

The Indians are said to have considered these waters of great

medicinal value and when they were driven from the country it

is reported that they endeavored to stop the flow of the springs by

driving pegs in the fissure of the rock from which the water issued.

 

The note is about Catoosa Springs near the Tennessee border. The Cherokee people believed the waters were healing and powerful. They did not want the land and its waters to nurture the hated people who took them.

• Sources: S.W. McCallie, A Preliminary Report on the Mineral Springs of Georgia; Atlanta: Chas. P. Byrd, state printer, 1913, p. 49. This was Bulletin No. 20 in the U.S. Geological Survey. The Digital Library of Georgia has it here:

https://dlg.usg.edu/record/dlg_ggpd_s-ga-bm500-pg4-bb1-bno-p-b20

For an earlier note on the report, see “Mineral springs,” March 27, 2025.

Something between grief and gratitude

 It’s painful when an old friend dies. Having a collection of your friend’s letters and essays might not count as consolation, but it is something.

Here’s a line written by my friend Dr. Melvyn Schreiber, who died in October:

 

My kind will soon be extinct, and I like to think that will be a loss.

 

That was in a paragraph about how Melvyn loved to teach and practice medicine. Melvyn had a soft heart, but some physicians called him the conscience of the committee that ruled on medical students: thumbs up or down. Melvyn hated telling students that their dreams had derailed, but he did. He was aware of and honest about the medical profession’s capacity to do harm as well as good.

He often asked students what they were reading for pleasure and posed question about literature. He talked Shakespeare and then switched languages and talked Beethoven and Puccini. He told students they would have bad days as doctors and they needed to have an intellectual and artistic life outside of medicine to help them maintain a sense of balance.

Grief is a mysterious thing, but when you read a friend’s letters and feel gratitude … well, that’s something if it’s not consolation.

Today would have been Melvyn’s 94^th birthday. 

‘A rural looker’

 Imagine a bus ride from Wormingford to Hadleigh in Sussex. It’s a bit more than 13 miles. We’re going by bus because one of the passengers is the writer Ronald Blythe, who doesn’t drive.

As the bus travels through the countryside, Blythe notices the wild teasel, Dipsacus fullonum, growing in a field.

Blythe notices it because he expects it to be there. He’s been filling out the Wild Flower Society’s registry for years. He knows what native plants grow on what farms, although he sometimes wonders whether it’s worth all the trouble.

 

But one feels guilty when one ceases to take note of plants. Those who did so incurred the wrath of John Clare. He was a rural looker. Nothing growing, flying, running, swimming, taking to its bed in autumn escaped his eye, and he would lash out at villagers who stumped to and fro in Helpston, apparently not seeing a thing.

 

The fellow sitting next to Blythe on the bus doesn’t notice the bank of wild teasel and apparently is one of those people who doesn’t see a thing. Unlike the poet John Clare, Blythe doesn’t lash out. He keeps his thoughts to himself and goes on.

In Hadleigh, the passengers look at the shoppers on the streets and rustle for their things. When the bus turns, Blythe thinks about the Rev. Rowland Taylor, who was led down Angel Street to be burned at the stake in 1554. Taylor, a student of Erasmus, believed in education. The town was full of weavers in those days, and Taylor was so diligent about the church’s responsibilities for educating the common people that wits claimed Hadleigh was a little university town.

Blythe is lost in thought about the cruelty of religious wars and the damage done to working people  when zealots come to power.

The fellow sitting next to Blythe doesn’t know any of that history and so is not thinking about any of those things. He’s just glad the bus trip is over.

Imagine two human beings, sitting side by side, doing something as ordinary as taking a bus ride to a market town to do some shopping. One is engaged, thinking about what he’s seeing, thinking about what it’s like to live in the place he calls home.

The other has been on the same bus ride and is bored.

Two people can live similar lives in a way. One finds it fascinating, and the other is tired of it. I want to sit next to the guy who’s fascinated.

Blythe, who died aged 100 in 2023, is the kind of writer I like to read.

• Source: Ronald Blythe, Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside; London: John Murray, 2022, p. 393.

Remembering Isaac Rosenberg

 How to observe Memorial Day?

When in doubt, let the poets speak.

Isaac Rosenberg, a British painter and a poet, told friends he didn’t sign up for the Great War for patriotic reasons. He thought everyone enlisted for the same reason: The country was in trouble, and people wanted to get it over.

Rosenberg’s “Break of Day in the Trenches” begins with these lines:

 

The darkness crumbles away.

It is the same old druid Time as ever,

Only a live thing leaps my hand,

A queer sardonic rat,

As I pull the parapet’s poppy

To stick behind my ear.

 

The poet says the rat seems to like his chances for living better than those of the soldiers.

Rosenberg was killed April 1, 1918.

• Isaac Rosenberg, “Break of Day in the Trenches”; Poetry Magazine, December 1916. It’s available here:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/13535/break-of-day-in-the-trenches

A birthplace in ashes

 Ronald Blythe grew up in a family of farm laborers in East Anglia between the world wars. Farm laborers were horribly poor in the decades before they finally disappeared.

Wages were low, and housing was spartan. The house Blythe was born in burned down. As an older man, he visited the place and wrote these lines:

 

I would have been three or four when we moved. All I can remember was the night when a wild swan came down the chimney and beat about the papered bedroom in terror, creating havoc, they say. My parents’ shouts remain in my ears like an equal terror.

The house was thatched, and birds and rats slept in its roof. No country person had a dwelling all to himself then. 

 

Farm hands by the hundreds worked the fields, tending and harvesting crops before machines and economics drove them into the cities. The farm workers didn’t just contribute to the rural communities. They were the communities. They supported the church, sent their kids to school and the village merchants. When all those workers and their families were gone, rural communities collapsed.

Similar forces were at work in this country. A lot of the places where the political climate is most irrational are rural places that once had thriving communities based on agriculture. Those left behind are beyond angry.

Blythe had no nostalgia for the kind of labor that farms required in the old days. But something was lost when the connection between ordinary people and the land was severed.

• Source: Ronald Blythe, Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside; London: John Murray, 2022, p. 437.

A shower, but not rain

 After it had rained all night, the skies cleared early. By the time we got into the woods, the sky was blue.

You wouldn’t think you’d need a hat, but you do.

The winds came up — 17 mph, the meteorologists said later — and all the water still clinging to leaves and limbs came down.

You can’t really say it was rain, but it was a heavy shower. You still need a hat.

 

A luna moth

 I thought it was a tulip tree blossom knocked down by the winds. It was a luna moth, Actias luna. It was the shade of green that reminded me of tulip tree blossoms.

The guidebooks say luna moths frequently have a 4.5-inch wingspan, but this one was closer to 6.

The moth’s long tails have puzzled biologists. They spin and flap behind the moth’s body, kind of like a wobbly propeller. Scientists figured out that the tails are acoustic deflectors.

Bats hunt by echolocation. They emit sounds that bounce off prospective targets, allowing the bats to find their prey.

If the bat is using radar, the moth is using stealth technology.

Checking on the river

 We went to see how the South River was doing and found it fast and red.

The rains have been relentless, and the current was carrying Georgia clay toward the Atlantic. The current was deadly fast. Large snags and a basketball went by.

On Alexander Lake, this year’s goslings were swimming with their parents. Some Canadian geese stay on the lake year-round. We saw two pairs of adults, each with four little ones. It looked like battleships herding destroyers.

We walked through woods where the rangers had burned the underbrush a couple of years ago. The forest floor, once brown with rotting leaves and pine needles, was as green as Ireland or Tennessee, whichever is greener. Native muscadine vines and invasive Japanese stilt grass were growing among the pines and hardwoods. The trees still bear scorch marks, some to an alarming height.

I remember an old forester in Texas, scoffing at the phrase “controlled burn.” In his mind, people who believed that such a concept was possible could not be reasoned with or talked to.

Armchair travel

 A friend asked about my desire to travel. I didn’t know what to say, other than that desire has changed.

I traveled in younger days. I was always in a rush to see as much as I could. I don’t have a desire to do that.

I’m partial to my own place and neighborhood these days. I like our garden and the woods nearby.

If I traveled far, I think I’d visit places tourists don’t think about. And instead of rushing from one place to another, I’d just sit in one place until it was time to go home.

The village of Discoed in the United Kingdon might be such a place. The ancient name of the place was Ditchecot or Dishcot, meaning cottage near the dyke. People were referring to Offa’s Dyke, said to have been built by the Mercians to keep the Celts out. The cottage was on the eastern side —the English side — of the earthworks. I know nothing of the Welsh-English border, but if it’s like the Mexico-Texas border it’s more fluid than most people imagine.

I’ve been reading about Discoed after seeing a reference to the village church, St. Michael’s. It has a circular churchyard with a wellspring just outside the gate. To the north is an ancient yew, 35 feet around. People say the tree could be 5,000 years old.

I can no longer imagine going through all the security at the airport, much less flying halfway across the world. But I can imagine sitting under that tree.

Following the sage

 The clouds were hanging low on Stone Mountain, and we felt a few raindrops before we got into the woods.

Before an outing, humans tend to worry. The worries are often about weather, gear and supplies, but the possibilities are endless.

Dogs are always ready to get on with it. We had good sense to follow the dog. It was a little wet, but the woods are beautiful in May.

It leads to thinking

 I’m interested in how people start writing, which is largely the story of how people start thinking.

The American poet William Stafford got up at 4 a.m., went to his place and began by making a few notes on the events of the previous day. Those sparse notes were a prompt — something that primed the pump or got the machinery going. Pretty soon, he had abandoned the diary and was writing poetry.

Other writers do the same thing in different ways. Here’s Ronald Blythe:

 

Crack of dawn. Remove harvest spiders from bath and sink by the renowned postcard and glass method. From glacial porcelain to dewy earth in a second, what arachnidal bliss. Howls from a starving Max who hasn’t seen a square meal for at least six hours. Switch off the headlines for the great creating silence of the day. Walk through the sopping grass eating cornflakes and Thinking.

 

Explanatory notes: Max is one Blythe’s cats. Harvest spiders are the spiders that come indoors in autumn. If you don’t know how to evict spiders by trapping them under a glass jar and then sliding a piece of stiff cardboard below, you might be a spider swatter or stomper, but I hope not.

Blythe calls the routines of the day humdrum. If he starts with the smallest routines of the day, pretty soon he’s thinking and then he’s writing.

• Source: Ronald Blythe, Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside; London: John Murray, 2022, p. 334.

Aesthetics and writers

 The conversation was about authors we don’t like. My friend doesn’t like a lot of bestsellers, and he doesn’t like most of the famous authors he was told he was supposed to like.

His tastes, like mine, run toward quirky books, written by people with distinct personalities, individual voices.

I can get through a lot of literature, but for something magical to happen I must have some feeling for the writer and his or her concerns.

Years ago, I read a comment by someone who dropped in on the poet Gary Snyder. Snyder’s concern at the moment was a wildcat that had gotten into his chickens.

I can get interested in the concerns — the life, the myths, the images — of a poet like that. That doesn’t mean I like everything Snyder has written. But I can get interested in what a person like that might be doing.

Pilgrims visiting the asylum

 Every few years, I try to understand Ezra Pound. My latest stab at it involves Peter Ackroyd’s short study of the poet.

One of the things poets do is clean up the tools of language. They use language in new ways that help us imagine new possibilities. That idea is widely held, largely because of Pound. Here he is in Make It New, published in 1934, criticizing his early poetry:

 

I hadn’t in 1910 made a language. I don’t mean a language to use, but even a language to think in.

   

Pound’s language focused on images: it was rooted in imagination rather than reason.

He wrote some poems I admire.

But the other side of Pound is so catastrophic it’s barely believable. He was rabidly racist, anti-Semitic and fascist. He made treasonous broadcasts from Rome when the United States was at war with fascist Italy. He wrote countless articles and letters spreading hate and prejudice.

After the war, Pound was locked up in St. Elizabeth’s asylum. Some people thought Pound was faking insanity to avoid charges of treason. Others, including his psychiatrists, thought he was insane.

Two groups of admirers visited Pound regularly: those who admired a poet who had done groundbreaking work and those who wanted to be in the presence of a famous fascist and hate monger.

He was an icon for both kinds of pilgrims.

The state of Pound’s mind fascinated some of his visitors. The American poet Charles Olson found him coherent, correcting dates and quotations in conversations. His lawyers found him incapable of answering questions. William Carlos Williams, a physician as well as poet, noticed that Pound spoke in words and phrases — “no sentence structure worth mentioning.”

The English poet and professor John Wain compared Pound’s mind to a phonograph record:

 

He talked on and on in connected sentences and with perfect logic and persuasiveness; but if anyone interrupted him with a question it simply threw the needle out of the groove, and he fell silent for a moment, passed his hand wearily over his eyes, and then went on talking, starting from a different point.

 

Pound was able to do different things at different times. In late 1961, back in Italy, he descended into silence.

• Source: Peter Ackroyd, Ezra Pound; London: Thames and Hudson, 1987, pp. 24 and 95.

R.S. Thomas: 'Here'

 I’m just coming to the poems of R.S. Thomas, a Welsh clergyman.

He had the reputation as a Welsh nationalist and as a hater of technology. We’re not talking about cellphones. He tried a vacuum cleaner but decided the noise outweighed the convenience.  

Thomas also had a reputation of being stony and austere, a brooder, not much of a people person.

I wonder if that’s a bad rap. Thomas was one of those people who look at the forces that shaped them. I know something about that pastime, and sometimes people who think about how they were shaped seem sick in a way, as if anything less than a relentlessly upbeat mood were a serious of illness requiring therapy.   

Here are the opening two stanzas of “Here”:

 

I am a man now.
Pass your hand over my brow.
You can feel the place where the brains grow.

I am like a tree,
From my top boughs I can see
The footprints that led up to me.

 

Looking at the footprints that lead to yourself is not always a cheery business. I’d say those lines suggest introspection, not brooding.

• Source: All Poetry has the complete poem here:

https://allpoetry.com/poem/8519915-Here-by-R-S-Thomas

Owls speaking at night

 The Wise Woman asked if I could hear them, the owls calling to each other.

I could not. The hearing aids were already in their case for the night.

But later, getting up before dawn, I heard them — were the owls closer or was the house quieter? They were barred owls by their call. “Who, who are you?”

I, a lifelong reader of poets, am just finding R.S. Thomas, 1913-2000, a Welsh clergyman. He began his poem “The Other” with these lines:

 

There are nights that are so still
that I can hear the small owl
calling
far off and a fox barking
miles away.

 

The sleepless poet thinks of the nearby ocean, with its swells breaking on the long shore by the lightless village.

 

And the
thought comes
of that other being who is
awake, too,
letting our prayers break on him,
not like this for a few hours,
but for days, years, for eternity.

 

That’s Thomas’s language, not mine. But, like him, I hear the owls and somehow feel connected to something so vast I can’t imagine it.

• Source: All Poetry has a selection here of R.S. Thomas’s poems here:

https://allpoetry.com/R-S-Thomas

 “The Other” is here:

https://allpoetry.com/poem/8519921-The-Other-by-R-S-Thomas

A rabbi’s influence

 Rabbi Henry Cohen, 1863-1952, was an odd fit for Galveston. Several things set him apart from the  Texans.

He was educated. He was a native of London, and he spoke like it. He also sang English dancehall songs that his long-suffering wife thought naughty.

The rabbi was small — there was some debate about whether he reached 5 feet — and he tore around Galveston on a bicycle. He was such a bad driver he was forbidden from getting behind the wheel of a car.

He wore neat clothes — if you overlooked the pinholes made by the ash from his cigars. He wore crisp white shirts, and he wrote the names of patients at the medical school’s hospital on the starched cuffs. He insisted on seeing all the patients, regardless of faith. He said:

 

To me there is no such thing as Episcopalian scarlet fever, Catholic arthritis, or Jewish mumps.

 

When I first moved to Galveston and asked people about the place, I was surprised how often they quoted that line. Cohen’s influence could still be felt 40 years after his death.

The bit about his being a bad driver was not hyperbole. As the rabbi aged, a series of teenage boys who were members of Temple B’nai Israel were assigned to drive him.

One was Jack Miller, who became a businessman after service in World War II. Even as a teenager in the 1930s, Miller was 6-foot-1. The rabbi was impressed.

Near the end of his life, Cohen’s memory faded. When Miller would stop to visit, the rabbi couldn’t recall his name but would greet him with a joyous shout: “Six-foot-one!”

When I got to Galveston, Miller congratulated me on my new job at the newspaper. And, after some pleasantries, he said: “And now what are you going to do for the community?”

He suggested I help the Salvation Army.

Perhaps it’s because I grew up in fundamentalist churches, but I had a hard time seeing myself as a volunteer for the Salvation Army.

That’s when Miller told me he was Jewish. He said the Salvation Army operated the only homeless shelter on Galveston Island. The city had a problem caring for poor people, and so he joined the board of the Salvation Army and helped raise money. If he had to sing a chorus of “Onward, Christian Soldiers” now and then, it was a small price to pay. So he signed up. Maybe I should too.

Too often, we think of influence as something bad. We forget it can be a force for good.

The Galveston Movement

 The New York Times had an article about a new book involving the Galveston Movement, which reminded me of an old book written by a friend.

The new book, which I plan to read, is Rachel Cockerell’s Melting Point. The old one is Henry Cohen: The Life of a Frontier Rabbi by Jimmy Kessler.

Cohen, a native of London, was rabbi of Temple B’nai Isreal in Galveston, Texas from 1888 to 1949. Jimmy was named rabbi of the same congregation in 1976.

Jimmy, who received the first Ph.D. in Texas Jewish history, was on a mission to help people understand the Galveston Movement.

Long before the state of Israel, Jews were fleeing Eastern Europe. People who’d left their property behind and fled for their lives piled up on Manhattan’s East Side. The poverty and crowding were horrific, and people realized the opportunities were better in the heartland.

A plan was put in place to steer immigrants to the Midwest and Southwest.

Galveston was the point of entry, and Rabbi Cohen was the friendly face who met the refugees on the docks, offering food, train tickets inland, places to rest and Yiddish newspapers.

From 1907 to 1914, 10,000 people came through Galveston. Jimmy said that if you looked at thriving Jewish communities in places like Dallas, Kansas City and Denver, you’d find families that had come through Galveston.

It grieved Jimmy that the story wasn’t better known and he sometimes prevailed on the local newspaper to help him spread the word. He said that when he got to the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati to do research, he found 30 boxes of index cards on New York City. After a search, he found two index cards on Texas.

Jimmy retired from B’nai Isreal just before I retired from the newspaper. He died in 2022. Were he alive, he’d rejoice at news of Rachel Cockerell’s book. I rejoice with him.

• Sources: Marc Tracy, “A Jewish Promised Land in … Texas? Rachel Cockerell Had to Know More.” The New York Times, May 9, 2025. It’s here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/09/books/review/rachel-cockerell-melting-point.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Jimmy Kessler, Henry Cohen: The Life of a Frontier Rabbi; Austin: Eakin Press, 1997.

Rabbi Henry Cohen II, Kindler of Souls; Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007.

Darwin and a village parson

 Ronald Blythe tells the story of the Rev. John Stevens Henslow, who helped give Darwin his start.

Henslow was an organizer, reformer and improver. He loved putting people in positions where they could learn and better themselves. He turned Cambridge’s small botanic garden into something that helped Darwin improve his understanding of natural history. Henslow recommended Darwin for the post of naturalist aboard the Beagle.

Blythe tells the story of Henslow’s work as a country parson.

 

He arrived in Hitcham in 1837 to discover a wretched village of warring farmers and child labour, and left it with a good school, allotments, cricket and athletic clubs and a history of railway excursions, the great one being that of Thursday 27 July 1854 when he took no fewer than 287 Hitchamites to Cambridge to see his Botanic Garden.

 

Henslow wrote and published an illustrated booklet so his parishioners would understand what they were seeing when they toured the garden. He arranged for them to dine at a college. He did something to widen the horizons of people who had few prospects. Teachers will tell you that such experiences can change lives.

The usual version of this story is about a single man — Darwin — and his development as a scientific genius. Blythe’s story is about an ecosystem, rather than a person. Henslow lacked the kind of mind that allowed Darwin to see the implications of the new learning. But, as a director of the botanic garden observed, “Without Henslows there are no Darwins.”

• Source: Ronald Blythe, Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside; London: John Murray, 2022, p. 252-4.

Pound on himself and his work

 I would love to better understand the state of Ezra Pound’s mind.

Late in life, he had conversations that suggest he had at least some idea of the mess he’d made. When the novelist and short-story writer Richard Stern asked him how he was, Pound replied:

 

Senile. Wrong, wrong, wrong. I’ve always been wrong.

 

When Daniel Cory, George Santayana’s secretary, asked him how his work was going, Pound replied:

 

It’s a botch … I knew too little about so many things … I picked out this and that thing that interested me, and then jumbled them into a bag. But that’s not the way to make … a work of art.”

 

• Source: Peter Ackroyd, Ezra Pound; London: Thames and Hudson, 1987, pp. 105 and 107.

Inspiration in writing, appreciation in reading

 I suppose I have been reading more poetry recently because I’ve been thinking about a remark made by my old friend Melvyn. When he was 69, he wrote this: 

I am reading the poems of W.B. Yeats, and I can see that he is a great writer, but I cannot for the life of me enjoy poetry very much (singular exceptions, of course). The best prose seems to me more profound, more moving, more musical, even.

 

Melvyn was a great reader, mostly of fiction. But when I would talk about poets, he would just smile, as if I were hopeless. I have the same reaction when someone goes on about certain poets. I know that Edmund Spenser, T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens were great poets. Maybe one day I’ll have an epiphany that will allow me to appreciate them, but time is not on my side.

The differences in the way we humans appreciate things are mysterious to me. I don’t think “taste” covers it.

Some ancient Greek thinkers were interested in where dreams come from and speculated that artistic inspiration might come from the same source.

Here’s Carl Jung with a modern version of that idea:

 

We know that something unknown, alien, does come our way, just as we know that we do not ourselves make a dream or an inspiration, but that it somehow arises of its own accord. What does happen to us can be said emanate from mana, from a daimon, a god, or the unconscious.

 

Maybe some artists draw from wells that are so deep or remote I just can’t get to them.

• Source: C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. My note says the quotation is from “Late Thoughts.”

Eady: ‘I’m a Fool to Love You’

 I have a friend who tells me about great blues tunes, but I’ve never heard him mention blues poem.

Cornelius Eady wrote a good one. His mother would tell him about his father. She chose him

 

            After choosing a man

            Who was, as we sing it,

            Of no account.

 

And so a second choice — an opportunity for a better choice — was influenced by the perspective of a bad choice already made.

 

            Compared to this,

            My father seems, briefly,

            To be a fire escape.

            This is the way the blues works

            Its sorry wonders.

            Makes trouble look like

            A feather bed.

            Makes the wrong man’s kisses

            A healing.

 

Eady and Toi Derricotte founded Cave Canem, an organization for African American poets.

• Source: Cornelius Eady’s “I’m a Fool to Love You” is available of the Academy of American Poets site:

https://poets.org/poem/im-fool-love-you

Ivies: English and poison

 After clearing the brush out of the woodlot, I began removing the English ivy.

It’s invasive, and the place was overgrown. Cutting it doesn’t help. It must be pulled up, and it’s slow work. The typical vine is about the diameter of a pencil and might run 25 feet. But you never grab one vine: a handful is half a dozen, intertwined like cable. A cable of intertwined vines would hold my weight.

Some of the vines that ran up the trees were larger, about like the handle of a baseball bat.

The forest floor was covered in ivy, a foot deep in places. I’m trying to save the Virginia creepers, native vines that look like ivy, as I go.

The English ivy is lush, and it’s hard to see the poison ivy lurking therein.

I’ve had spots of poisoning for the past two months, but this bout will force me to stop for a few days. I’m trying to remember the remedies my grandfather used. I think he used Burow’s solution, but I also vaguely remember a homemade concoction with oatmeal.

I’m covered in calamine and wishing I had something stronger.

Carol Ann Duffy: ‘Mrs Midas’

 Carol Ann Duffy, a wonderful poet, is also a playwright. She wrote monologs in the voices of the wives of famous men.

I love “Mrs Midas,” the story of the man with the golden touch as told by his wife.

Mrs. Midas sees her husband in the garden and gradually realizes what’s going on.

 

And then he plucked

a pear from a branch – we grew Fondante d’Automne – 

and it sat in his palm, like a lightbulb. On.

I thought to myself, Is he putting fairy lights in the tree?

 

Her suspicion grows.

 

He came into the house. The doorknobs gleamed.

 

The epiphany hit her as Midas was trying to drink some wine.

 

It was then that I started to scream. He sank to his knees.

After we’d both calmed down, I finished the wine

on my own, hearing him out. I made him sit

on the other side of the room and keep his hands to himself.

I locked the cat in the cellar. I moved the phone.

The toilet I didn’t mind.

 

The enormity of what he’d done set in. And of course it’s all his fault. Male explanations involving the male decision-making process generally don’t help.

I should know that by now. When I need a reminder, this poem helps.

• Source: Carol Ann Duffy’s monologs were collected in The World’s Wife in 1999. “Mrs. Midas” is available through the Scottish Poetry Library:

https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/mrs-midas/

Proverbs as memoir

 A friend is making notes for a memoir. The next time we talk, I hope I can remember to suggest that a good place to start would be in the aphorisms, proverbs and sayings he finds himself repeating.

Aphorisms play a large role in certain kinds of lives. It would probably be revealing — and fun — to investigate where they came from.

Earlier notes in this online collection have discussed aphorisms and proverbs. I like Ronald Blythe’s definition:

 

A proverb is a form of words which one cannot get out of one’s head, and thus it constantly reinforces certain beliefs and actions.

 

That transformation from word to action sounds like biographical material to me.

• Source: Ronald Blythe, Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside; London: John Murray, 2022, p. 175

J.V. Cunningham: ‘Coffee’

 I get up before the rest of the house to drink coffee, to be quiet, to be alone and to think. It’s a ritual for many people, and J.V. Cunningham wrote a poem about it that includes these lines: 

           I have so often fled

           Wherever I could drink

           Dark coffee and there read

           More than a man would think.

 

If your notion of goodness or happiness requires some benefit for the common good, this is a waste of time. But the poet claims the coffee hour is his time.

 

           I waste it for the waste.

 

• Source: The Poems of J.V. Cunningham, edited by Timothy Steele; Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press, 1997.

Conscious idleness

 Ronald Blythe occasionally forced himself to take an idle day. No answering the phone, no worrying about the important business that absolutely had to be attended to.

I feel wonderfully well — it is the inescapable result of a conscious idleness to feel wonderfully well.

 

I am learning.

• Source: Ronald Blythe, Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside; London: John Murray, 2022, p. 213.

Hemingway: ‘Cat in the Rain’

 When, the gifted teacher asked, are you aware that you are being told a story, rather than an anecdote? When are you aware of what the story is?

Hemingway’s short story is in six sections, each of which is about 200 words long. Library of America has the story online, and I hope you’ll read it or refresh your memory.

Two Americans, George and his wife, are at an Italian hotel. It’s raining, and the wife notices a cat cowering under a table outside. She decides to rescue it. Her husband is busy reading.

Possibility No. 1: This is a story about a woman trying to rescue the cat.

On the way out, the wife sees the hotel owner. She makes a mental list of all the things she likes about the old fellow, including his attentiveness, his consideration, his desire to be of service. The comparison to her feelings about her husband goes unstated.

The hotel owner sends a maid with an umbrella to accompany the American wife. But when she gets outside, the cat is gone.

The wife is disappointed — and that feeling is strong.

It’s then that we see that Possibility No. 1 was no correct. This is not a story about a woman rescuing a cat.

This is a story about what a woman feels and wants and whether she will get what she wants in her marriage.

• Sources: “Cat in the Rain” is in Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises & Other Writings 1918–1926; New York: Library of America, 2020. It’s available here:

https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2022/07/cat-in-rain.html

I ran across it by reading Julian Girdham’s wonderful newsletter, The Fortnightly.

https://www.juliangirdham.com/blog/tag/Short+Stories

Heavy work, light rain

 The wonders of Georgia: It’s May, and we’re covering the tender plants to protect them from cold. Overnight lows are supposed to reach the 40s.

The Texas boy within me can’t quite believe it.

The cold front came with heavy mist, gentle drizzle and light rain. I was in the woodlot, pulling up English ivy. Getting rid of ivy is heavy work, and the cooler weather was nice. The mosquitoes, which came in clouds the day before, were absent. I’d forgotten how nice it is to work outdoors in light rain.

Readers and their ways

 I like interviews with people who talk about their books and reading habits.

I’m interested in the habits and the finds of all kinds of readers, but recently I was struck by how often celebrities are not that interesting when it comes to talking books.

The interesting Q&As are with good readers. Being a good reader is not the same as being famous, powerful, intelligent or educated.

Here are two bits of advice from good readers. The first is from Seneca, advising a friend to focus on one good book, or at most a few:

 

You should be extending your stay among writers whose genius is unquestionable … To be everywhere is to be nowhere. People who spend their whole life traveling abroad end up having plenty of places where they can find hospitality but no real friendships. The same must needs be the case with people who never set about acquiring an intimate acquaintanceship with any one great writer.

 

The second is from my friend Melvyn, who was still practicing medicine as an old man when he wrote these lines:

 

I’ve started reading Poor Richard’s Almanack by Benjamin Franklin, making five in all the books I’m reading at once. I do it because it pleases and enlarges me, challenging me to keep my mind fresh and active. Some say that is the secret to preventing premature serious memory loss and general decay. We’ll see.

Great readers don’t necessarily think alike.

• Sources: Seneca, Letters from a Stoic, translated by Roy Campbell; London: Penguin Books, 1975, p. 33. The unpublished note from Dr. Melvyn Schreiber was dated Aug. 22, 2000. Melvyn died in October 2024 at 93. Reading several books at a time worked for Melvyn. He was sharp and acerbic until the end. He was planning a book-buying expedition on the day he died, a detail about his life that I admire.

A book that began with a map

 I’m drawn to stories about places. Robert Louis Stevenson’s first successful novel began with a map.

Treasure Island was not his first book, but it was his first successful book. He wrote it at age 31 after a string of failures.

Stevenson was in Scotland at a place called the Late Miss McGregor’s Cottage. A schoolboy came home for the holidays “and with the aid of pen and ink and a shilling box of water colours, he had soon turned one of the rooms into a picture gallery.“ Stevenson, instead of working, joined in the play.

 

On one of these occasions, I made the map of an island; it was elaborately and (I thought) beautifully coloured; the shape of it took my fancy beyond expression; it contained harbours that pleased me like sonnets; and with the unconsciousness of the predestined, I ticketed my performance ‘Treasure Island.’  I am told there are people who do not care for maps, and find it hard to believe.

 

The map captured his imagination, and soon he had characters tromping around on it. John Silver was based on a friend. Stevenson simply deprived his friend of his finer qualities and left the raw stuff: strength, courage and quickness.

 

Such psychical surgery is, I think, a common way of ‘making character’; perhaps it is, indeed, the only way.

 

Stevenson began work on The Sea Cook, a reminder that when it comes to titles the first thought is not always the best. He wrote a chapter a day for 15 days and then was stumped. After an anguished-filled break, he picked up the manuscript again and was astonished that the story flowed. Again, a chapter a day.

 

I have said the map was the most of the plot. I might almost say it was the whole. … It is, perhaps, not often that a map figures so largely in a tale, yet it is always important.  The author must know his countryside, whether real or imaginary, like his hand; the distances, the points of the compass, the place of the sun’s rising, the behaviour of the moon, should all be beyond cavil.

 

Stevenson believed in making a map or sketch of the place before starting the narrative. If he set a scene in a house, he’d draw the floorplan.

• Source: “My First Book: ‘Treasure Island’” is in Robert Louis Stevenson, Essays on the Art of Writing; London: Chatto & Windus, 1905, pp. 111-34. Project Gutenberg has it here:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/492/492-h/492-h.htm#page111

Communing with Pantherophis obsoleta

 At Panola Mountain, a 5-foot rat snake was sunning itself on the bicycle path. The snake was sluggish and seemed to be enjoying the warmth of the sun on the concrete.

Naturalists should avoid anthropomorphism. They certainly should not hear snake voices. But I’ve been removing English ivy from the woods behind the house, and the rat snake reminded me that I might meet his kin when I’m knee deep in ivy.