Rituals

Last night my husband and I were watching--dare I confess it?--the season's final episode of Nurse Jackie. We have been fans of Edie Falco for many years, but I must say the storyline has grown exceedingly tired for me, although not for my spouse.  As a recovering alcoholic, sober for thirty years, he takes a keen interest in others' struggles for sobriety, and this season we have watched Jackie reach the end of her first year, quite a triumph.  In earlier seasons she has been shown dipping into the pills in the hospital pharmacy, making out with the pharmacist, in fact, to improve her chances for gaining the access she needs.  The tension between her honest attempt to be the best possible ER nurse possible, and we see her in action plenty of times, where her intelligence, quick, sure judgement, and her boundless compassion are magnificently on display, and her need to medicate herself was indeed dramatic and moving, although I had to ask myself from my own years working in hospitals how it was she could be so always spot on in her reactions when she must have been glazed over one way or another in reaction to her little pills.  Now she is working on sobriety, an admirable goal, but I have found it tedious going.  For whatever reason she feels she has to enlist the attention and sympathies of all her friends and family, many of whom--her older daughter and her former husband--are thoroughly disgusted with her.  My feeling is go for it, Jackie, but don't tell us all about it.  It's a boring subject, your daily psychological stance vis-a-vis mood altering drugs, and if you are going to speak up, let's talk about some of the other things that must engage your obviously so intelligent mind.  My husband is disgusted with me, claims that because I have never been addicted, have not knowledge of addiction, I cannot understand her focus.  I claim no, I do understand, yes, it must be all consuming for her, something to which she must constant attention.  But do we all have to hear about the struggle?  Struggle qua struggle is not interesting.  How does this impact on Jackie's sense of life, her daily thoughts about the other people in her life?  She has become just too self-obsessed, as her daughter angrily claims often, and I am with that little fourteen year old.  Yes, shut up, Jackie.  On the other hand, toward the close of last night's program an old man dying alone of cancer tells Jackie that he was born a Catholic, and as she would know, that never leaves you, even if you leave the Church.  At last he calls for someone to give him the last rites, and asks that Jackie do this, which is evidently permissible in that religion.  She hasn't been to Mass in a long, long time, but the next scene we see her at his bedside with the book of prayer, with the water, anointing him while intoning the ritual.  I was deeply moved, as I am by all Christian ritual, atheist as I am, a holdover from my days as a serious Episcopalian altar boy.  My husband at my side, a seriously lapsed Catholic, snorted with impatience that all the people on the screen who had for very good reasons dropped the practice of their Catholic faith, and his husband next to him, a thoughtful and serious atheist, could surrender so completely to the words and gestures.  "That's what I want at the end," I said in a choked voice.  "Oh, God," he said in exasperation.

The Party's Over

Harvard University reports a dramatic decline in students choosing to major in some one of the humanities, as well as generally lower enrollments in humanities courses.  We live in an era in which making money is an all-consuming passion; the economic decline accompanying the Great Recession has not ended,  and it has rattled everyone's nerves.  The pundits insist that no one can succeed without a college degree, students are convinced that they must study something that is somehow technical so that they can justify the enormous sums of money spent on their education.  "Technical" means knowing specifically how to do something, some strategy, technique, system.  Spending time understanding Cinquecento painting, or learning to parse the obscurities of Pindar's Odes is not the same thing.  Humanism started in northern Italy as Petrarch and others began to order their prose after the style of the Latin of Cicero and his colleagues; they no longer were simply interested in studying the grammar of the ancient languages, they wanted to assimilate the style, the mental habits, the very being of their Roman forebears; they were coming out of the enormous all pervasive intellectual fog and spiritual debilitation that the spread of the Christian Church throughout medieval Europe had induced.  Humanism was the antidote; that body of knowledge became in nineteenth century Germany a kind of science, "klassische Altertumswissenschaft" as it was called, which was imported into England and North America.  In England "classics," however, became something else, more mystical, more of a form of social identification.  The English upper classes, or rather the males of that class, learned Greek and Latin, studied the classics as their posh private schools because it was that knowledge which was to set them apart from the middle classes where boys were intended to go on in the professions or business.  Upper class boys with their Latin and Greek were destined for the upper echelons of diplomacy, imperial service, the military or the church.  A knowledge of the literature and cultures of Greek and Roman antiquity was a private language which this class could use as short hand when talking to one another.  The literature which was the focus of their study was all about males who dominated, heroes, gods, generals, Achilles, Agamemnon, Alcibiades, Apollo.  It was not ever focused on the skivvy in the kitchen or the stable boy walking the horses.  In point of fact, the stories that dominated this literature steadfastly avoided a look at those who had walk-on roles in life's stage.  In the United States of America without so rigid a class system nor the relentless need to sequester and denominate groups, little by little the study of antiquity opened up to notice that, yes, there were women whose stories were maybe back stories but which nonetheless determined the shape of the foreground if sufficient imagination were applied, yes, there were all manner of marginal men and women, some from alternative ethnicities, whose attempt to move center stage was consistently repulsed.  Somewhere along the way, the heirs of the great unwashed became the principal cohort studying in American colleges, and their need to know more about the abusive, exploiting class and their psychic needs declined.  That was the beginning of the end for the humanities.  The great psychic, social, intellectual dramas were just as real and immediate in contemporary art whatever the medium; humanism of the last two millenia was just too expensive in every way to try to retrieve or maintain.

An Afternoon On Tremont Street

My husband and I had doctors’ appointments, one for me in Quincy at 10 or so in the morning preceded by an appointment to have x-rays taken, and one for him near Kenmore Square at 4:30pm.  We decided to go together, “make a day of it, a fun outing,” the words still ring in my ears, although I forget which of us uttered them.  A search of the downtown Boston movie houses revealed that “Before Midnight” was the only acceptable film available, and since we had seen the earlier two films that Delpe and Hawke had made, and had been keen on taking this one in, the projected “outing” just got more fun.  The appointments in Quincy went smoothly, I learned many new and important things about arthritis in my knee and hip, got a cortisone injection, and sailed forth with the confidence of the guy I used to be before the awful explosion of pain in my left knee on our trip to London a few weeks ago.  We stopped in South Station simply because we were hungry and we like the grilled cheese sandwiches that are made by some concession in the train station’s waiting room.  Onward we went underground again to Park Street Station.  Armed with the knowledge that my leg and hip pains had been the direct result of too much stair climbing in London’s tube system, I resolutely determined to take escalators and elevators.  Park Street seemed to have but one measly elevator to get to which required maneuvering through a quivering mass of humanity standing precariously on a much too narrow platform between the north and southbound tracks, but find it we did, and joined the queue which consisted of among other things a young mother with one of those modern baby carriages the size of a mini pick up in which the tiny tot seemed almost lost.  With some ingenuity we all managed to board the box which carried us up to the level of the Green Line.  Here the crush of humanity resembled downtown Delhi at its peak.  Clearly no train had appeared in some time to haul off any of those waiting.  Was it the rain? Boston’s underground trains can get temperamental on bad weather days.  We had noticed on the train ride up from Quincy that the rainfall was increasingly dramatic.  The cold damp seemed to be overriding the cortisone shot in my knee, so I suggested we walk to the movie theater near Boylston on Tremont.  Outside in the rain, wind and cold, the only pleasant distraction as we tried to move along under our umbrellas was glancing at the Boston Common which in its springtime planting resembled an ambitious square in any major European city.  (As an Italian friend of mine said when first visiting me in Boston “Why do Americans make such a fuss about going to Europe when they can get the same effect by coming to Boston?”)  It was the first time I had walked along Tremont Street in maybe twenty years so I was not prepared for the dramatic increase of the student population in that area.  I guess the little old Boston ladies have all died with none to replace them; the Boston I once knew, something that always seemed so stable from 1945 until the end of the twentieth century, was evidently gone.  We entered the movie cineplex to find a great crowd in the lobby, whether sheltering from the driving rain or organizing to go in groups to some film was unclear.  They all seemed to be fifteen years old tops, and as I glanced at the array of titles on offer, I saw that except for “Before Midnight” this was indeed a center for teen action films.  After we had taken our seats in the darkened auditorium we were treated to--assaulted by is better--advertisements for television shows of varying degrees of gore and violence which were followed by previews of coming attractions for movies I did not even know existed let alone would consider going to.  Twenty minutes of unbearable views of violence, sounds of violence, abrupt visual and audial transitions, violent in themselves, almost undid me.  Then at last the film which brought us back to our senses, to civilization, urbanity, intellectuality, taste, tact, goodwill, ending ironically in the verbal psychic violence of a deeply committed married couple.  Thank you, Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke.

My Meeting With A Millennial

The internet went down in the big storm on the coast last night, and along with it, in the sweeping, driving rains that pelted our yard, down went the peonies, the stately black iris just making their debut, the taller branches of some of the rose bushes heavily laden with masses of blooms, the large open white poppies with the black centers, oh, all manner of things, which I have inspected from the window, but decline to visit closely, since it will be a mess, and it is one of those moments when I would prefer to pour concrete over the entire area and go for bits of sculpture thither and yon, indestructible (of course, I would have to design and make it).  But now the internet is back up and here it the blog I had made for today, my verbal sculpture, as it were.  ****
My husband chanced to see a yard crew working next door and called across to establish a protocol for dealing with the climbing hydrangea which covers a fence dividing the two lots.  In talking with the foreman he suddenly thought to ask him to come by to consider taking on our place and quote some rates to us.  Last evening he arrived in his shiny black pickup truck.  He was a young fellow, how young we did not immediately grasp, tall, handsome, commanding.  Unlike so many young persons today, he looked each of us directly in the eye as he firmly shook hands, standing comfortably, casually, but commandingly before us.  He walked with Richard through the various shrubbery and garden beds, me trailing along behind, and they talked garden needs, fees for doing this or that, estimations of frequency, the whole lot, in which the young man kept up a firm overview of what was the issue at each juncture of their observations of the manifold aspects of keeping our grounds and garden in trim.  Then I, who wanted to gauge him myself as a person who would deal with the flower beds as I would want it, spent a few minutes pointing out the major weeds, all of which he knew by sight, which would be what I wanted him and his crew to handle, leaving alone the great variety of other growing things, since I do not like to worry whether flowering plants will be correctly identified or pulled as possible weeds.  He understood exactly what my concerns were and reassured me that they much preferred the less is more approach whilst weeding amongst flowers.  We agreed to take his crew on in the framework of the estimated costs of various activities, weeding, hedge trimming, mowing, etc etc, when he had indicated that they would not do their tasks routinely but only when the various growing things needed tending, which means of course weeding all the times, privet hedge trimming once a month perhaps, showing an admirable understanding of the nature of his work and the needs of his clients.  As we were considering a first date for his crew he remarked that the following weekend he would be busy with his brother’s college graduation celebrations, and we casually asked him when he had graduated college, only to have him reply that he was just entering his senior year at the local town high school.  We were amazed at his maturity, his gentlemanly behavior, his social skills, and even more so when he explained that he had started his gardening work three years earlier and was pleased that it grew enough that he could bring in friends and have a real “business.”  Well, then if he is seventeen, he must have been born at the close of the twentieth century, so he is one of those celebrated Millennials or Generation Y.  All I can say is “What’s not to like?”

Winging It

I love the old academic joke that goes:
One academic meets another and asks “Have you read James Joyce’s Ulysses?  “Read it?” replies the other, “I haven’t even taught it.”
My teaching career began in earnest when I was first hired as an instructor at Wheaton College where my principal obligation was to lecture to sixty five young women on the subject of ancient Greece from the arrival of the Myceneans into the mainland of present day Greece down to the death of Alexander in 323 BCE.  That was a lot of centuries for me to cover, not to mention melding all into “the big picture.”  Trouble was I knew next to nothing about ancient history, and faked a knowledge of it because I needed the job. I stayed up nights reading James Bagnall Bury’s history of ancient Greece,  jotting down names and dates which I desperately tried to stitch into some kind of quilt that made a picture.  I was very unsuccessful; at least half the class dropped it at the end of the term.  Problem was I could not loosen my grip on the facts, like a climber scaling the face of a cliff and hanging on desperately to any rock outcropping available.  I was a bore.  A few years later I was teaching one of the sections of a freshman honors course at Yale University where I was leading my ten lads through some of the masterpieces of western literature, again way out of my depth, since I had been studying ancient Greek and Latin literature exclusively for as long as I could remember, and really knew nothing else. I had consulted the reading list before the term began, and noted that every title was familiar to me, and indeed most of them I had read in either school or college so I was confident that if I had to wing it at all, then what could go wrong since we never spent more than a couple of sessions on any one work. But when we got to Moby Dick I was stymied by the author’s verbosity, could not bring myself to read beyond the first half of narrative, lost as I was like a swimmer in the roiling turmoil of the waves of a storm tossed sea.  Oh, those sentences, they never came to an end, oh, those endless facts, detail upon detail, where was Ernest Hemingway when you needed him?  The director of Directed Studies was the famous Maynard Mack, a very august presence in the English department who chaired a meeting of all us instructors once a week to suggest the direction we might be taking in the course.  The ease with which my colleagues in the English department tossed off observations about whatever author we were discussing filled me with terror and self-loathing.  I was having such a hard time faking it.  And Professor Mack had a kind of subtext for the course which he hinted at, but firmly, as senior faculty members have a habit of doing.  Everything somehow had to suggest Christ Crucified.  Easy enough with Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, an approach I thought nonsensical but still doable, and of course you could slot any Christian work into that world view, but Moby Dick?  I mean I knew somebody got it in the end; was it the whale or Ahab?  Was it man who was Christ crucified in his fight with nature, or was it Nature which stood in for Christ crucified the victim of humankind’s rape of the natural world? You see my dilemma, and how it was like dancing on eggs somehow to suggest either possibility without denying that it might be the other.  It was a relief to read the boys’ papers and learn what happened at the end.  Dumb of me not to think to get a plot summary.  Shortly before I retired I was asked to direct a dissertation for a student in Comparative Literature whose supervising professor had gone on emergency sick leave.  Because my field was epic poetry, and I was supposed to be so learned, endowed chair and all, it did not seem to anyone a stretch that the dissertation subject was Cervantes’ Don Quixote.  Egad,I'd never read the blasted thing.  Well, here we go again. . . . .

Thanks For The Memory

Every evening when I go to my room, I meditate on the events of the day, on the items I have read in the newspaper or in some one of the journals to which I subscribe, conversations I have had with friends or neighbors, and I think of something about which I might create a blog.  But I discovered some months ago that almost without exception everything which I am able to set out in vivid prose in my head in those evening moments of retrospection have vanished completely from my consciousness when I awake in the morning.  It’s not that I only remember vaguely, no, it is that the slate has been wiped clean: there is no memory whatsoever of anything I thought or fantasized the night before.  I know now that if I don’t write down something explicit the memory cannot be reconstructed.  This loss of memory is dramatic because it is not like a film of some sort has settled on my thoughts, no, not at all; they have completely vanished, as though they never were.  I thought of this the other night when we were in a cab with a friend talking over the London musical “Top Hat” from which we had just come, and I was exclaiming over the brilliant first number of the show which all three of us had applauded and whooped over when it ended, and our friend had no memory at all of it, in fact was quite hazy about anything that had occurred in the two hour production.  As  she herself knows and will tell you, she has the early stages of senile dementia.  Am I far behind, I wonder.  Do I always remember people and incidents from the night before?  Yes, I do.  But thoughts, the ideas of the evening, they will not return.  Last night I watched the film version of Margurite Duras” “The Lover” with Tony Leung, as the wealthy Chinese playboy living in Vietnam who becomes besotted with a teenaged French girl played by Jane March.  The action of the film is essentially the story of their chance meeting, instant attraction, and his deflowering of her that evening, followed by scenes of their intense passionate encounters until circumstances force them apart.  The sexual splendor of these two actors, their uninhibited surrender of their beautiful bodies to the camera and photographer, is constantly elegant, projecting passion born of a psychological desire for closeness.  Nothing about this sexual sensual film has the slightest trace of pornography.  It is interesting, because while I cannot remember my thoughts, I could narrate and describe the visuals of this film almost scene for scene.  One would think that for someone who made his living from writing and speaking for over forty years, words rather than images would be paramount  Yet I must struggle to read the articles in the many journals to which I subscribe, sometimes having to re-read passages which I don’t get on the first take, and again so many of them are forgotten so easily that I will often pick up from the table a discarded, London Review of Books, let’s say, and be intent on my reading when suddenly it occurs to me that I have read the article a day or two earlier. 

Teaching and Learning

Once upon a time a friend of mine while serving as a graduate assistant grader at Harvard received a paper from the demonstrably brightest kid in his section on the nominal subject of the common varieties of critical response to some one of the plays of Euripides, I now forget which.  In this paper the student had constructed a drama which took place in the “green room” of the theater where Euripides’ play was being produced for the first time.  Ignore, of course, the temporal incongruity--a modern day theater as substitute for the ancient Athenian amphitheater, indeed the presence of the retiring room where professionals might be found at intermission.  Concentrate instead on the drama in which a number of critics argued bitchily and proprietarily over their assessments of Euripides’ play.  The student had caught perfectly the linguistic and intellectual habits of the members of the Harvard classics department, had suggested in this collocation that they stood in for the variety of mainstream criticism.  The paper was an eccentric intellectual tour de force that only a truly sympathetic reader could have appreciated.  How would the remote control online grader/reader in the MOOCs course being proposed as the salvation of American education have responded to something like that, if indeed it was a human being and not a computer reading the offering?  Or what would be the on-line computerized reaction to the very bright, very eccentric Boston University student who gave me his paper one day late which he brought to my office on a tray carefully folded to fit between the top and bottom of a hamburger bun sitting on a plate between three milkshakes, one red, one white, one blue, to celebrate the impending bicentennial celebration the following week?  How would the computer course coordinators have dealt with my surprise appearance in a 100 person lecture course in a New Hampshire college classroom where I was scheduled to give a major endowed lecture that evening at the moment when the class was starting their reading of Euripides’ Medea, and I, asked to say a few words off the top of my head, gave one of the most impassioned assessments and interpretations of that play that ever occurred to me, which fifty minutes later ended and after a moment of astounded silence on the part of the teacher, the students, not to mention the impromptu speaker, was rewarded with a standing ovation and bursts of cheering?  What about the extraordinary difference in classroom behaviors in an ordinary freshman class at Lehman College up in the Bronx where the students are still getting around to understanding that a high school class where the object is to defy and upset the teacher is not going to happen at the university where the gravitas and knowledge of the professor demands an intellectual obedience which translates itself immediately into a certain adult behavior and posture in the classroom?  They only get beaten into shape, as it were, by the harsh questions tossed at them by the professor, by his hauteur, his froideur, his insolent disparaging of their ignorant responses.  They learn that adult intellectual life is not a joke, not a game, that learning demands constant respect as they had never seen before.  The computer does not teach that.