Category Archives: Meditations

Reading Boswell

Over the past ten years, I’ve been desultorily reading Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Today we’d call it a masterpiece of non-fiction that combines psychological insight, reportage, collage, anecdote, and narrative. But really, it’s a book about the moral and spiritual life of a public intellectual.

Last night, I came to this passage:

1777: Ætat. 68.]–In 1777, it appears from his Prayers and Meditations, that Johnson suffered much from a state of mind “unsettled and perplexed,” and from that constitutional gloom, which, together with his extreme humility and anxiety with regard to his religious state, made him contemplate himself through too dark and unfavourable a medium. It may be said of him, the he “saw God in the clouds.” Certain we may be of his injustice to himself in the following lamentable paragraph, which it is painful to think came from the contrite heart of this great man, to whose labors the world is so much indebted: “When I survey my past life, I discover nothing but a barren waste of time, with some disorders of body, and disturbances of the mind, very near to madness, which I hope He that made me will suffer to extenuate many faults, and excuse many deficiencies.” …

If Boswell were writing today, he would no doubt attempt to psychoanalyze Johnson; he would find that Johnson lacked sexual outlet following the untimely death of his wife, that Johnson’s “constitutional gloom” was in fact a clinical depression which could have been cleared up with a mood-elevating drug, that Johnson had Tourette’s Syndrome and obsessive-compulsive disorder, and that the disability of being blind in one eye (the result of a childhood bout with scrofula) affected him throughout his life. And if Boswell lived here in the United States, he probably would have gotten infected with our national mythology that the “pursuit of happiness” is the highest good, and he would have recommended a combination of psychoanalysis and happy consumerism to end Johnson’s woes.

I don’t know about you, but I certainly have surveyed my own life and thought, What a barren waste of time! –How little I have done (nothing, really) to leave the world better than it was I came into it! Better to say what is true than hide behind a bland psychologizing:– The usual liberal psychotherapy provides a pitifully meager answer to the question, How ought I to live out my life? Nor do the conservative platitudes of our time offer anything more; they just cloak psychology and pointless pursuit of happiness in strident nationalism or religious excess.

So we find more and more essentially sane people getting diagnosed as crazy-depressed and dosed up with anti-depressants. Our public discourse doesn’t allow us to carefully and honestly survey our lives, let alone admit that when we do survey our lives we are likely to find a good deal that is barren. Last night I took a long walk, thinking about what I’ve done with my life; and I found much that was barren. Anyone who is honest would find the same. What to do? Having already rejected strident nationalism, prosperity theology, religious fundamentalism, bland psychotherapy, over-medication, happiness through consumption, and a few other pointless things, I settled on some good honest soul-searching. I was not particularly happy to do so, and it’s never pleasant to realize that the barrenness of one’s own life is in part a reflection of the barrenness of public life. My deficiencies and faults didn’t go away. But when I went to sleep, my dreams were rich and untroubled, and I awakened with renewed energy.

Spring watch

Suddenly, two days ago, I started seeing the cormorants again. They disappeared from New Bedford harbor late last fall, were gone all winter, and then on Sunday I saw this big black bird pop up from swimming underwater: a cormorant, who was just as surprised to see me as I was to see it, and who immediately began swimming away from me, fast.

The day before that, Saturday, I saw three or four Red-breasted Mergansers. They came to the harbor last fall, and have been here ever since. But since then, I haven’t seen a one. It’s almost as if the cormorants and the mergansers traded places. The wintering waterfowl have gradually been leaving the harbor since March. The last time I saw a Common Loon was early last week, swimming around Fish Island, resplendent in his summer plumage. I have to say, I’m sad that they’re gone for the year.

It’s mating season for Herring Gulls. The gulls who live on the roof of the building next to our apartment have been getting noisy at night, so noisy that they have awakened me a number of times. One night last week, a terrible screeching squabble woke me up, then I heard something hit the roof — thunk! — and slide down, scrabbling and scraping. Mating season must be a rough time when you’re a gull.

May 26, 2007 — I’ve added a video showing a number of Herring Gull nests that I’ve discovered on the rooftops of New Bedford, including the nest on our roof.

Spring watch

Three years ago, we lived a mile away from Verrill Farm in Concord, Massachusetts. We used to walk down and buy our vegetables there. In the winter, they’d bring in vegetables from California or Florida, but at about this time of year they would start having some of their own vegetables for sale.

I drove up to see Carol’s parents this afternoon, and I took the route that went by Verrill’s Farm. Sure enough, they had their own spinach on sale, the first vegetables out of their greenhouse: nice, crisp, curly, succulent, bright green leaves of spinach. I bought a big bag of their spinach. By this time in the spring, I’m desperate for fresh local vegetables. The stuff they truck in from California and Florida always tastes a little limp and flat.

It’s a quarter to ten, and I just got back home. I was tempted to cook up some spinach before I went to sleep, but it’s really too late. Now I can hardly wait until tomorrow: spinach salad for lunch, steamed spinach for dinner….

Dream birds

Just before I awakened this morning, I had a particularly vivid dream. We were going somewhere in a car — my dad, my sisters, my aunt Martha and Uncle Bob. We went through a small New England seaside town; it was no more than a crossroads, really; then turned off the main road, and down a badly maintained road through abandoned farmland:– a stone wall on one side, rank field grass just starting to turn green again after winter. It was a gray April day, windy but warm enough that we only needed light jackets. We found ourselves on a flat promontory, long grass with puddles here and there, and at the edge dark granite bluffs dropped down into the heaving waves of the gray Atlantic.

There were quite a few other people around, and a few other cars. Dad and my sisters and aunt Martha went off somewhere in the car (to find a picnic site?). Uncle Bob and I walked around the field, picking our way through puddles, talking about something or other. We passed by some bushes, and there on the other side of the bushes was a little hollow, and half a dozen striking birds that I had never seen before except in field guides: gray birds waddling hurriedly away from us, with black heads and crests, and black mantle, the scapulars an iridescent green bordered top and bottom with black. Uncle Bob would keep talking, until I managed to draw his attention to the birds, and of course he knew exactly what they were. Off in the undergrowth I saw another bird I didn’t know, chicken-like, bold black and white pattern with some rusty touches on wings and head; but Uncle Bob didn’t see them, and I didn’t get a good look at them. The gray birds, though — I knew I could remember them well enough to identify them once I got my hands on a field guide, and I knew they would be a new bird for my life list.

Then I woke up.

Carol was talking on the phone somewhere. I went to the bathroom. The dream just wouldn’t go away. It was so convincing, so vivid, that I thought I must have seen those birds in a field guide somewhere, and managed to insert them into a dream. I went out into our sunny living room to get a couple of field guides — Peterson’s Field Guide to the Birds and the National Geographic Field Guide to North American Birds — and I leafed through them. The birds in my dream weren’t in either field guide. I thought, perhaps it was a Eurasian bird, one that I had seen in some European field guide. Slowly I realized that I was not going to find that bird in any field guide; except maybe in a field guide in my dreams, some other night when I am asleep.

I was vividly certain of the existence of these birds when I awoke. These birds do not exist in the world described by ornithology. In some sense, these two statements are equally “true” — in the sense that even though the birds weren’t real, they were an object of my consciousness:

For if we vary our factual world in free fantasy, carrying it over into random conceivable worlds, we are implicitly varying ourselves whose environment the world is: we each change ourselves into a possible subjectivity, whose environment would always have to be the world that was thought of, as a world of its [the subjectivity’s] possible experiences, possible theoretical evidences, possible practical life. [p. 28 of “Phenomenology” by Edmund Husserl, 1927]

As soon as I fully awakened, I gave up trying to find the dream birds in the waking-world field guides. But when I fall asleep tonight, my dreaming self won’t be surprised to find myself back on that rocky promontory next to the Atlantic Ocean, dream binoculars around my neck, dream-world field guides in hand, beating the bushes to find those gray and black dream birds with the iridescent green stripe running down their sides. And this time I will positively identify them.

The club janitor

In “The Club Secretary,” a story by Lord Dunsany, the narrator finds himself in the afterlife, wandering the buildings and the grounds of an exclusive club, just for great poets who have died. It sounds like just the sort of club where you would like to be able to spend all eternity, listening to conversations between, say, Shakespeare and Keats; but of course, the only way to gain admittance is to have written great poetry.

The narrator strikes up a conversation with the club secretary. It’s an enviable post, and how did he become the club’s secretary? He had written just one line of great poetry — “A rose-red city, half old as time” — not enough for him to gain admittance as a full member, but enough to get him the post as secretary.

I read that story more than thirty years ago, and I still fantasize about such a club. Who would make it in as a full member? And who else would be on staff? I know I would never qualify, but I suspect Edwin Markham would be one of the janitors, because of one quatrain that he wrote:

They drew a circle that shut me out —
Heretic, a rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took them in.

Even though the rest of Markham’s poetry is unreadable, I think this short verse is actually pretty good; the sentiment is not as trite as it sounds at first, and it’s a poem that has stuck with me for some years now. Although I admit I’m biassed because Markham was a Universalist, and for me this quatrain sums up the best of the Universalist impulse towards radical love.

And if there’s a great poets club in the afterlife, do you think there might be a non-fiction writers club? I would never gain admittance as a full member, but if I’m lucky someday I might write one paragraph of non-fiction good enough to get me a job as one of the groundskeepers.

Daffodils

Of course I ordered flowers for Easter. Every year, people in our church put up six or seven dollars for a pot of daffodils, or an Easter lily, or a pot of tulips, and the order of service on Easter Sunday prints the dedications for the flowers: In memory of the wonder dog; In honor of family; For my sister who’s fighting cancer. I ordered three pots of daffodils in memory of Mom. Then on Palm Sunday, you get to see all the flowers: banks of daffodils and lilies and tulips at the front of the church. No hyacinths, though, because our minister is allergic to them and wouldn’t be able to preach.

After the Easter service, everyone takes their flowers home. My three pots of daffodils wound up on the kitchen counter behind the stove. Most of the flowers started to fade over the next few days, gradually fading to dull yellow. But I kept watering the plants, and three last buds burst into bloom right after Easter.

Now, a week and a half later, the daffodils are looking pretty sad. The tall green leaves have gone brown at the tips, the stalks are sagging and falling over, and most of the blossoms have shrunk and withered. I thought about trimming back the plants, letting the bulbs dry out and rest so I could plant them next fall.

But those three last blossoms are now if full bloom: three vividly yellow flowers in amongst a score of dull, withered flowers. I decided to let the daffodils alone, and to admire the last flowers until they, too, withered away to nothing.

Spring?

I was going to be a good doobie, and write some more about the concept of “post-Christendom.” But it’s a rainy, nasty, raw, miserable night out, and I just don’t have the energy to do much of anything except sit and stare at the computer screen and not write.

Our regular letter carrier came into the church office this morning and said, “Looks like we’re getting our winter this spring.” So far, April has been colder, wetter, and nastier than January was around these parts. And snow has been forecast for tomorrow morning.

Someone remind me why we thought it would be a good idea to move back to New England.

Oblivious

Carol and I were sitting across from each other at the kitchen table. She was working on her book and listening to National Public Radio. I was reading the New York Times Book Review.

Carol laughed and said something.

“What?” I said distractedly, and kept on reading.

She repeated what she had said. It still didn’t register with me. I think it had to do with something she had heard on the radio.

Finally I looked up. “Uhn,” I said.

It’s not that I was intentionally ignoring Carol, it’s just that when I am reading I practically go into a trance state, and I am not particularly aware of the world around me.

Carol knows this, and politely ignored the fact that I had ignored her. She settled back into her writing, and I settled back into my reading.

Sometimes I become so oblivious of the world around me that I amaze myself. What I lack in mindfulness, I make up for in power of concentration.

Roadkill revelation

If you live in the city, looking at roadkill is a good way to figure out which larger animals live nearby. Mostly, the only roadkill I see is dead gulls. So I was surprised to come across a dead rabbit out on Pope’s Island. The carcass was fairly old — most of the flesh had been picked out, and it was pretty dry. I hadn’t seen it before because I usually leave the road and walk through the small park.

How had the dead rabbit gotten there? I imagined it must have come across the bridge at night, when there weren’t many cars. And how long had it lived on the island? Were there other rabbits living there? I have never seen a rabbit on Pope’s Island, and it didn’t seem possible that rabbits would want to live on a small island that is mostly parking lot and industrial buildings, with only a small park.

About two minutes later, I saw a flash of a white tail out of the corner of my eye:– a rabbit running across the grass into a clump of bushes. Obviously the rabbits have been living there all along and I just haven’t noticed them;– it took roadkill to make me notice.