October’s end: Samhain (SAH-win), and remembering when we played in Love’s Last Shift

Margaryta Yermolayeva — Witchy Art

Dear friends and readers,

The hard beginning of October has been long over, and we’ve had a couple of beautiful weeks: fall used to be my favorite time of year. I still love the light cool breezes, the whitish color of blue light in the morning and orangey-beige at dusk, the variegated colors of the leaves and trees and bushes, so that when I look out my window and see a receding block going downwards on both sides and in the far distance criss-crossing the street and sky yet more soft melting variety of intermingled trees. It reminds me why I quite like being alive. And I’ve put up a cheering picture: Witchy Art by Margaryta Yermolayeva.

Late last week we had frightening news: Rob, Laura’s husband, has developed a second form of cancer. From last time we knew he has a gene that makes him susceptible to cancer, and that is why he has tests twice a year; it’s been over 9 years since the last. Then Laura said it was skin (Squamous) cancer. No time was wasted and today he had an all-day operation. The cancer was in his face, and it was cut out; they then follow trails of cancer cells; when these gave out, there was said to be no cancer left, and they proceeded to do skin grafts on his face, then a face-lift, and at the close stitches by his nose and moustache. 8 hours. This is called mohs surgery, and has an excellent cure rate. Laura appears to have been in the hospital near him (with laptop to do her work) throughout and brought him home tonight. It seems no radiation will be necessary, but he goes for tests November 9th to make sure. You will appreciate how worrying this has been.

My osteoporosis is not as bad as the doctor feared, and “all” I have to do is take a prescription pill once a week, early morning, drink lots of water for 2 hours while sitting up. I too will have tests, but in 6 months time.

Two of the courses I’m taking (at Politics and Prose bookshop zoom space, on James Baldwin’s writing, on George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda) have come to an end — I’m still reading the latter with a group of friends on FB, and one day spontaneously wrote a defense of Walter Scott’s art (he is so influential on the depiction of the Jewish characters). I was asked to give a brief or short talk on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s stunning book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin in a “The Coming of the Civil War” course at OLLI at AU. It went over very well and now I’ve turned the talk into a brief essay blog explaining why it hit such an emotional nerve at the time and why it continues to elicit strong responses from readers, and I put my paper “Jane Austen and Anne Finch’s work in Manuscript and 21st century Manuscript Culture” on academia.edu and then linked it to an explanatory blog after I found I was not able to go to the EC/ASECS gathering after all. I regretted not being able to to the 40th anniversary party of OLLI at AU yesterday: again it was held into the time range when I’d have to be driving home at dusk into the dark. This is a serious disability now, for it cuts down on the small amount of real or physical social life I have. I am enjoying all the zoom classes I go to and one I teach, but know I am at the same time sadly lonely.  On Twitter.

Sometimes it seems I have such a long time ahead of me without him in the world. It’s been such a long time already. I’ve learned I can survive as long as I have my adequate income, and Izzy with me helps enormously, but still so many years perhaps to go without him.

So to tell you what has gone on with me outwardly (and inwardly), I look at what are in effect diary entries on face-book (short form entries on twitter), and can that I enjoyed for the first time two great movies: Tony Richardson’s 1960s Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner), a new superb serials (I joined Britbox!), e.g., 2022 Sherwood, an insightful serial dramatization of miners in Britain in 1984 and then 20 years later, how Thatcher succeeded in dividing and crushing them politically and personally and now they are bitter at one another and the larger society which has left them to rot — it’s on the long memories of life

Famous still of Tim Courtney running for life

Loneliness stands out as more than a brilliant film artfully, with cast famously a young Tim Courtney but also James Bolan (of Beiderbecke’s Tapes), Michael Redgrave, someone called Topsy Jane (!). I had an instinct that at the end our hero would not win the long run for the prison warden even though conventional mores would dictate this as a triumph. No, he would not be used, no matter what it cost him – partly because he knew winning would get him nothing despite vague promises. The intense depiction of poverty and class in Britain at the time; the music for Jerusalem, and the interlude of joy in sexual love at a beach — all make it fit into Angry Young Men material but also these British Social Conscience films of the 1960s. I can’t recommend this one too highly. Tony Richardson the famous director, but Alan Sillitoe wrote the story where the male lead is not a young sweet adolescent but a somewhat anti-social criminal type, and screenplay. Like Sherwood, it takes place in Nottingham; like Sherwood an ironic use of the Blake song Jerusalem.  I’ll mention Jim went to a public school where he had to play a sport, and he choose long-distance running — it does allow you solitude — escape for the time running.

The Red Bull Theater has returned to online productions (and in person at the same time: they did a dramatic reading of John Vanbrugh’s The Relapse, a witty, hard but good-natured too intelligent sequel, as it were correcting the prurient hypocritical and sentimental Love’s Last Shift by Colley Cibber, reminding me of how when Jim was 24 and I 26 we played a pair of amoral servants, he the gambling male and me the promiscuous female in just that inferior play (a great hit in the later 1690s). Here we are, 1972-73, at the Graduate Center, and I daresay it was the fall of that year:

Decades ago, when we were children — how wrinkle free is his skin, how unknowing is that smile only I know from memory. I had experienced it all right, but had no idea the complex causes, of what politics really is.  This past Monday night I sat with my copy of Vanbrugh’s play and read along. The video had a running transcript at the bottom, I could pause and re-watch, I was close up to their faces and bodies, could hear every word.

I learned that non-human animals can get very sick and die from Covid-19 too. This essay explains which animals are likeliest to get sick, the statistics on this, and which likeliest to transmit the disease to whom and get it from whom, that the supreme court might just act to protect pigs (at long last) from a short caged life. How angry I felt when the Washington Post had an editorial against allowing pigs a little enjoyable life lest it put the price of pork chops up, and someone somewhere lose a profit.

The pig is intensely relieved, feeling a puzzled gratitude

I have added the New Statesmen to my budget of subscriptions, which I hardly keep up with, but it comes in driblets each morning and so I do read it; Jim and I let our subscription lapse when we moved to Virginia as too expensive for us at that time. I am still buying books, doing things remembering that he would have appreciated this, understood that. I really felt an intense detestation of the thug woman, Liz Truss, a Thatcher without brains, enough to make me want to abjure feminism. Luckily I came across over the day Truss was still not giving in, Amia Srinivasan’s review of Andrea Dworkin’s My Name is Andrea in the LRB where both recognize the core of the subjection of woman, is male determination to control woman’s sexuality (be in charge of at least one if not more women), so felt yes, it has been of some use.

I have probably told you my winter offering, The Heroine’s Journey (a 4 week online course with 4 slender books, Atwood’s Penelopiad, Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and other adult tales, Ferrante’s Lost Daughter, and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey), and my spring one Contemporary Italian Memoirs and Novels (an 8 week onliner, three Levi’s, Natalia’s Family Lexicon, Carlo’s Christ Stopped at Eboli, Primo’s Periodic Table, and Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend) are accepted a OLLI at Mason so I will be useful for the coming year and have much to do and to enjoy. Cross fingers the second will be accepted at for the spring 10 week online course and the first for the summer 4 week online course at OLLI at AU. I am still hoping to travel with Laura and Izzy in the later spring and July — to Leeds for a Eurovision extravaganza where I don’t have to go to this event, and to San Diego comic.con where again I need not go, but stay at a beach-house. Dreams?

OTOH, my greatest fear is I’ll lose this house (and then everything in it I value). That is partly another reason why I am thinking of curtailing all travel — and won’t go unless I truly feel I’ll have a good time and won’t know the ordeal of anguish I often do for a reward not worth it every time. I sometimes think I would kill myself if I lost this peaceful refuge.

So I conclude this diary entry: Wompo has started up Foremother Postings again, and again it is slackening off, but they have made me remember one of my foremother poets, Amy Lowell and two of her poems intense moods that speak to me:

Madonna of the Evening Flowers

All day long I have been working,
Now I am tired.
I call: “Where are you?”
But there is only the oak-tree rustling in the wind.
The house is very quiet,
The sun shines in on your books,
On your scissors and thimble just put down,
But you are not there.
Suddenly I am lonely:
Where are you?
I go about searching.

Then I see you,
Standing under a spire of pale blue larkspur,
With a basket of roses on your arm.
You are cool, like silver,
And you smile.
I think the Canterbury bells are playing little tunes.

You tell me that the peonies need spraying,
That the columbines have overrun all bounds,
That the pyrus japonica should be cut back and
rounded.
You tell me these things.
But I look at you, heart of silver,
White heart-flame of polished silver,
Burning beneath the blue steeples of the larkspur,
And I long to kneel instantly at your feet,
While all about us peal the loud, sweet Te Deums of the
nbsp; Canterbury bells.

[I do work all day and late at night I do feel so desperately tired and look about me for someone, something, a book, feel the silence, long for music — and then I watch The Crown, or Outlander, or Foyle’s war where I find depths of feeling in characters to fill the emptiness of Jim’s having been devoured]

The Taxi

When I go away from you
The world beats dead
Like a slackened drum.
I call out for you against the jutted stars
And shout into the ridges of the wind.
Streets coming fast,
One after the other,
Wedge you away from me,
And the lamps of the city prick my eyes
So that I can no longer see your face.
Why should I leave you,
To wound myself upon the sharp edges of the night?

[And why should I ever go away from my memories of him, ravage myself on those knives however hidden]

Ellen about to watch the last episode of the third season of The Crown, where the two sisters, Elizabeth and Margaret confront one another after Margaret’s feeble attempt at suicide, and say they could not live without the other’s support, and must carry on both for the sake of the other …

Izzy, five years ago, at a library conference, with the patron saint of libraries, Benjamin Franklin

Vedova Parlando — What I was told in Cornwall & have been reading …

From Times Literary Supplement: Luxembourg Gardens, Paris, by Eugene Atget, c 1902  — the TLS is probably my favorite among all the periodicals I subscribe to

The anguish never ceases …

Friends,

One more about this Cornwall trip and its aftermath: I don’t let myself speak hard truth too often but once in a while I must let some full truth of feeling speak

I didn’t tell that the friend I was partly with, Stephen, confirmed my hunch about what caused esophageal cancer in Jim. After I told him much that had happened, he said, yes, when a hernia formed in Jim’s diaphragm, it became a constant irritant to that and other organs nearby. I had said how at first Kaiser gave Jim a strong prescriptive medicine that endangered his kidneys. He had been suffering terrific acid. Every three months he had to take a test to see if his kidneys were managing.

Then (they said) and over-the-counter preparations had improved enormously and why didn’t Jim try one of these. It would not threaten his kidneys so directly. As I recall at first the non-prescription pills helped, but gradually (over the years) it seemed to me Jim was eating 5 tums at a time and even several times a day. Why didn’t he go to to the doctor? For all I know Jim might have told the doctors about his suffering with acid. Until this last fatal illness, Jim would not let me come into the doctor’s office with him because he, Jim, wanted to be in charge wholly. I doubt they advised a preventative esophagectomy: he would have told me that.

Stephen implied they should have done one of these – -or something about this extraordinary condition. When I said the Kaiser people said that the hernia was not implicated, Stephen laughed and said obviously this rubbing and acid was the trigger. What is cancer but an error in replicating one’s DNA? His cells would have been constantly made sore. Stephen said the suggestions Jim’s smoking or anything else were not the culprits: alcohol insofar as it exacerbated his stomach distress — it’s a poison.

Now I know too that I didn’t contract hepitatis C 40 years ago; that is between, 1976 and 1984 when I had several hemorrhages and was given blood. That’s what the Kaiser Dr Chowla and the others all claimed. (Chowla looked at me suspiciously as if I had been taking illegal drugs. Oh no it could not be Kaiser.) So  supposedly for decades I was exacerbating my liver with alcohol while having this virus and it was still in good condition. Even she saw the improbability.

I said it was more likely three years ago when I had the semi-permanent denture on top of four implants put in my lower jaw. They said, could’t be since they have these impeccable methods. I was also on this trip rooming with a retired nurse. She snorted when I told her what Kaiser said, and replied “sloppy techniques.” Hospitals are places where people contract illness because of sloppy techniques. Of course you contracted it more recently, said she.

Kaiser doctors are ever protecting themselves against suit. Careful to protect their place in the organization.

I remember after Jim contracted this cancer my neighbor told me his father-in-law had had a preventative esophagectomy (it has some medical name) and he advised others ever after not to. He had been made miserable by it: he couldn’t eat much, and only the blandest food. Now I think to myself, he was still alive years later. Then I still (foolishly) was led to hope that perhaps the operation done then, chemotherapy and radiation would save Jim.

Now I’m thinking how long ago was that? I didn’t know the man’s age. Maybe when Jim was in his mid-40s when this hernia occurred, there was not the skill or ability to do this drastic surgery. Can anyone be sure Jim would contract cancer? they might think this measure could cause other fatal events? They might have recommended some other harsh medicine. At the time Jim was contracting diverticulitis and at each episode he’d take this super-strong stuff and suffer. It would work after a while. A surgeon did offer to remove part of Jim’s lower intestine but Jim declined “for now.” Said the medicine was working better than it had. Who knows what kinds of mistakes could happen in such surgeries?

I’m telling this now because I have been very hurt by people’s comments when I tell this. Stephen right away said, he should have gone to the doctor, and implied I was in the wrong not doing anything. He is a tactless man, his politics utterly heartless, and we hardly knew one another for real — he comprehended little of my feelings.

Others since have been more aggressive and said to me, it was Jim’s fault — or mine. A few years ago on a listserv a woman having read something I said about what had happened, pointed out that Hilary Mantel was still alive because she had been so smart about her medical conditions and aggressive and thus saved herself. I asked this woman, do you mean to say he’s dead because we were so stupid, to which she replied, if you can’t face up to the truth, that’s your look-out. She wanted to believe that if you are smart you can beat terminal illness; maybe there is none?

I did tell from early on how Jim would not go for a second opinion to a super-expensive doctor in Boston, would not take the time and put off the operation to see another who would have advised massive amounts of chemotherapy — said to be successful nowadays for some. Others it can be a disaster, but it is more and more successful, better than brutal surgery which does not stop metastasis. Then when 5 weeks after that horrendous operation was healing, and the cancer had spread, he would not try for Sloane-Kettering — a friend had offered to try for an appointment. No guarantee of course. He was by that time so weak and sick. He couldn’t face even the idea of removing his liver or parts of it after the operation he had had. I couldn’t see how I could get him to NY short of a chartered cab or plane and cab.  But this is the first time this implication his death was his or my fault was said so explicitly — by three people now. People can’t accept death as natural and to be sure Jim died hard, his body fought death tooth and nail as he was not 90 but 65, and strong before the cancer began to devour him.

I have to live with Jim’s death every day of my life, every night I go to bed. I push it from my mind by keeping so absorbed in my studies, reading, writing, movie-watching, teaching, going out to plays or whatever can absorb my mind. I distract and tire myself as best I can. Now I have this to live with.

Wyre Meadow — “Ruskin” Land — I was at the National Gallery yesterday where there was an exhibit of Ruskin’s art — I didn’t get to see it, but this image is appropriate for him (click to enlarge)

A well-meaning friend gave me an anthology of widow’s reflections called Widow’s Words, and edited by Nan Bauer-Maglin. I’ve now read many memoirs of grief, fiction, poetry, and for the most part they have helped me — I’ve felt much less alone; I’ve found that my experiences are common; some of the thoughts others have written down have helped me cope. Best thus far are Julian Barnes’s third essay in Levels of Life, Sherwin Nuland, How We Die, Jacqueline Lapidus and Lise Menu’s anthology of poetry, Widow’s Handbook. But this one makes me feel terrible. Almost all the women are upper middle class and very successful people in life; they have no troubles about money (this is very unusual for widows); they are surrounded by family and just tons of friends. When they have a gathering to commemorate the spouse, 300 people show up.

Along the way we learn how successful the husband was, often this famous scholar; one left a large archive of his papers which seems to have constituted his widow’s worst problem. She was determined to get out of the apartment but she didn’t want to throw away his life’s work in papers, document, editions, books, essays of all sorts. Finally the college she was chairman of a department at took the archive. Then we usually (not all I grant) hear how well they are doing now, how useful their existences, how busy, and most have a new partner.

Good thing I didn’t not come across this earlier: among Jim’s last coherent words to me were “I don’t want to die.”  I probably would not have killed myself reading this earlier (though it can make me feel so bad) because I learned in that first six months after Jim died that I didn’t want to die either.

I have found I am too old and ugly to attract a man; it may be that I give off signals “noli me tangere.” Do none of these women find submitting to a man sexually once again too much to ask?  Submitting by a woman is central to the experience. I don’t enjoy performing fellatio to be frank, nor anal sex. And there’s how about living your own life according to your own patterns and not having to be sure to please him or fit into his preconceptions or life patterns? They are just all buoyancy with strength enough to remain an individual …

Of course I’d have known this is not a representative book at all. Why then have I read about 3/4s of this material? Well because they are so confident, filled with a sense of their admirableness, they tell more truths in other ways: this is the first anthology I’ve read where the woman really tells the horrors of pain and suffering that the victims of some of these hugely painful fatal deteriorating diseases goes through in the US — especially when it’s cancer. They also tell of the abuse they put up with — from the hospice, from the medical establishment, not usually from the insurers (though here and there ominous comments about egregious bills are alluded to); but, what is most astonishing, from their spouse or partner. Most widows or widowers hide what they went through and do not admit to enduring as a typical experience vexation, corrosive cruel comments, denigration. In the Widow’s Handbook there are cases where the husband lied and left her broke, or without a pension or any health care but this area of emotional life is omitted. For once the “battle” is not presented as heroic and self-sustaining.

Indeed some of these people seem to me to behave like mad people, crazy.  Several of these essays tell of ceaseless toleration for pain with the implication practically until the person stops breathing and his heart ceases, that he may yet live. There is nothing they won’t do and to give up hope is what they refuse. Utter unrealism to the end. Well I suppose we may say their death is not their fault. They don’t seem to realize they are putting in for this horrendous experience. Maybe this is what is meant by that word “battle.”  It’s as if they have no other choice but to torture their bodies to the end. People are really kinder to their pets.

I remember Jim telling me once the operation was over and we did realize what a mistake this had been, “don’t let them hurt me” if I can’t protect myself from them. And I didn’t let them.

Bauer-Maglin herself has a couple of pieces where it’s clear her husband was violent bully: she seems to have looked upon this personality as admirable because so strong and effective. He left her once for a much younger woman and then came back. Since this anthology reflects her outlook, it’s not surprising that her pieces are characteristic of the whole volume. She chose people like herself that she knew — heavily New York City and east coast academics. So she too is doing splendidly well now. How could she think it would help others to have gathered women together to say how wonderful their existence still is and ever will be?

Well mine isn’t. I still endure the same ordeals that I have to encounter without Jim, and as ever (this is true when he was alive too) I do what I can, and what is hard for me doesn’t get easier. I am literally alone except for my cats most of the time. My life is mostly quiet and peaceful and sometimes pleasant and I know some enjoyments and have felt a few accomplishments (even if others would not recognize these as accomplishments because they don’t recognize me).

I remember that many widows, many people have much worse things to contend with than I do because Jim left me much better off than solvent and unexpectedly I inherited substantial (for me) savings from my mother and father, and an insurance policy intended to give me a lot if he died at 65 or before. I pay decently honest people to help me with my money, the garden, the cleaning of the house.

I have many internet and FB friends and acquaintances, lots of acquaintances from the two OLLIs and from the scholarly conferences I have gone to a couple of people carry on emailing me once in a while. I have my books, movies, this computer, my house (including nowadays a few small garden patches). My teaching is for now going very well: the people like the Booker Prize books I picked out and enjoy the films.  Unlike the lady with the archive, the world Jim and I created together — our house with everything in it  — gives me what meaning I feel, and what safety I have now. (Shall I tell you I know her and happened to tell her my attitude and her reaction was light scorn; well, if you want to delude yourself … ?) I watch Isobel bravely stalwartly carrying on. She is now at work on  a new song.

But I will never write the book I would like to write because I can’t travel by myself to do the needed research; I can’t figure out how to use “word” program so won’t send off essays to journals. I would like to do these and other things.  So I don’t need to be told the life I am driven to lead now without him is my fault, or it’s his fault that he was cut off from time and life and erased from all existence, leaving behind just the things he used and had gathered for himself and us.

A photo I took from the front part of my garden this weekend: the flowers won’t last, so I take a photo to remember: I like the dark yellow ones on the wide bush best …

One thing I cannot begin to convey with a photo is the intense relief I feel when on these trips I go into a large church or cathedral, which is cool and quiet. I feel this strongest in the central nave, and it’s most common in Anglican churches — some large formal beauty but not overdone — sitting by one of the columns not far from the usual row of high windows. I like the absolute quiet, away from sun and noise and movement. It is broken (sometimes ruined altogether) when a guide comes by and starts to talk and a crowd forms, or worse yet, people begin taking these endless photos. It’s at first just getting in to a sense of deep escape. I am not communing with any god. It’s solitude in these places of stone. Quasimodo: remember Charles Laughton’s cry at the end of the 1930s film.

And, so as I enter here from day to day
And leave my burden …
The tumult of the time disconsolate
To inarticulate murmurs dies away
— from Longfellow’s sonnets on translating Dante

Ellen

A hard week

Jim, summer 2006, on a bridge in London leading to the Globe theater

Friends,

My late husband, Jim Moody, was born on October 3, 1948; he would have been 70 today. When I would ask him, if he would like to travel here or there or he himself would talk of it, it was ever when he was 70 and some percentage of the money he had set aside for us via his job and added to over the years, would have to be spent, so much each year. I reached 70 more than a year ago and have found an alternative is simply to take out this percentage and put it in my taxable Schwabb account. I have also been spending it — with the money unexpectedly to me left me by my mother and the unexpected windfall amount from the insurance company as he died at age 65.

We married on October 6, 1969; we had met October 6, 1968 and we married a year to that first night. We went to a registry office and it took 5 minutes. We were married 44 years, together 45, to the day (or night). His parents and two girlfriends of his (friends) showed up; his parents took us out to dinner and when we woke and discovered we had 10 shillings between us, we shared it out, 5 each, and then went to work that day. I asked for an advance from the Chief Engineer whom I worked for and got £25 in cash across my palm. Not the first time I had had a pay packet that way. I told him I had been married the day before.

The last day he spoke was October 7, 2013. He had been been doing that hard dying for a few days. He made some sign for Izzy to come in before going off to work and she came in and he said “goodbye” and kissed her. Later that day he said to me “I don’t want to die.” These may have been his last words.

He died October 9, 2013, at 9:05 am, in my arms. I felt his heart stop and was glad for him that he knew no more suffering.

I am aware that since his death I have done a number of things he said were not a good idea, or had stopped me from doing, and that I couldn’t get him to agree to travel to the Hebrides, where I had this long-held dream to follow (more or less Johnson and Boswell’s route), he wouldn’t hear of Cornwall (not as bad an idea as Australia as impossibly far away), and didn’t want to return to the Lake District either. I can remember him only talking of Venice. If he knew how I loathe airlines, airplanes, airports, he would think I might go for his dream of taking one of these ships that carry cardboard boxes all over the world. Jenny Diski went round the world in one, but I had read they are dangerous, and wouldn’t hear of it. We both agreed we’d be bored out of out wits in a luxury cruise as I nowadays know I dislike luxury hotels, large anonymous soulless tasteless exploitative palaces. You can’t take a train to Venice ….

This to introduce my six blogs on my time in the Lake District and borders of Scotland and Northern England. I went with a tour group: I don’t see how he would have been able to get himself to try that — though he once said of a tour we took with a guide to Gettysburg battlefield, we did learn a lot. And there was no other way to see it. For me there is no other way to travel without enduring an ordeal of intense anxiety and perpetual mistakes (which end in my being cheated of too much money). I already told of this time in my Canterbury Tale of Road Scholars here.

Alnwick Castle, a photo taken from a bus stop by one of the “pilgrims” as Jim and I once took pictures of Eastwell, Kent, where Anne Finch had lived

The Wordsworth people and their sites; Keswick & neolithic stones

More Wordsworth sites; Beatrix Potter; lakes, mines & churches

Roman, ancient Celtic and Reivers Britain; castles, fortresses, dungeons …churches & mines …

Carlisle & the Tullie Museum; Lannercost & Hermitage; Scotland & Lindisfarne

Wallington Hall, Vindolanda & Hadrian’s Wall, Durham Cathedrale & heading home again

He had stopped me for many years from enclosing the porch; well, now I have, and did manage by lying to the city at first and not taking out a permit so I escaped the absurd expenses builders are able to pile on through these permits. Jim would never have done that nor permitted me to. I spent under $30,000 to enclose the room, build a new floor in our vestibule, paint the house and install a new ceiling fan. The room is far larger than he and I imagined it could be. The cats love it for the sunshine. I like it as a quiet rest away from the Internet, TV. I like looking at the world from the large windows and garden I have overpaid for (but not badly).

Suits me perfectly … my father used to say I never use a room in a single consistent way. No.

Jim thought working for nothing a very bad idea. He was thinking of how I got for Izzy two volunteer jobs working at libraries through a couple of students I knew. And he was correct insofar as enabling the capitalist system to flourish on the labor of ordinary people at wholly inadequate compensation. He saw she learned that she loved library work and had a good letter to show for the one chance she was given. Wage theft, starvation wages, have grown much worse since his death. Imagine college students now get on lines to receive bags of food sent by charitable organizations. Don’t even think about what Obamacare is fasting becoming.

Well, I spent 5 hours just doing the lecture and notes for my course on Monday (The Enlightenment: At Risk) and 5 yesterday for my course today (Wolf Hall: A Fresh Angle on the Tudor matter). I expect he would understand as he said to me “do what you can to get through the rest of your life.” Also “if you can’t do something, live with it.” I need company of like minds, and I love the work no one would ever pay me for. They paid me a derisory sum for years as an adjunct teaching undergraduates introductory literature and composition courses (one on Science and Tech writing faute de mieux) and when I had the first grounds of a job being paid similarly for teaching this sort of thing again I couldn’t manage it.

I sometimes ask myself if he knew about the OLLIs. My guess is no, because he would have enjoyed some aspects of both: Bridge at Mason, and the intellectual challenges and new materials in both in some classes. He did try to join the Wagner Society of Washington DC, and was bitterly disappointed when they excluded us from their yearly weekend away. He liked going with me to the 18th century conferences and even insisted I try (with him) two Victorian ones and both Trollopes. There is another one set up the London Society about to go on now in some far away expensive place — I just learned about it on the Trollope face-book page. Did he know about these package or Road Scholar type tours? I’ll never know. He spent so much time on the Net in later years, how could he not have come across them? but he never mentioned any of this ever.

He must have known about the Smithsonian where I’m going tonight for a George Gershwin concert — if I can find it, if the Metro works, if the crowds don’t stop me (I’m told Gallery Place has some kind of celebration on – I hope not). Note: I went, found it easily and the man’s talk was so stupid it was embarrassing: silly really, but he played wonderfully well and had remarkable clips and knew Gershwin’s career. My feeling is Jim would not go again while I am willing to compromise now that he is not here.

It has not been made much easier today because one of my proposals was rejected: the good original strong one on Anne Boleyn, Jenny Jones and The Provok’d Husband in Fielding’s Tom Jones (scroll down). In a text message though an app on my cell phone (which happily I don’t know to read so managed only so a part on face-book messenger) which mentioned my [lack of] “rank” and being a “senior” [age] as why she had to reject it. Is it that serious research and original ideas is not what conferences are for?  I will put my thoughts towards this paper on my Austen Reveries blog.

I still have a chance to go to the ASECS in Denver if the panel head for my other proposal (on Graham’s Poldark novels) get two panels. I thought I’d like to see Denver; have never seen the middle west of the US; it’s a single plane, direct and for all I might dislike the hotel, there is one set up.  Sometimes these conferences include tours for the people to go on so I can get out of the hotel. I am not holding my breath.

Jim was even against my developing the Poldark material seriously for scholarship on the very good grounds I have not the personality or connections to try to make this material respected after all these years. He did not live to see the new Poldark mini-series. He would not have been surprised at Andrew Graham’s grudging half-permission to look at his father’s archives.

How ironic all this is. Am I happy in this new life? I am cheerful, I sometimes enjoy myself. There is much to interest, amuse me, I do know some deep pleasure. I have companionship now and again. I’m thus far solvent. He would never write such a blog as this. The way he dealt with grief and rage is silence and eventually humor or poetry.

He had a wonderful sense of humor, the ability to make a funny joke which did not hurt people and yet could turn an experience around to put it in its place and make as absurd as much of life is. Now and again Izzy will remember his gentle jokes at her.

So why did I marry him and was so happy — I’ve given so many grounds and reasons in this blog since he died, I will only refer the interested reader to explore, among other things his love of poetry, a shared love of the intellectual and imaginative life, both of us strong leftists in politics, both atheists, we liked the same paintings?

But there is something specific I wanted to commemorate Jim today for, which I may not have mentioned as yet. Yes. We have today had the loathsome creature who some large enough minority of Americans voted for to become the new corrupt president ridicule, deride, and mock a courageous woman, Dr Christine Blasey Ford, who came forward to give credible evidence (as they say) that the new nominee for the supreme court (a lifetime appointment) is a thug, was a rapist for fun, a perpetual drunkard during his “glorious time” in prep school and at fraternities in college. I have been aroused so deeply by her testimony that in my blog on his motivations and behavior (An Instance of Male Bonding) to tell however briefly some of my story as to why I married Jim.

I experienced a series of deeply traumatic experiences from age 12 to 15. I finally tried to kill myself and when I didn’t manage that I retreated and retreat became my safety. It was the males who attacked but my experience was females didn’t support me at all and I saw they didn’t support others. Far from it, they spread rumors about one as a tramp, slut. When I had tried to find a friend and tell someone I thought was my friend, another girl came over and “as a gesture of friendship,” told me mot to do that any more. That girl had promptly told others so they could all jeer together and triumph as “chaste” and “good girls.” I never forgot that lesson. It was as important in understanding safety as keeping away from abrasive vile males of the Kavanaugh type and his buddies. So I went anorexic and was left alone. It has taken me decades to eradicate some of this anorexia (like alcoholism, one never recovers fully.)

She has said once of the same kind of treatment maimed her for decades. How shocked she was — coming from the sheltered privileged environment she had known. It apparently did not stop her from being (as all report)  “in the midst of a distinguished career.”

Unlike most other boys or men I ever met, Jim never tried to harass or rape me; he never came near to insulting me or making fun of me. He never treated me with discourtesy. He never badgered, never pressured me — well over traveling he did, but I did manage quickly to bring an end to that and we came to a compromise over his desire in the 1990s to begin to travel to Europe. And there was no residue. No reminders. No asking for gratitude for anything he didn’t do because he shouldn’t. He didn’t pretend to do what he didn’t want to do and kept his right to his own life — as how long he would work, where, and how. He never told defamatory stories about other women or men: he said of a man who refused to marry someone because she had had some unfortunate sexual experience, it was “a failure of imagination.” I can never remember him lying. He did omit to tell the truth sometimes but never concealed that ploy either. When he said he would meet me somewhere at a certain time, he never failed me. He was there and on time. He was to me utterly trustworthy.

I’m now taking on Future Learn a course on Violence Against Women. I recommend it. In the first week, the women scholars stressed that violence connects directly to the way women are gendered: men are violent to them because they can be and the gendered behavior imposed on women, how they are understood allows men to get away with.

Women do not trigger violence and victims are never to blame and the way she does this is to show all the different each of us live in: our habitas, our family and friend types, our class, what community we live in; all these show that women have to and do expect violence because it comes; it has nothing to do with them personally often. I was struck by how Dr Ford talked about how shocked she was when she was assailed. She repeated that word shocked and over. Well I never was shocked, not I had seen my uncle beat my aunt, other people beat up, the lack of respect and status for many people around me, the way the police behaved to people in the South east Bronx. Dr Ford never expected such a thing could happen to her and there she was treated as a female thing. Remember the crude medieval tales: all women are alike. I will put in the slides that were used to identify these contexts into our files — if they will go.

This was not yet been brought up except tangentially: an important point is ever after you lose your trust in everyone. If it’s someone inside your family and the family ignores it, and he has full access to you, imagine the loss of security and trust. That’s Woolf’s case — and many women in traditional family structures. Someone in her family did it, and no one would show they noticed. In many cultures, if the woman tells, she is punished, disbelieved (as Freud disbelieved Dora). In some, they’ll be honor-killed. My experience was I lost trust in everyone, not just the people who did it and laughed but those who from afar spread rumors, mocked, and then tried to climb on board. So how escape? retreat, anorexia, suicide ….

In the second week how violence exists in contexts and all these contexts are set up to shape what happens and exert control over women. Lots of slides. From all of it I take away this:

Violence against women begins early, the girl’s earliest years. I knew this and that this takes the form of setting up coercion in such a way that you prevent the girl from learning a skill, or idea that is enabling, gives power to act freely on her own behalf. Later on when she is married (forced or seeming to choose), more than half the battle is done for the husband whose pride is made to inhere in controlling her to do his bidding and act out of his interest. Again I knew this but didn’t make it explicit to myself in quite this way.

What I had not thought and this relates to the Woolfs is this silent violence against the child is secondary; it’s first aim is against her mother who is kept in an invisible straitjacket this way. The aim is twofold, mother and child. If we think about how Woolf hero-worships her mother in her Moments of Being, the first long piece and will not blame her but sees her father as the ogre, we see she is not understanding the full source of her oppression. In To The Lighthouse she does see how Mrs Ramsay is a controller, a forcer of marriage, teaching her daughters to re-enact her life but she is not truly seen as complicit.

Where Virginia broke away, was she did not grow up to be another women like her mother or at least she tried. When she became too ill (that is too nervous, too unable, too sad, or too angry to function), then she too came under the control of Leonard and the doctors and also her sister. I don’t know how Vanessa treated her daughter, I do know she rebelled utterly against Clive and lived the way she wanted to — it ended in great emotional pain for her since her choice was a man who was homosexual and promiscuous. But did she leave Angelica free?

I am probably not expressing what I want to as strongly or focusing sufficiently on it. It’s the early coercion which is not visibily violence except when the child disobeys and is punished (say put in her room, deprived of this or that) with this act being a secondary accompaniment to making the mother obedient and having her enact forcing obedience on the daughter I think so interesting.

As part of the second week, there is a number delving into female genital mutilation showing a girl who was mutilated growing up to understand how terrible her physical condition and returning to Gambia to be part of a campaign to stop the practice.

I hope they go into this from an inside view — thus far they have emphasized the larger outside view to show how women exist in contexts and these violations occur in contexts. The inner people count just as much in the experience of life

So why did I marry him and love him: he was everything most of the men I ever met were not. Only twice in our lives together did he ever become violent and in both cases he was provoked beyond bearing (the first instance included mockery and humiliation). I am not a sentimental liar; I can’t write a “how do I love thee” poem, so I wrote this.

He used to say: “I can deny thee nothing.”

Ellen

We go traveling again & my friend, Vivian

Vivian and me, July 14, 2015, taken by Izzy: Alexandria’s yearly birthday party, a large park area by the Potomac, a concert and fireworks for all for free; we had a picnic

Dear friends and readers,

We are near setting off on our journey to Milan, Italy — Laura, Izzy, and I — where among other things (a visit to a friend who lives near Zurick which will necessitate a train-ride through the Alps and beautiful lakes; a visit to a fellow biographer of Veronica Gambara, in Reggio Emilia) we plan to attend the World Figure-Skating Championships, and find and look into what fashion museums and exhibits there are in this famous world city.

The last time the three of us were in Italy was 1994, 5 weeks with Jim in an apartment in Rome, from the which we took 4 trips: to Pompei, to Naples, to the island of Ischia for 3 days (where there is a beautiful beach and Vittoria Colonna lived for a number of years it’s thought), to Marino (where Colonna was born). We all three have many memories of that time. Upon coming into the flat, Laura, then 15, declared Italy had not invented air conditioning yet. Izzy said to another child at the beach: “mi chiamo Isabella.” A high point for Jim and I was a fresco we saw in a fourteenth century church one morning. We all wandered in the heat over the forum, the Colosseum, saw an opera amid some ancient Roman stones.

And early yesterday evening my good friend, Vivian, died: she went quickly, three weeks after the cancer resumed. I wrote about my visit to her in a hospice place in my last blog. I have learned as she died she was quiet (perhaps sleeping?), appeared to be at peace, kept out of consciousness of pain by drugs. Did she go gentle into that good night? I was not there and in her two earlier phone calls she expressed anguish.

What is it Macbeth says upon being told: “She should have dy’de hereafter;/There would have been time for such a word.” I will not be here when the memorial service is held. I grieve for her and will miss her.

Every moment I’ve been able to I’ve been either reading, writing, thinking for the courses I’m teaching (The Later Virginia Woolf; Sexual & Marital Conflicts in Anthony Trollope: HKHWR), or taking (The Brontes, a book club whose first item is Atwood’s The Blind Assassin), or still at that paper (Woolf & Johnson, biographers), or online with friends, blogging, nurturing (so so speak) my 3 groups.io (the book, the extraordinary American Senator) — not to omit getting through all things needful for the trip. Some of them arduous, time-consuming, confusing — like airline reservations supposed to be on a website which are not there. Not to worry: Laura made a phone call in her firm determined voice and our tickets & we now exist again. “Able to” is the operative phrase: many a later afternoon or evening I give out and succumb to a movie that can keep me up; this weekend I reached the fifth episode of Alias Grace (another Atwood adapted).

I’m more awake tonight than I have been for several, enough to tell of how this past Wednesday I went to the last of the four lectures on Impressionism outside France: so to my last blog on Russia, the low countries and Italy, I add the UK, and I was not surprised it was the most interesting because he had the most paintings to show. Gariff went on for nearly 3 hours. This time I had heard of most of the painters, but had not realized that the work of many of the painters I had “placed” in separate schools when regarded as impressionist made a different kind of sense. Elizabeth Forbes (1859-1912), who I’ve written about as an Edwardian woman painter in the Newlyn School, links to Laura Knight (1877-1970), who I wrote more briefly about as a Cornish artist. Victorian artists familiar to me as recording the abysmal poverty of the countryside and cities, i.e., George Clausen (1852-1944) belong here; and some I’d never heard of, Spencer Frederick Gore (1878-1914):

The Icknield Way (1912) — a road in Surrey since Roman times

Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops, and his fostering of post-impressionism, his pictures belong here too. A Scottish woman artist, Ethel Walker (1861-1951) now fits. She painted Vanessa Bell, the first image I’ve seen that enables me to begin to understand why Bell was so liked:

Vanessa 1937

Two American artists this time were very influential: Whistler and John Singer Sargent. I learned that the next time I go to London I should go the London Imperial War Museum. Its name (because of the militarist connotations) is misleading: it is a leading place for artist painting during WW1, which most of these people did. Sidney Starr (1857-1925) has such a poor wikipedia page, I have to link in a sales one (he was an important art critic):

Starr’s City Atlas (1889-90) was part of an exhibit or talk about how difficult to get to know London

Philip Wilson Steer (1860-1942) ended up an important teacher (teachers matter), he was influenced by Monet and this is his most famous painting.

Children Paddling, Walberswick (1894)

But perhaps this curiosity, of an over-dressed woman with a cat called Hydrangeas is more characteristic

Vivian’s favorite painter was Monet, and during the visit her brother and sister took her on to Paris this summer they took her to Giverny. She also had a cat called Sammy (Samantha) for seven years.

Izzy and I almost didn’t go to a performance by Catherine Flye accompanied by Michael Tolaydo as narrator at the Metrostage of a revue of the life and songs of Joan Grenfell. We had tickets for Saturday, and were so preoccupied we forgot to go. The woman who basically runs the Metrostage single-handed phoned us 5 minutes before, and offered to let us come Sunday instead. This remarkable pair of actors presented a later afternoon of witty cheer with an undercurrent of desperate acceptance; there were some twee moments but also direct hits at frustrated longing hearts. My favorite was a piece called “The Telephone Call” (a woman spending her life caring for an aged parent). A couple very funny: one of a woman on her first airplane flight when people were still treated with respect and given comfort as human beings. The pianist played wonderful older melodies I recognized, one famous from WW2, The Warsaw Concert by Richard Addinsell (who wrote most of the music performed).

Michael Tolaydo and Catherine Flye, 2002 (Gardener McKay’s Sea Marks)

We had both wanted to go because we both remembered the moving play Sea Marks, with Tolaydo and Flye, which we saw with Jim in 2002 at this Metrostage. I’ve had that black-and-white newsprint picture on the wall of my study all this time

I return to Vivian. One of the class members of my Later Woolf came for the first class and for the rest I’ll keep him in the email list as I send comments and readings out, and lectures too. He can’t come regularly as he’s taking chemotherapy and radiation for cancer. Vivian was killed by lymphoma (as was Jenny Diski) combined with brain cancer. She was no reader: odd for a best friend for me, but there are other things that matter. She was a kind person, sensitive. Charitable and forbearing at others’ flaws. She shared my politics, my lack of religion. While she didn’t read books, she always seemed to know the latest US political development; she’d take the progressive side most of the time, and post about it on face-book. We went to Bernie Sanders rallies. We also took wandering walks in Old Town. We’d go to some movies together (we didn’t quite have the same tastes): I went twice to Kedi (the movie set in Isanbul about feral cats and their caretakers in that city) so she could see it, and she cried. She stayed up (she had problems sleeping so would often fall asleep at movies) for and was moved by Still Alice.

Here is one of the poems Flye recited, movingly:

If I should die before the rest of you,
Break not a flower nor inscribe a stone.
Nor, when I’m gone, speak in a Sunday voice,
But be the usual selves that I have known.
Weep if you must,
Parting is hell.
But life goes on …

That doesn’t mean one forgets however little one is given chance to mourn with any ceremony. I feel bad because Vivian had emailed the suggestion when she still thought she would live (some 5 weeks ago) that she and I go to the Grand Canyon this coming May. I had balked at the idea of the plane and asked if there was a way to go by train. No. It would take some absurd amount of time. A drive was ridiculous. I was adjusting to the idea of taking yet another plane (how I hate them all) and was beginning to propose we look into a package tour. I told her I imagined us on donkeys going up and down vast cliffs, which probably showed how little I know about modern tourism in the Grand Canyon. It was still in the realm of half-joke when she phoned to say the cancer had returned and she was in hospital. We had some good walks in Old Towne this summer: a ghost tour, one night along the water eating ice-cream listening to street musicians in the mild crowd.

We all come from the past … life is a braided cord of humanity stretching from time long gone … it cannot be defined by a single journey from diaper to shroud … (Russell Baker, Growing Up, an autobiography I read with freshman composition students decades ago, which I remembered tonight)

Ellen

Gwen Ifill (1955-2016): Let us remember her

It must’ve been in the mid-1990s that I came to the conclusion that Gwen Ifill would make a better US president than any candidate I had seen since I began to vote, and certainly better on what was on offer that year. The thought occurred to me regularly because at the time we regularly watched the PBS Newshour, with Jim Lehrer as the anchor and she as a chief correspondent (the titles they used). A memory comes back to me of Laura visiting a friend at this time, voicing shock that the family did not turn on this news program (these were arch-conservative people who I assume voted for Trump this time), and coming home to tell me they had laughed about this. “Not everyone watches PBS reports” they had said.

She died today of endometrial cancer, age 61. Apparently she had been sick for over a year.

As you can see I feel a kind of personal connection with Ifill (different from but analogous to my feeling about Jenny Diski, also destroyed by cancer), so choose to put this as part of my life-writing. It is, though, now also political, more in the vein of what I write on my first Sylvia blog nowadays. On such a bleak desolating day (where we can see how what we have is a hollow pretense of democracy), it seemed to me to keep spirits up not to be cowed and offer some effective force against the coming racist fierce militarist capitalism (a gov’t which will crush civil liberties even more than they have been!) now being put in place, let us remember her life and work.

I was reassured about the PBS Newshour tonight too because they devoted most of their hour to her. I have been disappointed and at times dismayed by the lack of rigorous questioning and truth-telling about Trump, the failure of Judy Woodruff as a woman to “call out” (as it’s articulated) Shields and Brooke for their equating Trump’s corruption and fascism with Hillary Clinton’s atttempt to keep her emails private, for their sexism; the worst moment was Paul Salmon’s shameful disrespectful tone towards David Kay Johnston while interviewing him on his thoroughly-researched exposure of Trump’s business practices, The Making of Donald Trump. Tonight for the first time I am aware how often Gwen Ifill was not there. In these last few years she had become more bland, more discreet, reined in the acute thinking mind of the earlier years: PBS is so dependent on corporate sponsors. So I didn’t miss her as much as I would have when she was merely a memorable part of a team questioning and talking or an on-the-spot reporter.

But I remembered and knew what she was capable of delivering and still did deliver in interviews from time to time. She projected and was a strong presence in her role of moderator, facilitator in recent years and I just enjoyed the line-up of segments she and Judy Woodruff produced together. It seemed to me a woman’s news hour of serious news, far better in scope, in what was understood and shown to be important than almost any other (a sole exception is another woman’s news program, Amy Goodman’s DemocracyNow.org). Precisely because it was a woman’s show they chose Malcolm Brabant on refugees, Fred de Sam Lazaro on the marginalized of the world, always showing how the intimate small experience is large political and affects us all.

with Judy Woodruff on their show together

Two panels, some tapes of reminiscent, and excerpts from an appreciation of Ifill comprised the beautiful tribute. I was much moved listening to those who had been helped in their careers, whom she worked with, whom she knew for many years in her private life. Charlene Hunter-Gault began to tear up more than once, Judy was unsteady and towards the end Hari Svrinavasin called her his mentor. It felt especially important to voice all this and present the worlds she came from, belonged to, and those she reported before because soon (before long now, January 20th to be precise), we seem headed to have media dominated by repression of all but fascistic points of view. That she lived and worked with the ideals she did should cheer us, even if her ending reveals much more emphatically than other parts of her existence, how we are are subject to the results of little ameliorated capitalism:

She was another victim to the cancer pandemic: and I feel a personal connection tonight because I can discern in the pattern of her behavior in this last year a paradigm like my husband’s: in summer she was off-the-air, said to have had a serious operation, after a considerable recovery period, she was back and looked strong, but only for one season, the she suddenly disappeared and in what felt like no time, was dead in a hospice. Like Jim, she had the show of force in a drastic operation, and then shortly after recovering, the cancer re-appeared in vital organ and devoured her.

With her sister, Sherrilyn, Ifill

Her book was The Break Through: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama

.

I was strengthened and consoled by the truth-telling of two more presences on the Internet. The first, a poem by Adrienne Rich, written

What Kind of Times Are These
By Adrienne Rich

There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows
    uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.

I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t
    be fooled
this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.

I won’t tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light—
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it’s necessary
to talk about trees.

The other the consolatory voice of retreat, Garrison Keillor’s “I’ll sit back and wait.”. What is most valuable in his words is his saying firmly Trump is the candidate of those who whooped it up for cruelty, ignorance and bald-faced stupidity. Especially cruelty (“by your 20s, you should be done with cruelty”): that was what was repeated across his most hooting jeering withering derision — of the disabled, of women, of people who grieving for the death of a son in a (colonialist) war, pensioned veterans (weak), the list is long and I need not take us through it. This was funny until he got to “deport the undocumented” (it is too much like Hitler that Trump’s first planned presidential order is to deport millions of hispanics):

Democrats can spend four years raising heirloom tomatoes, meditating, reading Jane Austen, traveling around the country, tasting artisan beers, and let the Republicans build the wall and carry on the trade war with China and deport the undocumented and deal with opioids, and we Democrats can go for a long, brisk walk and smell the roses.

What we who have voted for this party have now to do is spend four years pressuring for a re-invention of this democratic party into a body of people who respond to what their constituency wants and needs. I agree with Glen Greenwald on the Democratic Party self-destructing itself. In one of his last speeches before conceding the nomination to Clinton, Sanders said this election was about an impoverished woman (maybe he said on food stamps) struggling to bring up her children.

On election day I was in my local supermarket and had had on a real line in front of me a latino woman with two young children. Her meat was in plastic bags. Huge bags of dried vegetables. Well it was time to pay and she pulled out food stamps. Alas, it appeared that she had pulled the wrong product from some shelf and taken a bigger of whatever than was coming to her — 3 such wrong-size bags. These food stamps are very tricky; you are allowed to buy only certain specified products. The manager had to come over to settle the dispute (as there was a sign and she had an ad saying this product was for sale for food stamps), and then Linda (the checker, a kind hearted long term employee) was helping her dismantle her cart. On the other side of me a tough-looking (in her face) woman with blonde hair (clearly dyed), in jeans, looked very mad. Need I say she had a Trump t-shirt? So I said, “I think we ought to have a National Holiday to vote. All states stay open until 9. Everyone then could do it easily.” I do think that. She glared at me and was about to erupt with angry comments, when the manager sent another checker to open another register and make the long line of people vanish. This young woman cannot access any money through the welfare system that she could then use for her family in the best ways possible for them.

That woman with her food stamps is but for Jim me. I will now return to support Bernie Sanders.

But for now, tonight, we can remember Gwen Ifill and think of the good she managed to do, embody, and encourage others to achieve. It is necessary to talk about trees, real as well as metaphoric.

David Lohenberg, Gwen Ifill

Miss Drake

How shall I number these days and nights?

From Danger UXB (one of the great anti-war mini-series)

This is the anniversary of Jim’s dying two years ago. He has lost the ability to speak back as of October 7th and on October 8th he was beginning that terrible ordeal/agon of literally dying.

I feel I’m living through these days for a third time: the first two years ago, as he lay dying; the second last year when somehow I kept the sense of it all at a distance; and now:

On October 3rd this year when Jim would have been 67 I felt how uncanny it is that he is not here, how weird is death in comparison to how we feel about someone’s existence. We have to feel deeply that the person we are attached to has deep reality, and yet they are no more than 98?% water (as I’ve read in different places). I felt haunted the way I had for a time after my father died. Then it was the irretrievably of never being able to make contact again, and I felt such a strong desire to I projected psychologically a presence hiding somewhere, invisible, silent.

It’s not like that for Jim. I have this sense of the unbelievability of existence itself. I can hardly believe I am here concretely if he’s not. I don’t know why I don’t vanish away softly in the night — like one of Lewis Carroll’s mad figures — if he could so vanish.

I’d call such feelings are one of the origins of religious belief. Tonight we would have been married 46 years, met 47 years ago.

I remember Shakespeare’s lines as Prospero: we are such things as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded by a sleep.

And also that 90th sonnet: Do not drop in for an afterloss … in the onset come; so shall I know the very worst … which compared to loss of thee will not seem so

Jenny Diski’s latest entry as she moves into death is devastating. Her cancer is for now (what a sardonic joke in such words) in remission, for how long (ditto) the doctors can’t say (as they know nothing). Like the heroine in Wit, she is dying in immiseration because of the effect of the treatments on her, her lungs gone, she has (like Hilary Mantel) been made to look awful so that she is alienated from her body. at once feeble, unable to walk steadily and fat. Why should she care say the heartless neat doctors and nurses. She opens with talking of letters she has received; I was almost tempted to write. We learn in this one she has two grandchildren and we know the father of her daughter, once her partner-husband died a couple of years ago. So her daughter parentless.

People have asked me (well one person) what is gained by telling of Doris and me, well the same thing that is gained by her telling of these dreadful symptoms, her pain, her feebleness, how others will not help except for the Poet. Insofar as you can stop people from mouthing nonsense about triumphs, conquests, and bravery and instead tell what cancer is, you help a little in the pressure to do fundamental research. The research that is done is expensive surgery to prolong life and pills that cost huge sums — all garnering profit. What they discover fundamentally is a bye-product and not much sought. The TTP was signed yesterday: a key provision fought over was the US on behalf of the pharmaceuticals (like the fascist gov’t it is) to give them the right to charge outrageously for 5-8 years; 12 was what was wanted and the “balance” is it’s just 6-8 and uncountable thousands excluded because of the price at least until then.

I omit all the provisions which supercede workers’ rights and hand a good deal of the world over to corporations (with military backing) to exploit and immiserate everyone who is not in the elite genuinely rich and well connected.

Cancer is our great and ever spreading plague — like the engineered (in effect) famines and mass diseases of early times — India, Ireland. Settler colonialism now exterminating the Palestinians a little at a time — punctuated by the terror of lethal bombing.

Diski speaks for us all — she says don’t talk about bravery so instead I’ll say she writes what she does because she cannot help herself and thinks truth has a function in the world that helps others– if only by saying see here I am, is this the way you are? if so, we are not alone.

Diski (before cancer)

She does say it’s hard not to feel what’s happening to her is a punishment — like it’s hard not to feel the death and disappearance of someone is uncanny. But what it’s vital to remember is not to take what happens ever as a punishment. That is your psyche doubling in on itself and wanting to find some reason, some ultimate meaning for what is happening. For me not comfort, but that way madness lies.

Miss Drake

Animal Companions: Jenny Diski’s angle on memories of animals

Henrietta Pussycat (Mr Roger’s Neighborhood)

I’ve had cats in my life since I was fostered at the age of fifteen. When I arrived at the house in London, the woman who was fostering me greeted me at the door, holding a small grey kitten under her arm.
    ‘This is Grey Cat,’ she said, ‘I only got her yesterday.’
    Grey Cat and I were co-fosterings. She was supposed to be my cat … (Diski, What I Don’t Know About Animals, Chapter 4)

Dear friends and readers,

Since reading Kathryn Shevelow’s For the Love of Animals, about the rise of the animal rights movement and development of real fellow feeling in people generally for animals and animal protection laws and effective agencies, I’ve been wanting to know more about how such feeling develops — for myself, an exponential increase since Jim died. Since I’ve also became interested in Jenny Diski’s writing in the last two years, I noticed her What I don’t Know About Animals. Billed as a serious philosophical essay, I wondered how much it was written in reaction to Doris Lessing’s On Cats: Diski, it was said, went into human anthropomorphic responses to animals, and certainly, Lessing’s moving book on two of Lessing’s many beloved cats depends on endowing her cats with complicated moving lives.

Diski’s book has a highly problematic center. Her purpose is to make us agree that animals are “other;” to see that, acknowledge it, and yet give animals full rights and (as she apparently does) treat them when pets as real companions, equals in their way. She goes over several examples to “prove” we attribute feelings to cats (ever her example) that we can’t say they have. For example, when you leave a room and a cat sitting there, near a toy, and then you come back some time later and the cat is still sitting there, is he or she waiting for you? You don’t know that, but then I’d reply, you don’t know she isn’t. Briefly, her examples don’t hold up. Worse yet 2) as she acknowledges the “otherness” argument is the fundamental ammunition of those who want to use animals to benefit humans first and foremost, not attribute real value to their lives. Hers is a philosophical book where she argues with various experts on animals and philosophers of the type Kathryn Shevelow discusses.

However, Diski has what might seem a strange and telling procedure. She begins by telling us her experience of animals by telling us of her early dolls, stuffed toys, and of the animals she came across as dead which she and her mother (biological, a back formation) ate. She calls herself “post-domestic. ” A “domestic” life in animal studies means you grew up with working animals around you (cows, chickens, horses). So her first experience of animals includes watching her mother buy and cook a chicken, eating the bird. This seems to have been enough for Diski to imagine this as a once live animal victimized, and she says soon after she felt impelled to save a baby bird from a nest who was not grateful but terrified. The bird couldn’t understand what she was aiming at, could not trust, much less love her. The result was the poor bird hid behind the stove in their small kitchen where it was dangerous, and they had to pull it out by force. By the time they prodded it out, it was badly wounded; Jenny ended up wishing the bird would die immediately. The point was how vulnerable animals are to us in our habitats. She then moved onto stuffed animals she saw in museums, caught up in death, very dreary (no tigers burnt bright here); then dream animals, as in storybooks and especially Disney films, where they are not quite children, but dressed; and finally zoos, the early ones where the animals were put in caged prisons, for human entertainment.

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Me and Llyr, 1971 (in 76th Street flat in NYC)

I grant these are influential and perhaps where our earliest attitudes towards animals are shaped, but somehow to me this is not where my feeling for animals came, and I rather suspected she wanted to deny the importance of her first pet, that cat pushed on her (in effect) by Doris as an intermediary between them. Perversely (rather in the spirit of Jenny herself there), I tried to remember if I had an early relationship with a real animal and could not think of any beyond those I’d see as other people’s pets when my parents and I visited. That I saw dead chickens hanging up at a butcher’s (which I did as when I was young there were butcher shops and chickens that still had their heads and feet hanging from hooks on walls), well the interaction just doesn’t hack it. I must’ve been taken to a zoo but it didn’t affect me that I can recall. My aunt had a dog but I never got to know her; I wasn’t there often enough, and when I was I wanted to be with my cousins and paid attention to them.

I remember I longed for a pet, or thought I did. My parents refused saying the dog or cat would ruin the furniture and was a responsibility. I was an only child with only one or no friends at a time. After we moved away from my aunt and cousins, my father bought me a blue parakeet which we called Joey, thinking the bird was a boy. I did love it for a time but then even though I dutifully cleaned the cage once a week (I was an obedient child, especially good at routines), I didn’t play with it enough, my father said, and we got another because (he said) Joey was lonely. Well, Joey grew listless and unwell, and one day we found him dead; we went to vet then and discovered Joey was girl and had gotten pregnant and we needed to hep her give birth. This occurred before the days of the kind of animal medicine people regularly nowadays buy from vets. Nancy, the green parakeet, named by me with a girl’s name, but a boy, died son after that. Was she pining for Joey? The experiment was a failure. Now I see from Diski’s book, yes, animals are vulnerable to us.

Much briefer: when I was 10 or 11 my father attempted to buy me a dog; but he wouldn’t pay money for one and didn’t want to go to a rescue shelter; the dog really belonged to someone else. I had already begun to withdraw from painful experiences and didn’t try to make friends with the dog. I don’t even remember his or her name. Only that he or she was medium-sized and white. He or she was returned to the owner before the end of one week.

So truly my second experience of an animal for real was a feral cat (if that’s the appropriate term) I half-adopted shortly before Jim and I married (September 1969) and we came to live together permanently in a “self-enclosed flat” (£2 10 shillings a week), both of us with jobs (Jim a stockbroker’s clerk, me a personal assistant cum-secretary in a toy-packaging firm, Waddington’s). We lived in a poor Pakistani area of Leeds (England) just off a great park. Somehow he got into our flat. My hunch is it was through a small opening with a flap in the wall next to which the milkman left milk. I gave him a dish of milk. I did not know milk is not good for cats! Stories and films pictured cats happily lapping up milk. He did not know he was not supposed to drink milk either. He began to show up regularly, sat under the cooker (as we called the stove) where it was warm, and I began to buy cat food for him, also cans of fish, before you know it, he was sleeping in bed with me most nights. Jim wasn’t keen, but didn’t object as long as the cat stayed on my side of the bed.

I didn’t name him that I can remember.

I had to abandon him when we left for Southampton and the US (April, seven months later). It was not practicable for us. I understood we needed money to pay to make him healthy enough, for shots, to vouch for him, and who would take him on board a plane? Would it not be prohibitively expensive? We didn’t begin to have it. And after all, he was a stray; sometimes he didn’t return for several nights or a whole weekend would go by without seeing him. Who knew if he wanted to come? I’d have to put him in a carrier. He would not care for that. One night he came in all bloody, looking just so awful. I cried and exclaimed and began to wash and care for him. I’ll swear he looked at me and communicated the idea, ‘You should see the others.’ Was he really triumphant? Or did I imagine this (as Diski might ask). He stayed in for a couple of nights after that. I wasn’t sure how attached to me he was. Maybe he preferred Leeds. When I’d get home from work, Jim and I often went out to a pub because we didn’t have central heat. We had no TV or radio even in those days. Or I read.

Years later (14 to be precise) I realized I was very sick for 2 weeks shortly after my cat came to live with us on-and-off because I caught some potentially deadly virus from him. My immune system had thrown it off with difficulty. I was out of work for over a week and went back before I was quite ready (lest I lose the job). I found out when Yvette was born prematurely, and the tests showed she had these antibodies to this dread disease. At first this panicked the hospital staff in Fairfax hospital, and they thought she had this dread disease, and looked funny (suspiciously) at me; but then they saw it was rather that I had actually transmitted antibodies to this premature baby. The disease hadn’t been known about until AIDs had spread and homosexual men came down with it and died. Jim’s mother had had a cat and dog (called Judy, a Pomeranian) during much of his childhood and so maybe he had developed antibodies early on to this disease and that’s why he hadn’t gotten sick.

I left one last bowl of milk and dish of cat food and the door ajar when we left that flat.

Jim and Llry (same day as above)

Then there was Llyr, the dog we bought shortly after we came to NYC and who lived with us for 12 years. I walk around with intense guilt over her last two years or so of life — which coincided with our last two years in NYC. I was very good to her for 10 years, so too Jim; but we didn’t act to her as we would today. One evening after we came home from work and discovered she had torn apart a couch, we wanted to go out and so we tied her long leash to the radiator so she could not get near the furniture. I can almost still hear her cry of distress as we left. We rushed back and took off that leash and told her to destroy the furniture if she wanted to. But that we could even think to do such a thing to her (tie her to a radiator) shows how thoughtless as young people we could be. We did play with her; she slept with me, one summer when I was studying Latin night and day to pass an exam in it, she was my steady companion.

Another time a year after Caroline was born (1979) she may have saved our lives. I heard a man’s voice making a huge ruckus and opened the door to see someone there in uniform. Llyr suddenly began to growl ferociously and showed her teeth. That was most unlike her. The man angrily demanded I “put away that dog,” so he could read the meters. What meters I asked. Nervously I shut the door. Later that day I heard the man was not an employee of a utility company and had attacked another woman in another building later that day. How grateful I was to Llyr. When I’d walk with her in Central Park, I believe she functioned to protect me. When I had Caroline, Llyr would look at her over her cradle. When Caroline would cry, Llyr would howl. Jim went nuts trying to pay attention to his math studies.

It’s probably true to say about 10 years on, I was having a nervous breakdown (finishing my dissertation and unable to contemplate looking for interviews, no idea how to cope with them), Jim in a bad way (his dissertation had been rejected!), no money for food even at times. He had quit his full-time job to get a Ph.D. in math and we were both adjuncts with small salaries. So Llyr suffered too — as much because I didn’t have an emotional strength to companion her properly. Then she looked terrible, so thin (like us), and my father paid for a vet and we discovered she had cancers on her legs. He paid for an operation, complete with cone upon coming home, and I began to pay much more attention again. But within the year the cancers returned. The vet told us we should “put her down,” she was old, 14. Nowadays I’d question that, and take my dog to another Vet. Nowadays maybe the Vet would try again.

I cried hysterically the night she laid on the bathroom floor after several nights of not wanting to sleep with me. Jim kept saying, “it’s just a dog.” He was upset at how upset I became. I had failed her and couldn’t retrieve what I had done.

Then another of these brief incidents. We came to Alexandria, and Jim agreed to get another dog. We went to a rescue shelter and brought home a dog that Jim worried had been abused: Gueneviere her name. White, middle-sized. Caroline liked her and we said it would be hers. Of course I knew she was too young to care for a dog. But soon after that again I was feeling this was too much for me, when the dog acted oddly and was difficult to train to make outside, and a phone call from the shelter told us the dog had not been given up by its master. It was “a mistake” of some sort (?). Jim said let’s not look into this; let’s return her. We did. Poor creature.

Clarissa (as I called her then) and Ian as kittens

Fast forward to 7 years ago now when Caroline and I went to buy Clarycat and Ian. Caroline had two cats and I was seeking to have common ground with her. I thought too (like my parents the presence of the two kittens might keep Yvette company (she was home from college) and bring her out of herself. Jim did not want this and I overrode what I knew he was against. It turned out, he became far closer to Clarycat than I did because he was retired and at home. I was still working (in effect) full-time, and after an initial destruction by said kittens of the wires in this room attaching the computers to the outside world, Jim forbade them this room. Since I spend a lot of time here, I didn’t see them enough. About a year before I retired though, I felt they so disliked my staying in the room without them, and I myself disliked it so much (we were missing out), I insisted they be let in again. That’s nearly 4 years ago.

And now they are my close companion-friends — as anyone who reads this blog regularly knows. They are attached to Yvette too.

Jim was not post-domestic. His mother had a greenhouse where she grew vegetables and also chickens who she would kill, pluck and cook and the family eat them. Jim told me that one day when he was around four he was “playing” with one of these chickens and it pecked him hard. He ran away, but then he came back and told it his mother was going to kill it and they would eat it, so there. Now I wonder if he was teasing the animal.

The second early experience of animals Jim told me about is fuzzy. A dog is after him, and he is terrified, and his mother puts him high on a shelf. I wonder now if he teased animals when they were around him, and had done so to this dog, and it lunged for him.

He also had a long-term experience: the cat and Pomeranian, Judy. He said Judy was fierce and every once in a while would attack the cat and it would flee in terror. When we came to Southampton and lived with his mother and father for a month, I saw this pair of animals. The dog was long-lived; the cat was one of several his mother had had, one after another. Jim thought there was not much sentimentality or emotionalism towards these pets since he could not remember anyone grieving over each cat’s death; each one (in his memory) was simply replaced by another. But perhaps Jim under-estimated the complexity of his mother’s feelings: she was a woman who had grown up in the countryside of Hampshire.

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Caroline’s calico cat, Keira

Nonetheless, Diski persuaded me of the importance of all our contacts with animals (cooked, dream, on film, in books, zoos, wherever). So I feel vindicated that early on and for years in teaching Advanced Comp in the Natural Science and Tech, the second paper I assigned to students was to ask for an observation and most students who had no lab courses, and didn’t garden (a rare choice but it happened) chose to observe animals insofar as they could — complaining often that zoo experiences were artificial. But they had to sit and watch an animal for hours on end, and a repeated comment was they had had a distorted notion of that animal from Disney or animal film. She is probably right to say David Attenborough has had a strong and beneficial influence on how people who get to watch his films regard animals. I loved his Life on Earth; Yvette talked of his Life on this Planet. Like Mr Rogers, he is still on TV talking to young people. Since Attenborough or occurring at the same time, zoos treat animals very differently: insofar as zoos can they offer the animal an environment the animal can enjoy and thrive in, and animal companions, and follow their timetable. The animls are not there for our entertainment in the same way at all.

Caroline’s Mitzi, recovered from an operation to save her life

I am now thinking Caroline developed her love of cats when she watched Mr Roger’s Neighborhood. I remember how she would get so involved with Henrietta Pussycat if anything the least untoward happened to that cat. OTOH, she developed her cat family in response to her husband, Rob. When she first came to live with him, he was living in a close relationship with a cat named Lucy. Caroline was Lucy’s rival, and Caroline took Lucy’s central place in the household by buying two more cats, so Lucy was put in her place as one of three. Maybe Lucy provided an excuse for a long-delayed response to Henrietta Pussycat. Now Caroline has four cats and daily puts photos or videos of her four beloved companions on her I should have been a blogger blog.

My father’s cat when she was 5

My father could love an animal. He told me of when he was a boy coming across a dog hiding in an alleyway. It was cold, looked miserable and beaten. He went over to it to make friends and it tried to bite and scratch him. He was startled out of his complacency: he realized that the dog had learned to guard itself from others from its hard experience of the world. Fast forward many many years later after my father retired. Briefly he had a Siamese cat. It was fierce to outsiders and since I’d never had a cat and cats don’t reveal their inner nature to anyone but their owner, I didn’t believe the cat was as capable as a dog of attaching itself to a human being. I was wrong. That cat loved my father. My father grieved intensely when “Pushky” died.

I can’t resist saying a second core of What I Don’t Know about Cats is Diski’s relationship with Doris Lessing. There is an intense frisson when that fourth chapter opens and there is her foster mother (sort of) never named with a kitten or cat in her arm. Their first meeting together was Doris giving Jenny a cat to have a relationship with. We learn that the cat turned to Doris more than to her as Doris was there much more of the time, was more reliable for food and Grey Cat’s timetable. The foster mother is never named. I have to think that Doris asked Jenny (using their first names) never to in print talk about their relationship. Others clearly knew (from the columns and this book too) or asked that she not until Doris died. I don’t think the latter as Jenny didn’t tell until Jenny was diagnosed with incurable cancer. Jenny Diski did not want to die not having told about this central person in her life, how she fits into her biological parents and having shown that she was very important to Doris too: she is the one who followed in Doris’s footsteps, not just as a writer, but a person with cats. At any rate, this is Jenny’s response to Doris’s On Cats, a very anthropomorphic masterpiece. Jenny’s book is not a masterpiece.

I find myself so drawn to their relationship because 1) I had a very sore relationship with my mother and from other women I’ve known this relationship sore or not goes as deep into understanding the person and their choices in life as any and 2) it’s a central paradigm of l’ecriture-femme, women’s literature. Wolf Hall is not l’ecriture femme even if it has a woman in drag at its center because Cromwell and his fathers are the issue.

Diski’s relationship with the bird she tried to rescue is a kind of fable. It died terribly. I remembered my early experiences with animals and realize the lesson I should have taken away was how dangerous I was as a keeper; they could die if I didn’t do right. In later years I was at long last old enough to see this and thus we didn’t replace Llyr for many years as I feared I would not be up to the responisbility. Her fable is to show how vulnerable animals are and how often if we look they end up dead well before they have to if they are given inadequates mistress/masters keepers, unloving.

Miss Drake

Time has become cancer, cancer time itself

“Co-terminous”

Time is killing more of us more swiftly:
since time is become cancer,
cancer moves in to the beat of time itself.

It’s now
Look down and see what cancer is doing
Paulina’s line re-booted

As our air and food, straight chemicals
directly imbibed,
become ever-more polluted,
addictive —

“I am afraid to stop the pills …”
Says one unhappy soul
even if they have such side-effects.

Psychiatrists once soul-healers
deal out body altering chemicals
record-keepers for NSAs, DMVs

It becomes a matter of time
The pollution slowly eats us up —
Bloats us — Corrosive

How many years does this or that cancer
give this or that person. Ninety? 51? Ten?
That is the new question.

Miss Drake

For a 21st century Book of Hours

Endings matter: Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal Reviewed by Marcia Angell

From Frederick Wiseman’s Near Death

Dear friends and readers,

In a NYRB review (Jan 8, 2015, 72:1), A Better Way Out, Marcia Angell with a few important qualifications heaps praise on Atul Gawande’s latest book on how medicine treats aging and dying, how people sickness, aging, death because of modern medicine’ goals, training, politics: Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters. I’ve discussed Gawande before (see Realities of Medicine: how misunderstood), and Marcia Angell’s writing several times (see her on privatizing all aspects of medicine) and this review seems to be publicly on-line, available to the public. So let me just call attention just to a central section of the book and one of its silences.

In the book’s “most powerful chapter,” “Letting Go,” Angell reviews the book so as to bring out Gawande’s theme about the deeply inhumane and dishonest way cancer is treated by modern physicians and hospital staffs (and I’d add hospices too). Knowing how bleak an outlook, doctors lie and offer painful maiming operations and immiserating chemotherapies and radiations whose outcome they cannot predict. They make the last months or year of a person’s life an experience of toxic suffering, giving them (as I know too well) no opportunity to decide to enjoy what they can of their last months. She does not mention that if you refuse the doctor’s treatments, they tell you to go away; they will not provide half-way or palliative care to enable you to carry on in your own way. It’s all or nothing. It’s also highly exploitative. A multi-million edifice for its practitioners and drug companies. A friend told me recently about The Confessions of a Surgeon by Paul Ruggieri where he exposes the pressure put on doctors to recommend operations in order to make huge sums for hospitals (a brief inadequate review). Statistics quoted include physicians on average telling terminally ill patients they will live 5 times longer than they do; those who can find a palliative specialist and stop chemotherapy very early, having no operation, live about 25 per cent longer than those who submit to these treatments.

Do read Angell’s essay. Everything she writes is worth reading and thinking about.

She faults him in two areas: the first is money. He hardly ever discusses money in his writing: yes there are a couple of essays where he discusses money and the way medicine is delivered generally, and advocates moving gradually to a single-payer system, but since what drives each and every encounter between patient and medical person is a fee (and often hefty) this kind of general discussion doesn’t begin to get near the problems (see Money-Driven Medicine). Worse he gives a superficial and prejudiced account of physician-assisted dying: he is against it — he is strongly for high-tech solutions when he thinks they provide a “good outcome;” she points out there is no evidence in any of the US or European states where such practices have begun that assisted dying is resorted to unless the patient decides for it. That Gawande calls this resort a measure of failure shows how somewhere deep in himself he has not accepted the inferences of his own arguments; he may know enough not to use the metaphors of bravery and courage, and heroism (which should have no place in discussions of killing and therefore painful diseases) but he thinks of the decision to die rather than live through a hideous self-destruction unacceptable. Why? when he himself has said it’s not a question of life once it’s most cancers: life’s not on offer, occasionally it is a question of prolonging life (and this is where patients get sucked in, especially when young); for most it quickly enough becomes how and when and where the person dies.

That latter was Jim’s phrase when at first he wanted to do nothing. I couldn’t face his death, and I should have and proposed we go on a trip, and he try to have the best last few months he could. And then he couldn’t face it either.

Endings matter, for animals too.

A sick kitten being cared for

Sylvia

A man with cancer sits near me & Thomas Struth’s photographs at the Met museum

People in a gallery

One must live with great seriousness like a cat — a play upon an utterance by Nazim Hekmat

Dear friends and readers,

I’ve been meaning to tell of one last adventure Yvette and I had while in NYC: Friday morning until lunchtime we wandered all about the Metropolitan Museum of Art, exhausted ourselves there too, for me seeing paintings and art work I regard as old friends and with her looking at new art.

Well, we happened on an exhibition of photographs by Thomas Struth. The ones used to advertise his work are like the one above: people looking at vast art, people making things, not just beautiful art, but everything one might think of in an industrial building, wandering in and out of cities, esplanades, woods filled with twisted branches: ephemeral beings given some kind of larger meaning against the shape of seemingly permanent or continuing structures. I’m told that Frederick Wiseman’s latest documentary where he filmed the worlds of people doing things, talking in the institution in the UK called the National Gallery is rapturous. By contrast, Struth shows a family of artists whose living is made by restoring pictures working in the basement of an old church thus:

So (or but) if you go to one of Struth’s actual exhibits (not spread across the globe on the Net), you find there is another sort of photograph among them:

People submitting to technology: the above is a surgery for hymenoplasty. I melted into quiet crying upon seeing one of a woman on a table covered by surgical lines, with IVs all over her, bags of liquids, long sharp instruments all around, of course sheeted: she was having an operation for some dire cancer. I cried because I wished I had seen that image before I agreed to agree with Jim he would have that esophagectomy that made his last 8 weeks of life a living hell of nausea, starvation, pain. On the wall was a little plaque assuring you the woman as still living as of some date. Right. I can’t find a replica on the Net of that photo or a couple others in the Met that day. I knew that the photo was invasive and voyeuristic, but I wish everyone could see that or the other photos before they agree to a surgery. Since the advent of anesthesia people submit to operations with their eyes closed — metaphorically as well as through drugs. We ought to imagine these; maybe we will agree less often.

This is prompted by my having overheard a man at the Toyota Dealer this morning on the phone for over half an hour scheduling a series of appointments for what was clearly a major surgery, which was to be proceeded by a visit to the famed Mayo clinic (for cancer), and a number of other visits to this or that doctor. The man was all eager docility, cooperation itself. He looked about 70, white, had a briefcase thick with papers (perhaps a college professor). I was there waiting for my PriusC to be inspected so I could get my yearly sticker attesting to the safety of my car: it’s put on one’s window shield in Virginia. I wished I had the nerve to ask him what kind of cancer it was.

Don’t misunderstand me. I felt jealous. I sat there remembering how I could not persuade Jim to try to go to Boston, Massachusetts, where we were told we might be able to see a super-famous, (probably) super-expensive oncologist who never did esophagectomies (as he thought them horribly maiming) but poured intense chemotherapies into people to try to subdue, diminish, put the cancer into remission.

I realized that I never saw Jim being active on behalf of his health that way. In life for other things he was often a person who made many phone calls, set up all sorts of schedules for us to travel, engineered itineraries. But when it came to his health he often just submitted to doctors, didn’t question them. He did read about his cancer when we were told, and early on told me what the Kaiser people were doing was common protocol. Was what doctors did when the case was esophageal cancer.

At Kaiser there was no need beyond minimum appointment making. They found for him a man trained at the Mayo clinic (a surgeon outside Kaiser), a radiation doctor, another to do chemotherapy (in the event we never had them because the cancer metastasized into his liver before the series could start). Jim was I know not just thinking of the price, but thinking it would take time to go to Boston, precious time to try to reach this doctor, have his advice, and then maybe go for Kaiser anyway. He didn’t want to stop what was set up already.

I wasn’t sure of myself so I was afraid to say no, let’s not do this operation, let’s go to Boston, let’s insist on chemotherapy first, lest I was wrong — and he suffer from it, he die.

I worried about the worried looks in the eyes of the non-surgical doctors: did they think this guy a jock eager to cut Jim up and that he’d be better off doing chemotherapy first? Maybe he would have lived had he had chemotherapy first and the cancer would not have metastasized? It was a judgement whether to do the operation first because chemotherapy could burn the tissues and then the operation afterwards might result in dangerous complications as parts of the organs would not heal readily at all. So he said.

I found myself wishing I had persisted and made some kind of intense effort to for once listen to me — would he be alive today?

I was like am now a person walking down a stairway where the handrails have been taken away

I asked myself, Is this man I am watching and listening to, going to be alive 10 years from now because he’s doing this? I envied him. I should not have. Sitting there doing that so politely was an ordeal he was controlling. We do not see the terror inside other people. He will be like the people in Stuth’s photographs. I do not know; maybe he’s having his pancreas removed. He was determined the operation should not be put off and all his appointments fit in. I will remember his aging face, short hair, thin body and briefcase.

My car passed inspection and the honest people at Toyota (I’ve been there before and the people there have been all courtesy to me too) charged me $16. I drove home listening to Simon Vance reading aloud Trollope’s Dr Thorne and all day and until now (many hours later) had this man’s image in my mind and knew I would write this blog about Struth’s photograph of a woman having a cancer operation at last.

Struth, Milan Cathedral, 1998

Sylvia