The Ghost Trees of Spring

One thing about being without a permanent address over the last couple of years: I’ve gotten to know other parts of town that I didn’t know well before and probably wouldn’t have gotten to know at all in other circumstances. My opinion about which parts of town are desirable and which aren’t has changed several times; I’ve driven through entire neighborhoods I had never explored before; I’ve found out which streets really have the best holiday decorations; and I’ve gotten used to the gigantic Kroger stores that dwarf the smaller neighborhood store I used to frequent, which now seems small and cramped to me.

Driving west one winter morning over a year ago, I experienced a sunrise that turned the trees ahead of me into a molten gold, a particular shade of intense light I’d never seen before. I wasn’t used to traveling in that direction at that time of the morning and had never caught the sun at quite that angle before: a revelation. I discovered suburban neighborhoods that looked much older than they are because of the way in which mature trees had been incorporated into their development; I was surprised at how quickly they had assumed a mature appearance, because I remembered when they were brand-new.

I found out that the crabapple trees on a certain stretch of road look like ghost trees at night, something you would only know if you traveled that particular street after dark during a very brief period in spring when the trees are flowering. I discovered that downtown no longer seems like the center of things. If there is a center, it is one that seems to travel with me, like the Self, whose “center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” I’ve experienced the magic of autumn nights in streets swirling with leaves and rain. I’ve noted how much nocturnal life there is, even within city limits; a fox here, a pair of coyotes there, rabbits dashing across the roads on unknown errands. I passed a house with a horse in the front yard. I craned my neck, just this morning, to see if what appeared to be gigantic birds on a suburban roof were actually real birds or merely chimney pots or something equally mundane.

I’ve looked with longing at cozy windows, lighted at night; imagined what kind of tiny home I would design and where I would put it if I were building my own home; visited the Jot ’Em Down Store twice while driving out in the country; and photographed public art that has popped up in unexpected places all over town. I’ve passed a street sign that brings up a memory of someone who once lived there, long ago, a street that I had never seen until now, the person who lived there long since moved on. I’ve discovered that the achingly beautiful phenomenon that is spring is equally achingly beautiful all over town. I’ve found out what it’s like to have Starbucks as your living room and the public library as your drawing room. Not quite as cozy and private as I’d like, but there you have it.

Little by little, I’ve come across people that I hadn’t seen in a long time and discovered that the past is still present, that there is a sense of continuity between earlier periods of my life and where I am now. I’ve realized just how much living in one particular spot gives you a certain outlook, certain paths to trod, and particular points of view, and how not being tied to one spot expands your outlook. I’m still processing what this has all meant to me and probably will do so for a long time to come, but I will say that I’ve probably gained something from floating free, as it were, through my adopted hometown. I have a perspective on it that could never be matched by someone living settled at home, viewing the world through their front window. Some of it has to do with the strangeness but persistence of life, mixed with a fondness for this corner of the earth and its natural beauty, unfiltered through all the seasons.

Social Distancing for Extroverts

Hand washing and social distancing: the watchwords of the hour. I’ve been practicing both to the best of my ability, but I can’t help thinking that the latter, while probably necessary, is rather a tragic result of the current situation. I’m naturally an introvert, so spending time alone isn’t nearly as difficult for me as it is for the extroverted majority—and yet even I recognize that humans are social creatures and need other people. Most people can’t even seem to make it at home for more than two or three days during the holidays before they’re ready to bust out of the house, so I’m sure the quarantines are going to be very trying psychologically for many folks.

Of course, there also lessons to be learned on the ways in which trying to take care of each other can be accomplished in unfamiliar ways. I was going through the drive-through at Starbucks today when it occurred to me how many germs were probably on my Starbucks card, which I was getting ready to hand to the barista, so I wiped it off front and back with hand sanitizer. Apparently, that does not keep the card from working, though there might be a limit to how many times you could do that. (It’s too bad you can’t do the same thing to money.) Trying to give people extra personal space at the grocery store and not touching any more surfaces than necessary also requires thinking about things in a new way.

Whether it’s good news or bad news, I don’t know, but the fact is I’m so used to surreal conditions that this crisis is mostly just more of the same for me. I won’t be able to frequent cafes for a while, and the libraries are also closed. I had to scramble to find things I didn’t want to run out of once I realized people were starting to buy things up; I’m living with uncertainty and wondering how long current conditions will hold, just like you are. And yet, it’s exactly the type of thing I’m familiar with, how life can be turned upside down in the blink of an eye. I’m not happy about any of it, and yet in some ways I personally feel less isolated than I did when my own surreal adventure, if you can call it that, began 10 years ago. Now I know other people also know what it feels like to be isolated, anxious, and to some degree helpless, to see things spinning beyond your control.

It may be ironic that I, one of the world’s champion introverts, am so transfixed by the prohibitions on getting close to other people, but it’s that aspect of our current reality that’s really captured my imagination. Entire novels will be written about our current predicament; the one I would write would deal with the tragic aspect of not being to touch other people. It seems like a metaphor for so much more, for some kind of malaise that has perhaps been hidden for a long time but takes its visible shape in the form of a virus. Am I saying we made ourselves sick? It’s not that exactly, but more that there’s a kind of symbolic truth in the virus. How strange that it would have made its appearance at a time when we’re already so divided politically.

We will probably learn a lot of things about ourselves by the time this situation is over. One of the most interesting questions to me is how people will handle this unprecedented opportunity to practice introspection. Whether any profound changes come out of it is anyone’s guess, but the chance to get in dialogue with the Self (in Jungian terms) has never been better.

Don’t Sneeze On Me

I’m currently fighting a cold, and all that hand-washing and hand-wringing over “Are my hands clean enough?” and “Will I catch coronavirus on top of this?” is a bit tiring, I must admit. I am a model hand-washer, but I’ve been hit with an obscure feeling of guilt over having a cold, as if the very sight of me sneezing might be enough to send the populace into a panic and the stock markets tumbling. On top of that, I’m having to stay hydrated to keep a mild cold from turning into a bad one, my hands are dry from all the washing, and my nose is turning a becoming shade of red. Good times!

The coronavirus situation was borne in on me the other night when I went in search of sanitizing wipes. There were none to be had in any of the stores I went to; a Walmart employee told me that when the store does get a shipment, they sell out immediately. In the grocery store this morning, the toilet paper aisle was nearly decimated. When I heard about the strict quarantine taking place in Italy, I was amazed: if Italy is making people stay home, things are getting serious. Officials had been telling people in the beginning that there was little to worry about here in the U.S., and technically I suppose that was true—until the first cases appeared.

It all reminds me a little of a disaster movie in which the global threat of a pandemic starts to unravel the underpinnings of civilization and send the world back to the Dark Ages. No big deal not to be able to find Purell at the grocery store, you say. Oh, that’s just what you think. It starts with Purell and then progresses to milk, bread, antiperspirant, and beer. Then they’ll run out of toothbrushes and clean underwear. People start rioting in the streets, and the thin veneer of modernity gets ripped off like a dirty bandage. It’ll be up to a straggly band of hardy survivors to escape the pestilential cities, where people are fighting over stray boxes of Kleenex and tubes of toothpaste, to set up a new coronavirus-free zone in some Edenic setting that resembles Isla Nublar but hopefully contains no dinosaurs.

Well, I hope our structures, institutions, and resolve to hang onto our hard-won evolutionary gains will keep the coronavirus from spinning us all out of control. We’ve been through it before with the flu and other infectious diseases, and there seems to be little to be done other than following reasonable precautions. I haven’t noticed people behaving much differently here. I won’t be going to any large-scale events in the foreseeable future, but I wasn’t planning to anyway. I’ll be nursing my cold, trying to remember not to touch my face, and hoping the shortage of sanitizing wipes doesn’t last much longer (they are handy things to have, but I wouldn’t fight someone to the death over them). I have no large-scale mythological advice to offer beyond “Wash your hands,” and you already knew that anyway.

Bertha Rochester Was Robbed

For some time, I had been meaning to read Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, a novel that tells the story of Antoinette Cosway, the young island woman who becomes Edward Rochester’s first wife in Jane Eyre. Wide Sargasso Sea was published in the 1960s and is considered a modern masterpiece; it is also a fairly compact novel, which belies its impact, and I sped through it, partly, in all honesty, to “get it over with.” Despite the beauty and vividness of its description of the natural world of the Caribbean, the story is so full of misery and cruelty that I didn’t have any wish to prolong the experience of reading it. It’s an accomplished work, but the story it tells is horrifying.

Edwidge Danticat, who wrote the introduction to the edition, says that she imagines someone else writing an alternative version of Jane Eyre in which Antoinette (later called Bertha) and Miss Eyre get to know one another. I confess I started writing it in my mind right after finishing the book. The most terrible thing about Miss Rhys’s novel is the lack of options open to either Antoinette or her mother once they lose the protection of the men in their lives. The other terrible thing is the background of the story, the period following the era of slavery on Jamaica, in which both upper class plantation owners and former slaves still encounter one another daily, although the terms of the encounters have changed. Hatred, fear, and resentment poison all relationships, and there seems to be no escaping the horrors of the past, which simply perpetuate themselves anew.

Young Antoinette is alive to the great natural beauty of her island home, which is all she has ever known, but she fears it at the same time, realizing even as a child that dangers lurk in the shadows. To the reader, it appears that the only chance of happiness she might have is to leave the islands and go elsewhere to start anew—it’s also obvious that her strong identification with the place of her birth makes it nearly impossible for her to imagine doing this. For her, the idea of England, the place from which her young husband arrives, is almost a fable; to him, it is the island that seems unreal. Even having a fortune does not save Antoinette from disaster, since Rochester marries her for money. Husband and wife seem unable to understand one another, and the difference in their backgrounds and experiences quickly tears them apart.

I imagined Antoinette, already driven mad by the time she and Rochester leave for England, encountering Miss Eyre during one of her nocturnal rambles at Thornfield. I imagined her becoming friends with Jane and possibly recovering some of her equanimity under the influence of Jane’s steadiness and common sense. Miss Eyre, I feel sure, would have the ability to see Antoinette as she really is, not through the filters of resentment and fear she seems to encounter elsewhere. Miss Eyre would be too just in her judgments to overlook the role Rochester himself played in Antoinette’s downfall, so bringing the two women together would change the entire dynamic of the story.

Jane Eyre was in my dissertation, and I admit that I have always enjoyed the novel for its “love among the ruins” mentality, its idea that even people who have previously failed at love sometimes get another chance (and I believe they often do). Of course, Wide Sargasso Sea was written by Jean Rhys, not Charlotte Brontë, and Miss Brontë had her own story to tell in her own way. In Jane Eyre, Rochester is older and wiser, regardless of what he may have been in his youth, and has suffered greatly. I won’t say that it’s impossible to think of Jane Eyre in the same way after reading Miss Rhys’s book, but the idea of some kind of meeting of the two women is intriguing and leads to the question of what would have happened to the love affair of Miss Eyre and Rochester had Antoinette and Jane come to understand one another.

Since I’ve gone this far, let’s say Antoinette and Jane become confidantes, and Jane becomes an advocate for Antoinette’s rights, as I believe she would have. She insists that Edward divorce his wife properly and return her money to her. Maybe St. John Rivers returns from India due to illness, Antoinette helps nurse him back to health, and the two of them find some common ground. I realize this seems too much like tidying up loose ends, and St. John would have to have loosened up quite a bit to be palatable to someone like Antoinette, but we’ll say he’s been humbled by his illness, and having lived in India, is attracted to Antoinette’s “exotic” quality. England seems perhaps a trifle tame to him after the tropics.

How’s this working so far? Not too bad, I think. He and Antoinette eventually marry, and he takes a parish in whatever part of England has the warmest climate, in deference to his wife, though Antoinette never returns to the islands. Rochester is spared the loss of his sight and the disfiguring injury, Thornfield never burns, and Jane (who has meanwhile gotten that bequest from her uncle), travels around, goes to America, and nearly marries someone else but returns to Rochester in the end, saving him from brooding, developing gout, and God knows what else. There has to be some complicating factor that brings her flying to his side, so we’ll say he develops a fever but recovers quickly once his ministering angel returns. Oh, and Blanche Ingram marries an earl and returns to the neighborhood to be a thorn in everyone’s side, and Adele becomes a renowned opera singer.

As you can see, I favor happy endings, so if I wrote it, that’s what we’ll have. I have to say that I don’t fully understand the antipathy Rochester develops for his young wife in Miss Rhys’s novel, beyond the fact that some corrupting influence seems to be at work that ruins everyone on the island. The land itself seems to be cursed due to the injustices that have taken place there, and no one seems capable of breaking the cycle. I believe that Miss Rhys was drawing some parallels between the treatment of slaves and the treatment of women in the early 19th century, but in some ways, the depiction of the relationships between husbands and wives seems a bit dated.

It should fall to someone else to write the story of what happens to the people Antoinette leaves behind on the island, but that will be a book for another day. I was intrigued by the little boy who cried when Rochester left for England, having developed a fondness for him that Rochester coldly brushed aside. Perhaps one day he becomes governor of the island, marries his true love, has five children, and lives happily ever after. If I end up having to write that one, too, that’s what will happen. I’m all for realism, but since when is it unrealistic to expect happiness?

What I Learned by Eating Pancakes

It’s been years since I regularly attended church, but just to show you how ingrained one’s upbringing is, I’ll tell you that I was actually considering this morning whether I should give anything up for Lent. This all got started because the other day I was looking things up about Shrove Tuesday, a liturgical occasion that I probably hadn’t thought about since, literally, high school. I looked it up to see what it had to do with Mardi Gras, and when I found out that eating pancakes is something one does to mark Shrove Tuesday (because you’re eating up eggs, sugar, and fat, all those things you won’t be eating during the period of abstinence), I decided I’d treat myself to pancakes to mark the day.

With Mardi Gras, you’re throwing beads, eating King Cake, and possibly toasting the occasion with libations. I have to admit that when I hear the word “pancakes,” I don’t immediately think, “Wow—the decadence!” Shrove Tuesday is a devout person’s version of kicking up one’s heels. I sometimes made pancakes at home (not for devotional reasons, but on random occasions) and was always trying to replicate the ones my mother made when I was little. I never succeeded in doing so. Hers were thin, more like crepes than the big, thick ones restaurants serve, and she made them small, no more than four or five inches in diameter. They were delicious in an unassuming way, sort of sweet and savory. No one else’s tasted like hers, although other peoples’ presentation was often more impressive.

I have gotten closer to her way of making them over time, but mine are too soggy, and there’s still something missing flavor-wise. It seems to me that everybody else makes enormous pancakes but relies on toppings for most of the razzmatazz and flavor. My mom’s weren’t like that: you could eat them alone and they would still taste good. I remember eating them with a little bit of butter (actually margarine) or grape jelly and considering them a treat. I wish I had asked her how she did it, but I’m not sure even she would have been able to tell me. Probably, it had to do as much with the ingredients and the skillet she used as with any technique involved. (I do know she used Calumet Baking Powder.)

Well, the gist of it is, I went out for pancakes yesterday, ended up at First Watch eating carrot cake and pecan flavored pancakes, and once again thought to myself, once it was over, “Not bad, but not like Mom’s.” The pancakes were huge, and I couldn’t quite finish them, so I rolled out of the restaurant feeling that I had definitely lived up to my “Fat Tuesday” obligations. Having gotten into the Shrove Tuesday mode, I woke up this morning thinking about whether I might get any benefit from celebrating Lent, and if so, what I might want to give up for it. Then it occurred to me, all at once: Mary! You’re living in your car! You live like a nun, you don’t even have a pillow to lay your head on, you eat hard-boiled eggs, almonds, and salad (admittedly with some potato chips and fries thrown in), and your money goes toward the basics of living. Getting a roof over your head is the main luxury you’re looking forward to at the moment. What could you possibly deprive yourself of that circumstances haven’t taken away from you already?

When you’re raised as a Catholic, you have that “But I could always try a little harder to be good” ethic impressed on you from the get-go, and while I think this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, you do have a responsibility to yourself to say when enough is enough. A person can only be so good before starting to float off into the ether or sail off to heaven in a magic ship like Perceval did. If that sounds good to you, go right ahead, but I’ve spent much of my life trying to learn to embrace earthly life, not leave it behind. Catholicism, as I learned it, probably emphasized the next life a little too strongly. I can see that in the Middle Ages, when life was tough all over, this might have played well and even have given people a lifeline. But I think we’re at point in the 21st century when we have to say to ourselves, “This is where we are. If we don’t like it, how do we go about making the world better?”

So in short, I’m not giving anything up for Lent. I, personally, have had enough character building experiences and in fact probably have extra character to give away, should you be in need of some. It seems eminently more practical to try to hang onto the things I’ve got, though a good Lenten exercise might be to keep in mind that all of us, no matter where we’re situated, have something to say about the kind of world we’re creating. No matter who you are, no matter where you are, your actions affect the world we’re living in, and we can only make this life better if we decide that we want to.

Is Spring Fever Still PC?

It’s only been a little over two weeks since the groundhog saw its shadow (or didn’t see it—I don’t know which it was this time). Technically, we should be in the depths of winter, and in years past we would have been. Ten years ago we had a cold, dark February that seemed to go on and on, and since I had just gotten back from a vacation in SoCal at the beginning of the month, it seemed even worse by contrast. We’ve had barely any snow this year, and it hasn’t been notably cold, but since our winters seem to be skewing late in recent years, there’s still time for it. I’ve realized that I don’t really mind winter weather that much, except that I don’t enjoy driving in it. It’s the lack of winter that worries me.

An occasional mild winter seems like a reprieve, but a pattern of mild winters several years in a row is worrisome even for someone who loves summer. I sometimes wonder what our world will look like even 20 or 30 years from now. While catastrophic war is always a possibility, the catastrophe that scares me the most has to do with changes in our climate. Of course, many things that happen in nature are outside of our control and could also result in catastrophe, but the lack of urgency about things we could be doing to slow climate change is something I’m afraid we’ll rue sooner than we think.

What’s supposed to happen here in Kentucky is that we suffer through our Vitamin D deficiencies and complain about how dark it is for at least four months and then suddenly leap back to life again sometime in March. It may be early, it may be late—and an early spring is almost always interrupted by more winter weather—but you don’t have to feel guilty about welcoming the first signs of spring once you’ve paid your dues with a proper Kentucky winter. So it is with that preamble that I tell you that I felt a difference in the light this afternoon, that it seemed stronger and warmer, and coupled with the fact that it was still broad daylight when I was on my way to dinner, I felt unseasonably early stirrings of what I can only describe as spring fever. I felt kind of good, and then I felt bad about Feeling Good.

People around here practice a sort of “sympathetic weather magic,” which means you’ll sometimes see someone wearing shorts and a T-shirt at even the barest hint of a crocus blooming or a piece of blue sky appearing. I’m surprised I didn’t see anyone doing that today. It’s quite cold at night still, and for all I know, we could have the blizzard of the century a month from now, but this afternoon there was a distinct feeling that spring is coming on, and it’s not something you really want to say no to, no matter what. Even a mild Kentucky winter is damp and chilly and causes you to feel ready for any spring you can get, though you’re perhaps not as starved for it as you would feel under normal circumstances.

At the grocery store, they seem to have skipped directly from Valentine’s Day to Easter (if there are shamrocks about, I didn’t see any, though that may have been in a different aisle). They’ve even been dropping different songs into the playlist at Kroger after seemingly playing the same loop forever, which is probably a coincidence but has somehow become associated in my mind with an impending change of season. Not only that, but the floral department was a raft of color and bloom this evening, a gorgeous thing to behold, even if it’s only cut flowers.

So here I am, sadly enjoying these harbingers of spring, and not only that, I took pictures of the flowers at the store so that I could go on looking at them in case Old Man Winter suddenly comes back with a vengeance. Things have come to a pitiful state when you feel bad about enjoying the first stirrings of spring, so I’ll try not to let my happiness drag on any further than a few minutes. I’ve also been feeling the effects of pollen, already circulating as per usual, so this smidgen of spring is not an unalloyed pleasure. A burst of spring flowers, a stuffy nose. A chilly overnight, a dose of sunshine. Things could be worse.

Blue-Eyed Hero

Following the death of actor Kirk Douglas at age 103 last week, a slew of news stories appeared summarizing his life and achievements in the movie industry. I actually didn’t know very much about Mr. Douglas, but he does earn a place on this blog for his portrayal of Ulysses in the 1954 film of that name directed by Mario Camerini. It was my first introduction to Homer on film, and while in many ways it may have been less faithful to the spirit of the Greeks than other adaptations I’ve seen, it was, at the same time, one of the most entertaining versions of “The Odyssey” on record.

I don’t really remember a time when I didn’t have some familiarity with the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece and Rome. I read “The Iliad” when I was a teenager and followed it up immediately with “The Odyssey” but wouldn’t be truthful if I said I got a lot out of it. I remember having a book in junior high school with retellings of the stories of Greek and/or Roman mythology that was more accessible than Homer, Ovid, or Virgil in their original forms if also somewhat simplistic—but even at that stage I was already familiar with the stories. In the same way I absorbed fairy tales, seemingly without effort and from a variety of sources, I came to know ancient mythology without being able to say how it happened.

Even in junior high school, though, I was struck by the fatalism evident in many of myths, which—unlike fairy tales—sometimes ended unhappily. Why did Persephone have to keep going back to the Underworld just because she’d eaten some seeds, I wondered. Why did Daphne have to change her very being just because Apollo wouldn’t leave her in peace? Why couldn’t Icarus have listened to his father and flown a little further from the sun? There didn’t seem to be any answers to these questions except “that’s the way it was,” a sobering fatalism mixed up with all those wonderfully inventive characters and stories.

It wasn’t until I read some of the Greek tragedies that I realized that Odysseus was not always portrayed as the sympathetic, godlike hero I first knew who wandered for many years, enduring many hardships, only to return in triumph at last to his beloved home and family. The Odysseus who was instrumental in sacrificing Iphigenia at Aulis bears little relation to the hale and hearty Ulysses Mr. Douglas portrayed on screen in the 1950s, and to be honest, the big-screen Ulysses is the way I preferred him. He was glorious on screen, fearlessly brawling and maneuvering his way from one adventure to another, maintaining a sense of humor, courage, and elan no matter what happened, and looking good while doing it.

The versions of the myths I heard as a child emphasized the heroic qualities of the characters, while the “adult” versions revealed cruelty, ruthlessness, misogyny, and more. When you see Mr. Douglas’s Ulysses up on the screen, you know that he is truly a hero, that he deserves to defeat his enemies, and that his homecoming is a just reward. Well, who wouldn’t prefer to see him in that light? In Euripides, one finds it difficult to drum up any enthusiasm for the Greek cause because you know the human cost of purchasing the winds favorable to their venture. The Trojan War seems cursed from the outset, and the Greek leaders, including Odysseus, come across as a pack of savages.

While the “adult” versions of the myths make us extremely thoughtful about such things as war, peace, family psychodrama, and expediency, the more playful versions give us heroes and adventures we can follow by proxy. I’m not sure that one type is really that much more superior to the other—there’s plenty of room for multiple retellings of these stories, and there are many different ways to approach mythology. I have to thank Mr. Douglas for giving me my first and most visceral image of Ulysses, even if it is somewhat larger than life, since that is the one I will probably always cherish. I will admit to preferring my heroes to be heroic, even if it doesn’t always happen that way.