During these times of closures of public spaces, some people have been, for instance, taking virtual tours of museums, which Peter Schjeldahl, an art critic for the New Yorker, says "add insult to injury" because they are "a strictly spectacular, amorphous disembodiments of aesthetic experience." So many people have shifted to working at home that the computer store sold out of computer holding stands and other stores out of goose-neck lamps. One can read books, try new recipes, and I hear that Netflix and Zoom-type apps are making tons of money, so they sure better be donating tons of money to virus research or to small businesses or other places to help those who have been thrust to the bottom of the barrel through no fault of their own, just as the unexpected boon from the bad has come to those companies through no effort on their part. All luck.
Might I suggest another way to deal with both the lag of time and the need for stimulation? Memorizing poetry is a wonderful distraction. I started with T. S. Eliot's brilliant 140-line poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." The subject matter is maybe too close to this our own dismal time, but the poetry, the word usage, is so beautiful it carries through the existential ennui, as it's supposed to do. I walk the hills saying, "Shall we go, then, you and I,/ while the evening is spread out against the sky/ like a patient etherized upon a table?" and "There will be time, there will be time," even though I know full well that it isn't true.
Needing something both easier and shorter after memorizing "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," I picked up the gorgeous humor of Edward Hoagland and started in on "His Majesty," which begins, "What does his majesty, Mr. Boombox in my Jeep think/ as he drives down the beach every night at 2:00 a.m./ under the bleached shell of the summer moon/ assaulting all the houses with his rude tunes?" and containing the great suggestion that the "divine peaceful Florida night" might "inflict on the human condition a big flat tire" or "write it a ticket for two thousand years of disturbing the peace." I love saying those words again and again, as I learn the poem.
And then what could be better than one of Robert Frost's delightful narrative poems? I memorized "Death of a Hired Man" many years ago, so now I decided on another one of my favorites, "Wild Grapes," in which a five-year-old girl is taken grape picking by her brother to a bunch of wild grapes growing in white birches. When he bends the tree down (you remember from "Birches," don't you? how flexible the white birch tree is?) for her to hold onto and pick the grapes out of, the tree "caught me up as if I were the fish/ and it the fish pole," and then she hangs on "with something of the baby grip/ acquired ancestrally in just such trees." It's a delightful tale, but the best thing is the quintessential Frost way of ending with something wise:
I had not learned to let go with the hands
as I still have not learned to with the heart
and have desires to with the heart — nor need
that I can see. The heart—is not the mind
I might yet live, as I know others live,
to wish to let go with the mind
of cares, at night, to sleep,
but nothing tells me I need learn
to let go with the heart.
Now I'm onto Gerard Manley Hopkins because I love Hopkins, but most of his poetry is full of angst, and I don't want to be reciting angst right now. So I've chosen "Binsley Poplars," which contains the beautiful and wise lines, "Oh if we but knew what we do/ when we delve and hew/ hack and wrack the growing green."
Where will I go from here? I'm looking at Wallace Stephens (pretty difficult), maybe Mary Oliver. I like the long poems because the memorization part lasts longer. In the meantime, I'll walk the hills with Eliot, Hoagland, Frost, and Hopkins.
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