Scatter these blossoms

Winter's over, and for a few brief weeks, the fruit trees - cherries, peaches, apples, apricots - are in furious bloom. They're gorgeous, and everywhere, but they don't last. No-one knows this better than Japan's poets, for whom the cherry blossom has long been a symbol of evanescence. “It is just because / they scatter without a trace,” says one ancient anonymous fragment, “that cherry blossoms / delight us so, for in this world / lingering means ugliness.” The eighth century poet Takahashi Mushimaro wrote mostly about local folk tales, and about Mount Fuji and Mount Tsukuha. This poem (roughly 1280 years old this spring) was composed when one of his noble patrons, Lord Fujiwara no Umakai, was sent to be Commander of the Western Sea Circuit - hence the reference to ‘my lords return.’ Charging a god to keep the blossoms on the trees an extra week is the kind of effrontery of which only poets, God bless them, are capable. But the sentiment's in all of us I'm sure when the cherry trees flower. 

Where white clouds rise
Above soaring Tatsuta
And the mountain torrent
Plummets down Ogura’s peak,
Blossoming cherries
Burgeon in great swirls of bloom;
But the mountain is high
And the wind is never still,
And the spring rain
Goes on falling day by day,
So that by now the petals
Have scattered from the upper branches.
O blossoms remaining
On the branches down below,
For a little while
Do no scatter so wildly,
Until my lords return
From the journey where they go,
Grass for their pillow.

This journey of mine
Will not last beyond seven days:
God of Tatsuta,
I charge you, do not let the wind
Scatter these blossoms to the ground.

Domum tuam, Domine

Growing up vaguely puritan, I somehow nursed the notion that beautifying one's space was wasteful or worse, and that decoration was eminently dispensible. Church in particular was deliberately bare, and the Catholics were missing the point with their soaring visual romance. Yet I had aesthetic tendencies that struggled against this apparent prohibition. I would read interior design magazines furtively, guiltily. I would draw and then tear up houseplans or pictures of furniture, knowing they were worldly. I would secretly enjoy the architecture and atmosphere of stony, incense-ridden chapels.

As I grew up, read more and thought more, I decided the Puritans were wrong about space. Whatever level of spiritual detachment you might reach, the space you inhabit influences your state of mind and wellbeing. The ideal of a non-visual theology doesn't quite match our intensely visual lived experience. Besides, there's nothing irreligious about beauty, and ordering one's private space, as much as ordering an ecclesiastical space, is a thoughtful activity, perhaps even a wise one. I still belong to a church that doesn't oblige aesthetically, but I now think that time and imagination should be given to arranging one's domestic life, not in defiance of one's spiritual life, but in accordance with it, as a reflection of it and an aid to it. 

When we got married, a truckload (literally) of presents arrived. Having travelled fairly lightly for many years, this sudden profusion of stuff in my house, especially in my kitchen and my linen cupboard, left me delighted and alarmed. The delight came not, I think, from having more stuff, but from a feeling of being, for the first time as an adult, replete; well equipped, well prepared. It gave me a sense of kinship with women through generations who were wardens of domestic wealth, who had a place for everything and everything in its place, who, like the paragon in Proverbs 31, laughed at the days to come.  

And here's the heart of what I struggled with as a child and for years afterward. How am I supposed to live in this world, knowing there's another? There always seemed to me two models to choose from: the first was the life of the world-renouncers, the zealots, martyrs and ascetics; the second was the life of the wise - those who found joy and order in creation, who celebrated ordinary human loveliness. Paul might have belonged to the first category; Job and John to the second. As I get older, the second comes to seem more valid, not just more appealing. I grow more and more sure that the best clue we have to that other world is beauty, and the best way to live is beautifully. 

Starting from Paumonok

As always, American politics is an absorbing sideshow. After an alarming primary season, Romney and Ryan are now on the GOP ticket, but what Mitt, Newt, Rick, Ron, and Rick all had in common was that they thought a privileged white doofus should be in charge. Come on, America. You've tried that. And as if there weren't enough PWDs in the field, Missouri's Todd Akin had to pipe up, reminding everyone that Republicans often have a nebulous grasp of reality. His Palinesque ignorance earned him instant notoriety, and ignited a debate about rape and reproduction. One of the best things I've read on the subject was this in the New Yorker, by someone who (unlike Akin) actually knows what he's talking about.

One of the best lines I've read of late was in an article on Mitt's sex appeal at The Atlantic: Evolutionary psychology is the phrenology of our time. Thank you, Elspeth Reeve. I'm glad I'm not the only one rolling her eyes at fatuous explanations of how our behaviour around the office or at parties reflects traits on which our hunter/gatherer ancestors must have relied. I think the ancestors would turn in their neolithic graves if they knew what nonsense is talked in their name.  

Darwin, too, might turn, since he wrote with truth and beauty in mind, and wonder, and curiosity, and love: none of these seem present in his dim descendents, the psychopundits. I found this week these lines from Origin of Species which seem to me lovely: “As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever-branching and beautiful ramifications.”

The odds of finding a poem to tie these loose thoughts into some kind of coherence were always slim, but Darwin's contemporary, Walt Whitman, casts so wide a net that he just might catch, in these lines from the poem “Starting from Paumonok,” all the creatures I've just loosed. (You can read the whole thing here.)  Have a nice weekend. 

Victory, union, faith, identity, time,
The indissoluble compacts, riches, mystery,
Eternal progress, the kosmos, and the modern reports.
This then is life,
Here is what has come to the surface after so many throes and convulsions.
 
How curious! how real!
Underfoot the divine soil, overhead the sun.
 
See revolving the globe,
The ancestor-continents away group'd together,
The present and future continents north and south, with the isthmus
between.
 
See, vast trackless spaces,
As in a dream they change, they swiftly fill,
Countless masses debouch upon them,
They are now cover'd with the foremost people, arts, institutions, known.
 
See, projected through time,
For me an audience interminable.

With firm and regular step they wend, they never stop,
Successions of men, Americanos, a hundred millions,
One generation playing its part and passing on,
Another generation playing its part and passing on in its turn,
With faces turn'd sideways or backward towards me to listen,
With eyes retrospective towards me.

[…]

Take my leaves America, take them South and take them North,
Make welcome for them everywhere, for they are your own off-spring,
Surround them East and West, for they would surround you,
And you precedents, connect lovingly with them, for they connect
lovingly with you. 

Good shepherds

Two mass shootings in as many weeks have prompted the usual American impasse about the apparently intractable problem of guns.  Meanwhile just about everyone else in the world can see the solution. And it’s not the one proposed by the gun lobby: more guns. In fact it’s the opposite: fewer guns. Or, heck, how about just fewer assault rifles? That would be a good start. But the so-called second amendment rights of the gun nuts seem to trump the first amendment rights of, for example, the Sikhs. Their freedom to carry lethal weapons must not on any account be infringed by the right of their fellow citizens to live in peace and safety. “’Tis mad idolatry to make the service greater than the god,” Shakespeare has Hector say in Troilus and Cressida. The one that got me, though, was philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s line: “Freedom for the wolves is death to the lambs.” That equation had a bloody resonance this past month. 

It has another kind of resonance this week, with the announcement of Paul Ryan as Romney’s VP pick. Ryan’s notorious Budget proposal, that, according to the independent Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, would represent “the largest redistribution of income from the bottom to the top in modern U.S. history”, argues from a purely ideological (and Randian) stance that America would genuinely be better off if the wealthy got breaks and the poor got broken. Obama’s called it “thinly veiled Social Darwinism,” but it’s worse. It’s aiding the wolves, and tying down the lambs. 

Words that don't mean what you think they do but you wish they did

I have a number of these: the words you use wrongly but confidently until the day when some smug linguist comes along and pricks your bubble. Instead of relief at knowing the truth, you're left with a sense of deflation. Instead of gratitude, there's a double loss: you have no use for a word that doesn't mean what you thought it did, and no word for what you thought you meant. Here are the ones I could think of today; doubtless there are others.

1. Nonplused. This is definitely the one I'm most upset about. I thought it meant something like unimpressed, impassive, a kind of “yeah, so what?” When I found out it means confused, bewildered or perplexed, needless to say I was nonplused. (And shouldn't it have a double s?)

2. Hopefully. This is one of Don Watson's bugbears; since he pointed it out I still use it wrongly but now with a twinge of guilt. We can say “I hope it won’t rain,” and we might even hang the washing out hopefully, but we shouldn’t say “hopefully it won’t rain,” since “hopefully,” as an adverb, describes our attitude in performing an action. We use it more as our ancestors would have used “God willing.” Maybe I should substitute that since I can't get by without hopefully.

3. Salubrious. This totally sounds like something sibilant and lugubrious and slightly risque. But it means healthful or conducive to health. Almost the opposite of what you'd expect it to mean. 

4. Lugubrious. Sounds gooey, doesn't it? It's not though. It means mournful, dismal, extravagantly, almost histrionically gloomy. Turns out there's no fancy word for gooey. 

5. Refulgent. This one sounds like an expletive, a more explosive word for repugnant or repellent. You can almost feel the saliva spraying as a contemptuous orator hurls this one at some hideously refulgent object of wrath. The joke would be on him, though, since it means something more like resplendent, radiant, brilliant. 

Perhaps my next list should be the words that - wonderfully, deliciously - mean exactly what they sound like they mean. Words like “obstreperous” and “malodorous.” And “unkempt.”

(No, not thinking of anyone in particular.)