Much work to finish today, heading into the night hours.  What better encouragement than this passage from Czesław Miłosz, which I happened across in my research? From Roadside Dog (1998):

“In order to accomplish something, one must dedicate oneself to it totally, so much that our fellow men cannot even imagine such an exclusivity. And that does not mean at all the amount of time consumed. There are also the innumerable emotional subterfuges practiced toward oneself, slow transformations of personality, as if one supreme goal, beyond one’s will and knowledge, pulled in a single direction and organized destiny.”

Palo Alto: “the hiss of sprinklers, blue recycling bins…”

I don’t usually read Esquire, but I spent some time browsing its website last night.  Here’s why: Adam Johnson, winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize, has a short story, “Nirvana,” in this month’s issue.  (I’ve written about Adam and his Orphan Master’s Son here and here and here and here, among other places). His newest story is about love, death,  drones, hashboards from Bangalore, and a cyberspace resurrection of a dead president that’s been downloaded 14 million times – and it all takes place on “a normal Palo Alto night—the hiss of sprinklers, blue recycling bins, a raccoon digging in the community garden.”

The protagonist’s wife has Guillain-Barré syndrome, a condition that leaves her paralyzed from the neck down. The couple live “at the edge of the medical literature.”  He talks to a dead president, she listens to Nirvana, “whose songs are all from a guy who blew his brains out.”  The rest twines the real and the unreal, the transhuman and the poignantly human.

.

It’s late, and I can’t sleep.

I raise a window for some spring Palo Alto air, but it doesn’t help. In bed, eyes open, I hear whispers, which makes me think of the President because we often talk in whispers. I know the whisper sound is really just my wife, Charlotte, who listens to Nirvana on her headphones all night and tends to sleep-mumble the lyrics. Charlotte has her own bed, a mechanical one.

Pulitzer-winning author.

Yes, hearing the President whisper is creepy because he’s been dead now, what—three months? But even creepier is what happens when I close my eyes: I keep visualizing my wife killing herself. More like the ways she might try to kill herself, since she’s paralyzed from the shoulders down. The paralysis is quite temporary, though good luck trying to convince Charlotte of that. She slept on her side today, to fight the bedsores, and there was something about the way she stared at the safety rail at the edge of the mattress. The bed is voice-activated, so if she could somehow get her head between the bars of the safety rail, “incline” is all she’d have to say. As the bed powered up, she’d be choked in seconds. And then there’s the way she stares at the looping cable that descends from the Hoyer lift, which swings her in and out of bed.

What can really keep a guy up at night is the knowledge that she doesn’t need an exotic exit strategy, not when she’s exacted a promise from you to help her do it when the time comes.

I rise and go to her, but she’s not listening to Nirvana yet—she tends to save it for when she needs it most, after midnight, when her nerves really start to crackle.

“I thought I heard a noise,” I tell her. “Kind of a whisper.”

Short, choppy hair frames her drawn face, skin faint as refrigerator light.

“I heard it, too,” she says.

Whenever I talk about Auguste Rodin‘s famous “Burghers of Calais,” a prominent feature of Stanford life since the six condemned men are plopped in front of its main quad, I usually conclude with, “Well, you know what happened to them, don’t you?”  Then the smiles disappear and the faces fall, and I always get this answer, “Yeah, they were killed.”  And so it happened when I spoke to Peter Carroll a week or so ago after his poetry reading (read about it here).  My answer to him was the same as it is to everyone.  “No, no, no, no!”

Only I know the true story, and I shall tell it to you, for free.  Here’s what everyone knows: At the beginning of the Hundred Year’s War, King Edward III‘s men approached Calais, but the city’s substantial walls and moats could not be breached. Edward received aid from England and Flanders.  Two months later, in November 1346, the English were supplied with cannon, catapults, and long ladders, but still they failed.  The English king began a siege the following February. The British royals were broke in those days – not like today – and the king pawned the Queen’s crown to pay for the siege.  The city held out for almost a year. They survived on dogs and rats in the end, when they survived at all.

The inevitable happened. Calais was defeated, and knew it. King Edward wanted to put the whole city to the sword, with sacking and pillaging and much mayhem.  He wasn’t a friendly kind of guy in the best of circumstances, and would go completely bats later in his life.  He was dissuaded from his original plan, however, but demanded instead that the city’s six leading citizens should be brought outside the city gates, in chains, to meet his pleasure.  “Pleasure,” for King Edward, could take some rather inventive and brutal turns, so you can imagine the feelings of the citizens.  The mayor, Eustache de Saint Pierre, led the way in “a shirt and a rope around his neck,” and was joined by five other volunteers.

So then … slow torture and death, yes?  No!  Enter someone who should be better known, Queen Philippa of Hainault (chronicler Jean Froissart called her as “the most gentle Queen, most liberal, and most courteous that ever was Queen in her days”).  She threw herself down on her knees before her husband, and begged for clemency for these six brave citizens, for her sake, and the sake of the child she was carrying (one of thirteen).  He scowled … but he relented.  And so they all went to a feast together and told long, funny stories, no doubt.

I read about this after I bought a small book at Her Majesty’s Stationery Office back when I lived in Old London Town.  I still have it.

From Barbara Softly‘s short Queens of England:

“Philippa is one of those few characters from the past who, in Shakespeare’s words from The Merchant of Venice, shone ‘like a good deed in a naughter world’.  The world of the Middle Ages was a grim place of constant disease – lack of sanitation affected everyone and the court moved from castle to castle, palace to palace as each building became too unpleasant to live in. Famine, early death, war, intolerance, cruel sport and cruel punishment were an accepted way of life. Philippa, one of the four daughters of the Count of Hainault, with her loving nature, humility, compassion and strength of character managed to lighten this darkness while she was Edward’s queen. When she died, ‘beloved of God and all men’, Edward, as with so many of the Plantagenents, was completely broken and the better side of his nature, together with the better side of court life, came to an end.”

She went on to bring her native Flemish weavers to England, since the backward nation had plenty of wool, but didn’t know quite what to do with it “any more than the sheep that bore it.” Her weavers settled in Norwich, and a booming industry was launched.  I understand some stained-glass Madonnas were modeled on her, but I don’t know where to find them.  All I ever find as a reliable likeness is the effigy, which looks like she has a jeweled toilet roll affixed to each side of her face.

So that’s the story.  Does it spoil things for you?  Admit it:  you were hoping for something gory, a bit of nasty to polish off your weekend, weren’t you?

Ah, but that’s only the story behind the story.  Here’s the story behind that:  After the birth of their first child, Edward the Black Prince, in Woodstock, seventeen years before Calais, the King hastily arranged a tournament in Cheapside.  A special stand was provided for the queen and the ladies of the court.  It collapsed.  No one was injured, but everyone was shaken.  The furious king demanded to have the carpenters come forward and be put to death.  You guessed it … the then-16-year-old queen came forward, threw herself on her knees before the king, and asked for mercy.  And got it.  So was the gig at Calais a set piece, a planned intervention to show off the wild king’s mercy?  There have been whispers.  Who knows?

And why should you care about all this anyway?  Well, if you’re English, or even half, as I am, a number of scholars and statisticians estimate that there’s an 80 percent chance you’re descended from him.  One source here says the percentage may be even higher.

Anyway, Peter Carroll (who looks like Jean d’Aire, as I said before)  was relieved to find out everyone was okay.  And, coincidentally, his wife, the photographer Jeannette Ferrary, who also teaches a course on food writing at Stanford, happened to be on campus recently and was photographing … the Burghers of Calais.  “They are so moving, aren’t they? If you really look at them, you can barely stand it,” she wrote.  She offered to share her dramatic photos. How could we refuse?  All photos are by Jeannette Ferrary.  Un grand merci, Jeannette.

Decisions, decisions…

I listened to Mummy.

My political education began very young.  When people would praise FDR in my family home, my mother would hiss “Yalta” between her teeth.  The 1945 photograph of Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, and Franklin D. Roosevelt sitting side by side at the Crimean resort elicited the muttered remark, “a bunch of criminals” (although she read Churchill’s multi-volume series on the war).  “Poor Neville Chamberlain believed he could trust Hitler. He was wrong. But I don’t think I’m wrong about Stalin,” Churchill naively opined.

Having a mother who was 100% Magyar was a good antidote to political correctness.  And she never forgot nor forgave the conference that forked over most of Eastern Europe to Stalinist rule.  (Perhaps it’s no coincidence that her daughter writes so much about Cold War-era writers from Poland and Russia.)

So I read with interest the Christopher Caldwell‘s discussion of two impressive and recent books in the New Republic, Anne Applebaum‘s Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-56 and Marci Shore‘s The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe.  I have endless admiration for both women.  You can read the article, “When Evil Was a Social System: The Moral Burdens of Living under Communist Rule in Eastern Europe,” here.

I pulled out piles of excerpts to cite, but this humble blog post quickly became top-heavy, and I felt the ominous presence of the copyright cops outside my door.  Let me settle instead for citing Caldwell’s concluding paragraphs:

“These two books are a sign that something is changing in our understanding of the twentieth century. Applebaum and Shore, while close in age, are on opposite sides of a generational razor’s edge. Applebaum, born in the 1960s, has adult memories of the Cold War; Shore, born in the 1970s, does not. Applebaum speaks to, and in the idiom of, those who survived totalitarianism. She dedicates her book to ‘those Eastern Europeans who refused to live within a lie.’ Her big, resolute book gives us the most authoritative knowledge we have about communism, and only the most authoritative knowledge.

“Shore is engaged in a different project. Her book shows what erudition looks like in the Internet Age. Like a blog string, it records every false step she makes on her way to understanding. Shore almost never writes about important matters in her own voice. This means a loss of authority compared with Applebaum’s more classical style, but it allows her to share more with the reader. It frees her of the historian’s superego. The question of whether the reader can handle certain of the explosive things she has to say about Jews and communism appears not to have occurred to her.  …

“Reasonable historians may differ about whether this sort of history-through-memoir is more honest (transparent) or more cowardly (non-
committal) than the standard kind. But it will be clear to any reader of good faith that Shore has chosen historical guilt as her subject in order to deepen our understanding, not to sow discord or rile anyone up. She has found a way to illuminate certain Polish and Jewish ideas about the worst episodes of the twentieth century that is frank, fresh, and gripping. Guilt, after all, is not just self-inflicted injury but productive moral work. At any time, “guilty” will describe almost any conscience functioning as it should.”

Read the whole article here.

Right on.

Meanwhile, a final anecdote lingers:  “Applebaum mentions a girl sent home from school for saying, ‘my grandfather says Stalin is already burning in Hell’—sent home not because the teacher disapproved, but to protect the girl, her friends, her grandfather, her school, and the people who ran it. In such circumstances, propaganda can be a balm. It provides a way for men to lie to themselves, to rationalize submission to the strong, to save face. ‘I don’t like everything Stalin says,’ you could mutter (quietly!) to your wife, ‘but someone has to do something about the illiterate.’” Do I detect a whiff of Czesław Miłosz‘s  ketman here?

I’ve written about poet Dana Gioia recently, but I couldn’t resist this opportunity to do so again. I don’t know Mary Tabor, except on Facebook, which is how I found her interesting interview with Dana over at Facts and Arts (the interview is here).  A good deal of the talk is about his latest collection, Pity the Beautiful  (I got a private early reading of some of the poems – I wrote about that here). Says Dana, “Everything in this new book is in a sense a subtle, complicated protest against the gross, short-term materialism of contemporary life in the United States. In protesting, I think that we move with compassion, not with anger.”

An excerpt:

Tabor: At this point in your career that has been so sterling, you have 11 honorary degrees—

Gioia: None of which I deserved.

Tabor: Aren’t you modest? On psychologist Maslow’s Pyramid, at the bottom are food and shelter, safety, then love, esteem and at the top is self-actualization. Are you there?

Interviewer…

Gioia: I’ve always had kind of an inverted pyramid. My life seems terribly practical from the outside. I’ve had to construct a practical life because everything inside is totally idealistic and self-actualizing. So how could I lead the life I wanted to lead when essentially I’m a working-class kid? I always had a job and I’ve turned down practical offers. I only wrote what I believed I should write. My pyramid is all mixed up. It’s like Maslow’s Rubik Cube.

Tabor: What did your parents do?

Gioia: My Dad was Sicilian and when I was born he was a cab driver, then a chauffeur. My mother worked at the phone company. She was Mexican-American. They were good working people but poor as could be. At the end of their lives, they were totally broke. My brother and I felt we had to be practical with two more kids younger than we were. But at this point I do think I’ve earned the right to just do what I want: to write and to energize culture. American literary culture right now is in the doldrums.

…and interviewee

Tabor: You’ve said, “I don’t think Americans are dumber than they were 25 years ago, but our culture is.” Tell me how our culture is dumber.

Gioia: Our culture is vastly dumber. I’ll give you an example. If you’ve got a copy of The New Yorker from 30 years ago, it would have about six times as many words as it does now. The same thing for The Atlantic. With most of our newspapers, if somebody wrote a review of a book, it was thousands of words long. People would actually think through things in print in a serious way. Even if you didn’t like The New Yorker, you had to take it seriously. Nowadays we have the USA Today version of culture. People have been trained by TV and the Internet to want an image and a headline. The notion of careful sequential thought contextualized historically, ideologically is a vanishing skill. When we collectively lose our ability to have sustained linear attention, whole types of thought are impossible. I see this in my students who are bright kids but have read very little.

Read the whole shebang here.

Postscript on 8/1:  And the incomparable Jeff Sypeck over at Quid Plura agrees!  He wrote to us:

I agree with Gioia, but you don’t have to look to The New Yorker or The Atlantic for examples. In 1952, Time magazine published a piece about postwar efforts to preserve and publish Anglo-Saxon manuscripts; the article treats the subject seriously and assumes the curiosity of the middlebrow reader.

By contrast, when Heaney’s Beowulf came out in 2000, Time covered its publication with a cliché from Woody Allen and a crack about Harry Potter, characterized it as the epic every English major only pretended to read, said it was “filled with odd names and a lot of gory hewing and hacking,” and called Heaney’s translation “boffo.” A reader from 1952 transported to the year 2000 might well have concluded that Time had become a magazine for children.

The book that brought him to the West.

Zbigniew Herbert died on a stormy night in Warsaw, this day, in 1998. We can do no better than link to Artur Sebastian Rosman‘s post, “Zbigniew Herbert Tempers the Rational Fury” in his brand-new blog, Cosmos the in Lost. In particular, Artur explores Herbert’s interesting connection with the philosopher Baruch Spinoza.

From Herbert’s poem, “Mr. Cogito Tells of the Temptation of Spinoza”:

Baruch Spinoza of Amsterdam
was seized by a desire to reach God

in the attic
cutting lenses
he suddenly pierced a curtain
and stood face to face

he spoke for a long time
(and as he so spoke
his mind enlarged
and his soul)
he posed questions
about the nature of man …

Well, read the rest here.

I never met Zbigniew Herbert, but I did stroke his cat.  I snapped this photo of the occasion in 2008.  Szu-szu is on the right.  On the left is Mouszka, an important acquisition by Madame Herbert sometime after the death of her husband.  I wonder if Szu-szu is still alive…

Meanwhile, among my own posts on Herbert are: “The Worst Dinner Party Ever, Czeslaw Milosz, Zbigniew Herbert, and the Lady Who Watched the Fight” here; and “When Zbyszek Met Kasia” here; and “Notting Hill Editions: Irish Saints, Dutch Executioners, and “a Crumb of Helpless Goodness”  here.

Light a candle in his memory.  And meanwhile, I must find a larger photo of these cats somewhere.  (Postscript: Found a bigger copy of the photo. The Herbert pussycats deserve no less.)