There Is a Last Solitary Coach - David Vogel

There is a last, solitary coach about to leave.


Let us get in and go,


For it won’t wait.




I have seen young girls going softly


With sad faces


That looked ashamed and sorry


Like purple sunsets,

 

And chubby, pink children


Who went simply


Because they were called.




And I’ve seen men


Who stepped proud and straight through the world’s streets,


Whose large eyes went ranging


Far and wide,


They too got in calmly


And left.

 

And we are the last.


Day is declining.


The last, solitary coach is about to leave.


Let us too get in quietly


And go,


For it won’t wait.

The Kotzker rebbe

Tomb of Menachem Mendl of Kotzk

"While the Kotzker rebbe (d. 1859) is a relatively unknown figure in the history of Western civilization, he is often compared to the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard.  They lived worlds apart (the Kotzer in Guray, Poland, and Kierkegaard in Cophenhagen, Denmark) and never met.  By the time Kierkegaard (1813-1855) had published his first book, Either/Or, in 1843, the Kotzker had removed himself from the world and lived in virtual isolation (perhaps a psychotic break).  While their ways of life were worlds apart, their theological concerns express a remarkable similarity.  They both searched for ways to determine how to live one's life in accordance with a personal religious creed and committment.  Niether left their students answers, only limitless challenge.  For the Kotzker, the one who thinks he is finished is finished.  Hence, their struggle urges us on in our struggle."

Kushner & Olitzky, Sparks Beneath the Surface

Feminist Hebrew Poetry

The Defiant Muse: Hebrew Feminist Poems from Antiquity to the Present, offers just what the title declares. A collection of poems, from the early period of Hebrew to modern times that have some sort of female viewpoint.


This is an anthology, so there is no consistent view of what "feminism" is, nor is there any attempt at a thematic focal point. Rather, the reader weaves his or her way through many voices, finding surprises here and there, and a great range of expression. Except for the fact that these are female voices speaking, we could almost drop the feminist label. If there was not a dominant, male voice in Hebrew poetics, this fine collection could easily be called Hebrew Humanist Poems from Antiquity to the Present.


This is a bi-lingual edition, so the reader with some Hebrew can also take a crack at the originals, and compare them to the final translations.  The rich nuances of the original are here to compare and contrast.

The Harvest Moon by Ted Hughes

The flame-red moon, the harvest moon,



Rolls along the hills, gently bouncing,


A vast balloon,


Till it takes off, and sinks upward


To lie on the bottom of the sky, like a gold doubloon.


The harvest moon has come,


Booming softly through heaven, like a bassoon.


And the earth replies all night, like a deep drum.






So people can't sleep,


So they go out where elms and oak trees keep


A kneeling vigil, in a religious hush.


The harvest moon has come!






And all the moonlit cows and all the sheep


Stare up at her petrified, while she swells


Filling heaven, as if red hot, and sailing


Closer and closer like the end of the world.






Till the gold fields of stiff wheat


Cry `We are ripe, reap us!' and the rivers


Sweat from the melting hills.

The Long Decline

Hemingway: The Final Years, is the final book in Reynold's five part biography of Hemingway; this volume chronicles the writer's decline. Along the way, there is another war which he both fights and covers as a correspondent, long periods where he does not write fiction, yet another failed marriage, large writing projects that would only be published posthumously, a Pulitzer and Nobel Prize, and the fall into chronic poor health, two plane crashes, depression, and alcohol.

Reynolds is careful to show how Hemingway's decisions, laid down since he was a young man in the early twenties, eventually came to haunt him as he aged (and he aged fast).

Reynolds' series of books is interesting, well-paced, meticulously researched. The lesson of the books, if we can say there is a lesson to a book, is an old one: enjoy what you have.

Hemingway was never able to enjoy the fruits of his labor or the accolades he received. Part of it was a genetic inheritance of depression improperly treated. Another part was a lack of self-examination, critical to most writing, and largely absent from Hemingway's psychological makeup. Like many of us, he just kept making the same mistakes again and again. Eventually he couldn't live with them.

The earth gets tired of being exploited

From Hemingway's Green Hills of Africa; a rare explicit statement on ecological conservation.

A continent ages once we come. But the foreigner destroys, cuts down the trees, drains the water, so that the water supply is altered and in a short time the soil, once the sod is turned under, is cropped out and blown away as I had seen it start to blow in Canada. The earth gets tired of being exploited. A country wears out quickly unless man puts back all of his residue and that of the beasts.  When he quits using beasts and uses machines, the earth defeats him quickly.  The machine can't reproduce, nor does it fertilize the soil, and it eats what he cannot raise.  A country was made to be as we found it. 

A Time To Die

I am always sniffing around for the pagan holdover in the fabric of our monothestic culture.


No greater holdover exists than Halloween.  Folded into All Souls Day or All Saints Day, the overtly pagan element of the holiday is evident.  Anyone who has gone to work at 7AM knows that the days are growing shorter, darker, colder.  Anyone in the North East of North American can see that nature is doing its great slough of vegetation.  In heavy wind and soggy rain, leaves tumble down to  death.

We are at a threshold where life cascades into death, or at least, to the dormancy of life.  And at this time, somewhere in the past, certain cultures saw in this death in nature a metaphor for the greater cycles of human life and death.  So this holiday of Halloween, or the Day of the Dead, was created in part to fulfill a great need: the desire to have a nexus between life and death.  A place where the dead communicate with the living.


The costumes and trick-or-treating are really just a superficial symbols for the expression of these greater archetypes.  Things die.  But death also brings forth new life.  And this is a great cycle that never ends