Drooping Spirits

I think the term in French is l’esprit tombant.  Or maybe l’esprit triste. Or l'esprit embrouillé. Whatever it’s called, my spirits have been drooping these last few days.

It helps to know that many other people are affected with this condition as we enter the second year of restrictions. Sue Horner, an Ontario-based freelance writer who has a website called Get It Write, offers some useful suggestions that propose turning to creativity as a way of lifting one’s spirits.

https://getitwrite.ca/2020/10/02/spark-creativity/

I’ve tried all of her tips and they do help. It also helps to have a French term for these feelings. I like the French l’esprit for spirit, and I especially like the expression l’esprit d’escalier, the spirit of the staircase, which refers to the things you think you might have said once you are already on the way out and it’s too late. I know that as soon as I send this post out I will think of something clever that I should have said.

For the moment, though, it's enough to note that time passes, and my mood today is now more positive. Many people I love will receive vaccines this month. I will probably get one sometime in April. Things are looking up.

And, anyway, I can shame myself into lifting my own spirits by reading Lucinda Matlock’s sharp words in Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology:

What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness,

Anger, discontent and drooping hopes?

Degenerate sons and daughters,

Life is too strong for you —

It takes life to love Life.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45935/lucinda-matlock

The days are getting warmer and longer. The trees are showing that shimmer of green that lifts the spirit and brings new hope. And Lucinda Matlock always spurs me to press on.

However, I’ve just looked at my website and find that, since March of last year, I've sketched and written 52 posts on my blog, most of them referring to the pandemic.. It's now time to step back -- maybe step outdoors as well -- and reduce my blogging to every second week. Later, I might reduce it to once a month.

There’s lots to do, but only so much to say about it all. And maybe I won’t be needing blog therapy as much as I did over the past year.

Onwards! Happy March, dear blog-readers!

 REMINDER: People have told me they’ve sent replies to the Carol Matthews These Days emails but, for some reason, I don’t get them. They disappear into the stratosphere. If you would like to comment or reply, please email me directly: wayword@telus.net.

Grief

Last week I was writing about love.

This week, it’s grief and loss. The other side of the coin.

Nine years ago on February 25th, my husband died. He had spent 10 days in the acute ward of the hospital and 8 days in palliative care. It was sudden, quick, aggressive and, in one way, merciful. For him, maybe. But not for me.

I miss him every day -- and yet still feel his presence.

A few weeks ago, a man with whom I’d been friends for 50 years died, after a long illness. Since then, two other dear friends were rushed to hospitals in Victoria and Vancouver. Last week I learned that the wife of another long-time friend is in palliative care. Grief and loss are very much on my mind.

As Edgar says in King Lear, Men must endure their going hence even as their coming hither. We must all endure the loss of those we love, and grief is the other side of love. As George Saunders said in a Five Dials (Number 10) tribute to his friend, David Foster Wallace, Grief is the bill that comes due for love.

For me, it feels like a lifelong mortgage that I’ll never be able to pay off.

I’m not one of those who often talk about the silver linings of the pandemic. I do think that we’re all learning a great deal and that many of us are connecting more, and with more people, than ever before. But I also know that there's a lot of grief and loss at this time.

It’s especially sad for those who, bereaved and grieving, are unable to have family and friends gather round. We aren’t able to participate in memorials to speak of those we have loved and lost. Nothing makes a deep loss go away, but some things make it even harder to bear.

What to do about it? The most poignant poem I know about grief is Elizabeth Bishop’s One Art, (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47536/one-art). It’s well worth reading the whole poem. She writes about the many losses she has endured, noting that many were not too hard to master. Yet she acknowledges that others seem disastrous:

It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

When Bishop says (Write it!) ,I believe she’s speaking about the absolute need to give words to the loss.

As McDuff says in Macbeth, The grief that does not speak whispers the o'erfraught heart and bids it break.

 We’re all suffering from grief and loss as a result of this pandemic. We know that we must endure whatever hardships it brings, but it’s essential that, at the same time, we express the grief and loss we’re feeling.

 Otherwise, our hearts will surely break.

 

 

 

Hearts and Flowers

Yesterday was Valentine’s Day. A time of hearts and flowers.

Hearts and Flowers is the name of a song composed in 1893 by Theodore Moses-Tobani. It was frequently played as an accompaniment to silent movies and was later associated with melodrama, In 1954 Johnny Desmond referred to it in the title of his hit “Play Me Hearts and Flowers (I want to Cry).” The song was also referenced in Noel Coward’s “Family Affair” and in Amazing Spider Man #45. A sweetly sentimental song, at least one actor requested that it be played for her in order for her to be able to generate real tears!  There are many versions of the song on the internet, and I think this one is especially engaging in a poignant sort of way. Check it out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnXOr8GvKcQ

People frequently give flowers to loved ones on Valentine’s Day. I have a potful of mixed spring bulbs coming into bloom in my living room -- a very nice thing on a snowy February day. Flowers lift our spirits and are sometimes seen as a symbol of romantic love. Because of this, florists often advise people to “say it with flowers.”

Hearts and flowers, hearts and love. I’ve been thinking about hearts lately, not just because of Valentine’s Day but also because I have a few friends who have been dealing with matters of the heart that required surgery. Thankfully, heart surgery is being performed expertly in our hospitals. Our hearts are in good hands in this province.

The association between hearts and love has a long history going back centuries to the Greeks and Romans. Marilyn Yalmon’s book, The Amorous Heart: An Unconventional History of Love, traces that history from ancient times through to the appearance of the heart emoji in 1973. Yalmon concludes that “The continued global popularity of the heart as a symbol for love offers us a small dose of hope, serving as a reminder of the ageless assumption that love can save us.”:

https://ideas.ted.com/how-did-the-human-heart-become-associated-with-love-and-how-did-it-turn-into-the-shape-we-know-today/

At the beginning of the pandemic, we saw a great many hearts on doors, windows and balconies as a symbol to recognize the dedication of our health care workers. Lately, I have seen far fewer. We’re all getting accustomed to the pandemic and are less panicky about it than we were at the start. But, a year later, the nurses, doctors and other essential workers are still risking their health as they turn up for work every day.

There have been many reports of just how deeply nurses and doctors are feeling the strain of the pandemic as they keep battling the virus day after day, month after month. I think we’re all conscious of the sacrifices that are being made by all our essential workers, but I’d like to see a greater appreciation being kept at the forefront. It was good to read in the Toronto Star that a new initiative of appreciation was initiated two weeks ago in several Ontario communities:

Hearts for Healthcare Workers initiative comes to Tudor and Cashel | The Star

I’m looking at hearts differently these days because I think if there is one message that has come from the pandemic, it's about love. I find myself thinking about Dylan Thomas’s poem, And Death Shall Have No Dominion: https://poets.org/poem/and-death-shall-have-no-dominion

P K Page, in Hologram (Brick Books, 1994), used Thomas’s poem as the basis for her wonderful glosa “Love’s Pavilion” and concludes

Though lovers be lost, love shall not.

Hand in hand we shall say Amen

And we shall dance and we shall sing

With Love, with Love for companion.

 

Page also refers to love at the end of her prescient story, Unless the Eye Catch Fire, when she says “We share one heart.”

 

That may be one of the lessons we are now learning.

Good advice

 

Recently I’ve read a bit about motivated cognition. Dan Kahan, Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor at Yale Law School, says “Motivated cognition refers to the unconscious tendency of individuals to fit their processing of information to conclusions that suit some end or goal.” https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/what-is-motivated-reasoning-how-does-it-work-dan-kahan-answers That’s not quite like saying that we rationalize the decisions we make in order to escape judgment upon ourselves, but it does go some way toward explaining why people I admire might think it fine to have Super Bowl gatherings this weekend, despite what the Premier of our province and the Minister of Health advised.

I have to admit that we all do it. We justify our decisions according to our beliefs. Adjust our beliefs according to what we want to be the case. Let such beliefs determine our behaviours. Rationalize our behaviours accordingly. It’s only human. It’s understandable

But, it’s also understandable that people who are staying home, following Covid regulations, and renouncing visits with loved ones, are irritated by those who disobey the guidelines, and especially irritated when those who flout the rules are always claiming exceptional circumstances and assuring others that they're being very safe.

What to do? What to say? I believe our Provincial Medical Health Officer is right in encouraging us to be kind, to forgive, and to understand that most of us are following the rules most of the time.

Shakespeare said: The quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath. It is twice blessed/ It blesseth him that gives and him that takes. (Merchant of Venice, Act IV, Scene 1.)

The Bible tells us that God maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust (Matthews 5:45).

Good advice, all of this.

And yet, I cannot help also remembering what George Orwell wrote in his essay Facing Unpleasant Facts: “We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.”

The truth is, we know the virus is spreading. The truth is, we know that people are the spreaders. The truth is, we know that our government is unable to stop the spread, except by imposing much more extreme lockdown measures.

Let’s restate the obvious: It’s up to us! Tuum est, all you Latin scholars and UBC graduates.

And, at the same time, let’s be merciful and blessed, and kind, to the unjust as well as the just. And let’s be honest enough to acknowledge that we’re all sometimes guilty of motivated cognition and the behaviours that result.

Besides, the sun is shining and it feels as though spring is just around the corner.

Sound the flute!

Now it's mute!

Birds delight,

Day and night,

Nightingale,

In the dale,

Lark in sky, -

Merrily,

Merrily, merrily to welcome in the year.

 William Blake, Songs of Innocence

https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/blake/spring.html