Writing the Same Poem Again

It was now ten years ago that I wrote a poem recently called “Silent Movie” and when I was publishing it on my Writing the Day poems site, the software reminded me that I had already written a poem with that title. I looked and sure enough I not only had used that title but it was a very similar poem. I changed the title of the earlier poem and revised the newer poem.

It’s not just poems. Writing on this blog about Michelangelo, I was reminded by the software that I had already written about Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel the previous year. More revision.

Damn, but this trend is disturbing. These gaps in my memory are increasing lately. I remember a routine Woody Allen used in his nightclub years that included a line about him spending a summer writing Great Expectations and then realizing that Charles Dickens had already written it.

That poetry site now has more than 900 poems (a number that surprises even me) so it’s not shocking that I sometimes forget what I had written years before.

I forget names a lot , like the names of actors in films, but also names of people I have known for decades.

My very short-term memory is dreadful. I will open a new tab on the browser and then forget why I did it. I walk down to the basement and then I can’t remember why I went down there.

Are you starting to feel worried for me?

It’s not a relief that one of my sons recently said “Who was the other guy, not Morgan Freeman, in The Shawshank Redemption?” I know a lot about films and could picture his face. Yes, we could look it up on our phones easily, but we wanted to pull it out of memory because we knew that we knew it. We could picture him. He was with Susan Sarandon for years. They met when they were in Bull Durham. He won an Oscar for Mystic River. All those synapses were firing, but no name. Bob? No. *

I write a lot about memory. I know that memory loss with aging is natural. It is normal to experience short-term forgetfulness, such as the inability to remember a person’s name you met recently. Memory loss does not mean dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, but you hear so much about those topics that you consider it.

That information stored in long-term memory from events that occurred years ago tends to remain easier to recall. I remember the first day of school, my freshman year dorm room and a girl in a Shakespeare class who I never even spoke to but stared at twice a week all semester.

Aging means a gradual loss of brain cells that affects the way we store and retrieve information. Our short-term memory progressively declines, but I keep reading that memory loss from aging does not typically affect normal functioning, nor does it necessarily get worse over time.

It’s no wonder that we boomers and younger generations have made maintaining memory an industry. I have written about and you have read about exercising your mind with puzzles, mind games, and challenging reading or classes and the need to exercise your body for better mental function, perhaps because of improved circulation.

Eat lots of antioxidants, omega-3 fatty acids, vegetables and fruits, tea and dark chocolate, cold-water fish, freshly ground flaxseed, walnuts, less alcohol, less stress, practice meditation and yoga, or at least buy some Ginkgo biloba,  DHA, zinc, lutein and zeaxanthin and take it daily.

I think what I really need is more time. More quiet. More opportunities to focus. Less input for better output. I find all kinds of good thoughts and memories come while taking a shower, weeding the garden or raking the leaves.

*Footnote: That Shawshank day, I went outside and just walked around the yard looking at the plants and all of a sudden, I found Tim Robbins, who was there all along.

Deux ex Machina

A thought came to me one morning this past week and I wrote this poem.

One morning while slowly winding the springs
in my machine, sunrise made me think
of God and how Deux ex Vita
would be much preferred by me to
life’s plot resolutions that can be explained

away as coincidences, synchronicities or, God forbid,
miracles, because the world’s not a stage,
we are not players, no gods seem
to be interested in our many lives,
good or bad, slight or critical. Nothing.

Deus ex machina is a Latin phrase that means “god from the machine”. It’s a plot device where an unexpected and unlikely event suddenly resolves a seemingly unsolvable problem in a story. The phrase comes from ancient Greek and Roman theater, where an actual crane called a mechane would elevate an actor who was portraying a god above the stage would be able to to resolve a play’s plot.

I do think that how deux ex vita would be preferable to machina. I’d prefer to see a god in life.

When some plot point in real life seems to be resolved, I would like to know it was some god. I wouldn’t be picky about which god is operating the machene – Christian, Jewish, Islamic, or that god of Deism that I have been forced to believe in due to a distinct lack of evidence of any god being involved. When there does appear to be some deux ex machina, it seems to make more sense to me that it was a coincidence or synchronicity, which is a s close as I get to a miracle.

Dark Matter and Alternate Realities

I see that a new series is coming on May 8 to Apple+ titled Dark Matter. It is based on the novel of the same name by Blake Crouch. I read the novel a few years ago and, as TV shows go into reruns, I will look for streaming series to fill the summer.

I wrote elsewhere about the “real” dark matter. I say “real” because in astronomy, dark matter is a hypothetical form of matter that appears not to interact with light or the electromagnetic field like other matter.

Dark matter isn’t something we can see but gravitational effects which cannot be explained by Einstein’s general relativity give scientists the impression that it is present. This gets complicated but it seems to be involved in the formation and evolution of galaxies. Powerful

Crouch has said that in using the term for his novel he was thinking that life is full of mysteries, but that there are many more beneath the surface that we cannot see, hidden like dark matter but felt as a presence.

Experimental quantum physicist Aaron D. O’Connell demonstrated that subatomic particles exist in quantum superposition – a fancy way to say that occupy multiple realities. Crouch imagined that if someone could build a device that allowed a person to exist in superposition. Not time travel, but travel to an alternate reality.

Of course, the novel and series is entertainment not science but you can see how the leap to considering the nature of reality and of identity, and of questioning whether or not to trust what we see before our eyes would be easy.

I looked back at some reviews of the book since it has been a few years since I read the book. Interestingly, they label it alternate-universe science fiction, a countdown thriller, pop physics and a fantasy. They compare it to C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia and Lev Grossman’s Magicians books. One critic, Brian Truitt, said the novel was “a nightmarish quantum-mechanics version of It’s a Wonderful Life.” I like that comparison both because I love that film and because I consider it a dark (film noir) tale of an alternate life.

April Is the Cruelest Month

It is now May and I was looking back at last month in my journal and thinking about the line in “The Waste Land,” when T.S. Eliot said that “April is the cruelest month.” Why?  Because of its
“…breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain”

It is a month when we are thinking about spring, maybe even about summer on some unusually warm days, but it mixes new life and desire with things that have died and passed. Not all of us would agree with Eliot. He continues:

“Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.”

You don’t immediately associate winter with keeping warm, but winter snows do actually keep the soil “warm” in that protective way that snow cover helps plants and gives the bulbs the rest needed to be renewed.

But April might be the cruelest month for other reasons. My wife is one person who associates this month with bad things.

• In 2007, there was the April 16 Virginia Tech mass shooting. My son was a student and his class was involved. His professor was killed and several of his classmates were wounded.
• The Boston Marathon bombing occurred on April 15, 2013.
• April 20, 1999 was the shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado. It was one of the key reasons my wife retired from teaching soon after.
• The bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 was on April 19, a date chosen by Timothy McVeigh because it was the anniversary of the bloody end of the FBI siege on a compound in Waco, Texas in 1993.

“He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience.”

The Columbine tragedy was on Adolph Hitler’s birthday, thought to be symbolic by the young shooters. The FBI wondered if the date of the Boston Marathon, April 15, was significant being that it was Patriots Day, a Massachusetts state holiday commemorating the opening battles of the American Revolutionary War. The Waco and Oklahoma City tragedies were on the anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord in the American Revolution.

So, are the dates symbolic attempts to make a statement, or is there something about the month of April?

For extremists who believe that our federal government is as tyrannical as the British monarchy of our American Revolution, the date is symbolic of a war on a government by its own patriot people.

Of course, every month has its tragedies in modern and older times, but I have seen articles mentioning April as the month for not only the start of our Revolutionary War, but the American Civil War. Add to that the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. in April

I did some reading and April is no more violent statistically than other months. In fact, crime statistics usually go up in summer.

“A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”

American Buddhist nun Pema Chodron wrote a book,  When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times, in which she writes that “We live in difficult times. One senses a possibility they may get worse.” Her book is a Tibetan Buddhist view in how Buddhism helps cope with fear, despair, rage and the feeling that we are not in control of our lives.

The Buddhist view that despite any planning or efforts on our part, the only thing we can predict with certainty is change. While most of us rage against the night of all that, the Buddhist surrenders to the reality of impermanence.  We can center and ground ourselves. We can discover our relationship to a higher power that controls our world, no matter what name we may give to that power.

“Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
-But who is that on the other side of you?”

Quotations from The Waste Land (Norton Critical Edition) by T.S. Eliot

Cicada-geddon 2024

Brood X cicada in New Jersey

So you thought the recent solar eclipse was a “once in a lifetime” event? Well, the largest periodical cicada brood in the country, Brood XIX, is scheduled to emerge this spring after 13 years underground. And if that’s not scary enough, around the same time, the adjacent Brood XIII is scheduled to pop up for the first time in 17 years. These two broods haven’t shared an emergence since 1803. There will be billions of them. Some estimates hit a trillion.

Is this a once-in-a-lifetime year for us being hit by billions of those buzzing bugs with their red-eyes in a Cicada-geddon? That’s the buzz in the media, but it won’t be for all of the U.S.

Brood XIX has a presence in midwestern states and the southeastern portion of the U.S. and Brood XIII is mainly a problem for Illinois. Here in Paradelle, we have a few 17-year groupings of cicadas, but none are scheduled for emergence this year. New Jersey did have a Brood X year in 2021 so they won’t be back until 2038.

Cicada nymphs, adults, and exoskeleton castings are expected to cover forest floors this year like they did in this photo from a 2016 emergence. (USDA Forest Service photo by Sandy Liebhold)

Annual cicada cycles bring some insects to the surface each year., but the numbers are bigger with 17-year broods. Brood XIV is scheduled for emergence next year in parts of 13 states, including New Jersey.

What’s the harm from cicadas? Cicadas feed on tree sap and could cause damage to a variety of young hardwood trees, including forest, shade, and fruit trees such as oak, hickory, apple, birch or dogwood. It is recommended that you cover high-value young trees with netting prior to emergence.

Here come the cicadas! – USDA Forest Service
A Double Emergence of Periodical Cicadas Isn’t Cicada-geddon—It’s a Marvel – Scientific America

Bridging Troubled Water

The poster that came in my vinyl copy of Bookends

There is a documentary, In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon, from 2023 directed by Alex Gibney. It is on Apple TV+. It is in two parts and cover a lot (not all) his career.

We find him at 82 working on his 15th solo album, Seven Psalms, and reflecting on his career. That album came to him in a dream. A restless dream? Perhaps, though that title comes from his “Sounds of Silence.” The new album will not remind you of those early Simon and Garfunkel albums. That shouldn’t surprise anyone, since Paul has always been moving forward.

I remember an English teacher presenting some of the lyrics as poetry in class. I was 13. I bought a cheap acoustic guitar and started learning the songs. I started writing poems. I never got good enough to play his instrumental “Anji” but I could pick out “Kathy’s Song” in my bedroom for a Kathy in my life. So, Paul and I go back a long way.

The documentary goes back to his upbringing in Queens, N.Y., his short-lived marriage to Carrie Fisher, rare footage of the recording of “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” the making of 1969’s “Songs of America,” and video from 1991’s Central Park concert.

At 14, I wrote a “script” and wanted to make a film using “Sounds of Silence” as the soundtrack. This was a long time before music videos and MTV.

Each of their albums takes me back to a very clear time in my life – much more so than almost any of the hundreds of albums I bought including my beloved Beatles.

The title song won Grammy Awards in 1971 for Song of the Year and Record of the Year. The other ten tracks included one of my favorites by them, “The Boxer.” I love their music and I like a lot of that album, but I remember buying the album when it came out (January 1970) and having a mixed reaction to it.

“Bridge Over Troubled Water” was a long song (almost five minutes) to be a hit single, but it was played endlessly on top 40 AM radio for six weeks until it got knocked out by a similarly long and lush Beatles‘ “Let it Be.” I thought both of those tracks – classics now – were too lush, too pop, not enough rock or folk respectively. Of course, Paul and Artie are the most successful folk-rock duo of the 1960s. Bridge Over Troubled Water sold over 25 million copies worldwide and was one of the biggest-selling albums of its decade, topping the charts for ten weeks and containing four hit singles (the title track, “The Boxer,” “Cecilia,” and “El Condor Pasa“).

That was a rough year for me and looking back on it now I realize that the music added to that downer feeling. Bridge was the fifth and final studio album by Simon and Garfunkel as they were in the process of splitting for a second time. The Beatles were also splitting up.

The track I listened to a lot that year was “The Only Living Boy in New York.” It seemed really sad. Half of the time we’re gone
But we don’t know where
And we don’t know where
I did learn that Paul Simon wrote it to Art Garfunkel because this was a time when when Garfunkel, was trying out an acting career. He left for Mexico to act in the film Catch-22. Simon, the boy alone in NYC, continued to write songs for the album and probably felt like a solo act already. In the song, Artie is “Tom”, a reference to their early days when they were billed as “Tom and Jerry.”

I went back to an earlier album. My favorite one of theirs – Bookends – came out in 1968. That year was worse than 1970. It was the year my father died after a long illness. There was turmoil in America – Vietnam – and in my own life. I was thinking about the possibility of being drafted and going to Vietnam. My year was the last draft lottery year. “We’ve all come to look for America…” they sang on the beautiful track “America” where Kathy shows up on a bus on the New Jersey Turnpike that I knew very well. My Kathy was gone. The weight of taking care of my mom and sister and being “the man of the house” at 15 was on me. I wanted to go away to college, but could I? Responsibilities. If I was going, I would have to earn the money myself. My mom didn’t have any money for college. She told me that if I was drafted, she would support me leaving and going to Canada.

One side of Bookends is a “concept album” on aging. Side one is great. It’s their Sergeant Pepper or Pet Sounds.

“Old Friends” is a sad song.
Can you imagine us years from today
Sharing a park bench quietly?
How terribly strange to be 70
I couldn’t imagine it then. I can easily see it now.
The “Bookends Theme” opens and closes the album side.
Preserve your memories.
They’re all that’s left you.

Side two is made up of songs written for The Graduate soundtrack but not used and a few leftover tracks. It’s rockier than side one of most of their previous work. The 1967 film The Graduate is one of my favorite movies and at that time in my life it was definitely my favorite movie.

Side two consists of miscellaneous unrelated songs unused for The Graduate, with many possessing a more rock-based sound than the unified folk songs that precede it. “Fakin’ It” rocks along but the lyrics are about being a phony. “Punky’s Dilemma” is light, jazzy and silly and is my favorite song on the side. Of course, “Mrs. Robinson” was the big hit. It’s not the version used in The Graduate. It’s the first rock and roll song to win Record of the Year at the Grammy Awards in 1969 and it also was Best Contemporary Pop Performance by a Duo or Group. “A Hazy Shade of Winter” is another pop-rocker that The Bangles would cover in the 1980s. But I can imagine the lyrics beinga folkier, sadder song on side one.
Hang on to your hopes, my friend
That’s an easy thing to say
But if your hopes should pass away
Simply pretend that you can build them again
And I can imagine a version of “At the Zoo” in the zoo scene from The Graduate.

The song “Overs” on side one was another leftover track from The Graduate sessions but it fit thematically with the arc of aging on side one. The same is true of “Save the Life of My Child.” Simon explained that “Overs” is a companion piece to their earlier composition, “For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her.” The earlier song is about believing in true love, while “Overs” is about the loss of that belief. In the film, it would fit as a song about the loveless marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Robin and with Simon. son.

Those albums helped me bridge some troubled times in my life. I will listen to these albums until I die. I have aged with them and with Paul Simon. He has a decade on me, so his concerns will always point to where I am going.

Time it was and what a time it was, it was
A time of innocence
A time of confidences
Long ago, it must be
I have a photograph…
Preserve your memories
They’re all that’s left you