Head of the year

Like the U.S. Congress, I'm on a break today for the Jewish holidays. A damp, overcast but still warmish morning with the scent of fall in the air. I am skipping all religious obligations except for tashlik, tossing stale bread to the gulls off the Marblehead end of Boston Harbor, followed by a celebratory buffet at a friend's house. Gluttony is obviously not a sin I plan to cast away today. Or sloth. Or lust for that matter. But pride, envy, anger and greed are good to go -- the last not something I'm prone to myself, but I'll throw it off vicariously on behalf of all the recently humbled derivative traders out there. (The traditional Catholic Seven Deadlies make a convenient shopping list for sinners, even if they don't map precisely to the more comprehensive, once a year Yom Kippur line up.)

Actually I will spare some anger for everyone, Democrat or Republican, who contributed to not passing the bailout package in the House of Representatives yesterday. And for the ugliness and arrogance and stupidity of John McCain's recent carping against Barack Obama on this subject. Though maybe I should take the longer view. One small bright side of the recent crisis amidst so many dark ones is that Democratic presidential candidates always do better in bad economic times. And McCain's posturing and erratic judgement appears to be eroding his support yet further, to judge by polls in the last few days. The more McCain inflates his own role in the Congressional deliberations, the more he blames the Democrats even while touting bipartisanship, the more he's likely to suffer as partisanship by both sides drags out the process and the pain. Happy thoughts!

I don't know if it's the mental image of being on a beach, reminding me of the opening scenes of the movie "Chariots of Fire", but this song from Blake's Milton, now a popular Anglican hymn, has been playing in my head for the last few minutes. So let's pause the Rosh Hashanah retrospection and move ahead to post Yom Kippur visions (in Blake's crypto-gnostic post-Christian imagery) of the year to come:

And did those feet in ancient time

Walk upon England's mountains green?

And was the holy Lamb of God

On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine

Shine forth upon our clouded hills?

And was Jerusalem builded here

Among these dark Satanic mills?

Bring me my bow of burning gold:

Bring me my arrows of desire:

Bring me my spear: O clouds unfold!

Bring me my chariot of fire.

I will not cease from mental fight,

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand

Till we have built Jerusalem

In England's green and pleasant land.

That is to say, I will not cease starting tomorrow.

Saturdaze

A deep one hour massage is a good way to start the weekend. I come home all soft, oily and smelling of cinnamon, like a rugelach before going into the oven. I sit at my desk, a little dizzy but also oddly focused, staring into the backyard: it is damp with drizzle and early autumn mist, though the temperature is getting more summery as the morning progresses. Our trees aren't changing colors yet but there were already swaths of red on the maples across from the massage studio. Casey hops down the stairs into the family room, gives me a small look of reproach, sighs, and curls up on the carpet behind my chair.

Naturally my mind drifts to last night's debate, if you can really call it that, between the two presidential candidates -- a strong, steady but emotionally restrained Barack Obama and an at first somewhat disconnected but finally more engaged and even eloquent John McCain. I came home all but giddy with excitement the event would really happen, given McCain's flip-flops on joining Obama at Old Miss. We watched the debate in the darkened family room, sprawled on the floor or on couches, munching gummi bears and chocolate chip cookies -- me, Julie, a single friend and colleague of hers in need of company, Julie's 17-year-old son, and a friend of his whom Eric insisted stay and watch. And Casey, of course, sacked out on the carpet beneath the TV, getting up at intervals to troll for cookie crumbs.

In the end, I felt, the evening was a wash -- not just the performance of the two candidates but the political impact of the event as a whole. There were few surprises and little deviation from already well-known scripts. Each speaker evaded the other's challenges on critical issues (esp. going to war in Iraq and the success of the surge); they rarely confronted each other directly despite the good-humored efforts of Jim Lehrer; and overall they seemed more concerned with controlling media perceptions than risking embarrassing impromptus. Looking back just a few months, the level of energy, combativeness and policy detail was significantly lower than in most of Obama's debates with Hillary Clinton. Even the previous week's economic meltdown and partisan grudge matches over a bailout plan, on which Lehrer pushed them for a good half hour, got no more than high-sounding generalities.

The candidates' irresolution on the greatest financial crisis in most people's memory isn't, after all, that surprising: neither man wanted to risk appearing as a spoiler with so much at stake in the ongoing negotiations, fiddling with party politics while the economy burned. Perhaps the overall feeling of gloom and uncertainty in the week's news explains the very scripted, managed feel of the evening. Or perhaps this is just one more of the infinite variations of politics as usual. A newly posted article on the New York Times website promises "Consensus on Wall Street Rescue Plan Is Said to Be Near". Due to be announced Sunday before the opening of the Asian markets. Hopefully this also means the candidates will be willing to take the gloves off in their next debate, which is explicitly planned to be about the economy.

It's now mid-afternoon, and the morning's drizzles have turned to intermittent heavy downpours. A lovely excuse to stay indoors and snooze and read and eat leftover chili and pick away at household chores - not excluding trying to whip my mushy political prose into shape.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

The first thing I do when starting to write about Jean-Dominique Bauby's magnificent jewel of a book is to look up the French title (which didn't occur to me while reading it): Le scaphandre et le papillon. The translator's English is close enough, it seems, even capturing in its own way the rhythmic assonance of the original. But then, maybe not so much: my old Langenscheidt pocket French dictionary gives scaphandre as "diving suit" rather than diving bell, and scaphandrier as "deep-sea diver". A different image, of enclosure yes but also of a kind of monstrous mannikin, ringed with masks and tanks and tubes, deprived of normal sensation, like Bauby in his hospital bed in Berck-sur-Mer. Possibly more a sense of exploring the depths too, whatever the dangers and restrictions. I'll have to bug one of my native speaker friends for clarification.

Whatever the sense of the title, there's less of the cold, dark depths than you might imagine in this book, and much more of the butterfly, fluttering half deliberately half impulsively from memory to fancy to sharp, funny and moving observances of himself and the people and things around him. I think only a French writer could create a book like this from a condition, a history like this. Flipping through the narrow volume of short, evocatively or evasively titled chapters, it strikes me that that protean French prose genre the essai has itself come to the diver's rescue. Or rather it becomes the vehicle (submarine? helicopter?) by which he rescues himself, even while his efforts give a whole new meaning to the form.

I page though the book to find the exact wording of one image that had stuck in my mind, celebrating the letters Bauby receives in the hospital from friends, family and colleagues: "I hoard these letters like treasure. One day I hope to fasten them end to end in a half-mile streamer, to float in the wind like a banner raised to the glory of friendship." I remembered these being the last words in the chapter, which they were, except for this one line closing paragraph: "It will keep the vultures at bay". Interesting that I'd remembered the hopeful fancy not the black humor. There's an ever present, ever shifting mix of both moods in the communications Bauby crafted, as he describes, so carefully in his head before conveying them the world through a carefully orchestrated system of winks -- no stranger a mechanism when you come right down to it than tapping on laptop keys or incising wedge-shaped marks on wet clay.

Backache

I woke up with what my wife calls, with decisive familiarity, a 'tight' back - she's more prone to aches of all kinds than I am. Hard to roll out of bed, hard to stand up. Probably the result of lying too long in our super supportive, super green foam mattress, including an hour before going to sleep (deliciously dozing between bouts of Rohintan Mistry's engaging first novel) and an hour or so after waking up. No Marblehead farmer's market this morning, just lazy coffee & morning papers, accompanied by a couple of Advil and some intermittent stretching. I'm impatient with Julie's efforts to show me the best ways to roll out the kinks, whether because I'm just a bad patient or because I feel self-conscious and uncoordinated watching her graceful, ex-dancer's movements. I chase her away and give her advice a half hearted try, with no one to watch except the dog. I walk around and sit around, bending and stretching occasionally, not so much therapeutically as to ask the backache, Can I ignore you yet? "Noses run in my family", an old girlfriend of mine used to joke. Denial with regard to physical aches and pains runs in mine. Writing about it puts me in a better mood if not in less discomfort (my stiff Levenger desk chair is great if my back is status quo, not if not). Really, who are you kidding? my back says, sounding like my wife. OK for a change I'll listen.

Kayaking in Marblehead

A weekend itch, a hum, an expectation, when the weather obliges, and many weathers oblige. Though a schlep to start out of course. Haul the boat from the backyard, hose off the dirt thrown up the the rain, flip it onto the SUV rack, strap it down -- a 14 foot Walden Expedition, lobster red. Carry yourself and the kayak down to the sea. With an appetizing crunch push off from the sand. Then, miraculous reversal, the sea and the kayak are carrying you -- out past the splashing families, the boatyards, the bobbing floats beneath which real lobsters scuttle, shrewdly untempted (in my mind) by the locals' traps. Along the islets and shores of this rocky bay, dotted with seaside mansions old and new. I alternately dart and drift, the dripping double-bladed oar in its steady rotation, half push half pull, always reminding me of a dragonfly's wings, or resting comfortably athwart the cockpit, as the boat slides along under its own momentum or simply bobbed by the waves. A little outside the mouth of the bay the wind and the swells pick up and I paddle harder, with more consciousness of having to choose a direction -- northwest round the point to Salem, southeast across the harbor with its forest of masts, and the lighthouse in front of me. Further out, Great Misery island, where more intrepid paddlers in wetsuits habitually venture but I haven't attempted yet, probably never will. An hour and a half floating on the waves with my feet up and a modest, half imagined weekender's sense of the power and pull of the sea is quite enough adventure, right now.

Lehmannaide

I can't ignore the fall of Lehmann Brothers but can't quite grasp it either, or don't want to, so my mind skitters defensively to the company's human namesakes. Nicholas Lehmann, Julie's old Harvard classmate, now dean of the Columbia School of Journalism. Pronounced like 'lemon', not 'lee-mun'. He must be experiencing some onomastic angst of his own. And David Lehman - clever, glum American poet and prolific poetry editor. Glad today to be short one 'n' in his last name.

What's in a name? Or what's in a word, like 'reformer' or 'deregulation'? The presidential candidates are each trying to cash in on Wall Street's woes -- "John McCain casting himself as an outspoken populist outraged at corporate greed and Barack Obama hammering what he called a Republican-led climate of deregulation that McCain championed" (Boston Globe, 9/17). Personally, I worry that more people will embrace the faux-maverick "populist" who channels their visceral fear and resentment than the earnest liberal who asks his audience to pay mind to legislative and economic history.

Conclusion: did Nicholas Lehmann's immigrant ancestors think "lemon" was less Jewish sounding than the alternative?