MEANDERING RIVER I

Spring diminishes with each falling petal,

countless points of sorrow swirling in the wind.

Soon I will see the last remaining flower

and then will be drinking wine without solace.

Kingfishers nest on a hut by the river.

Unicorns adorn the border of a high tomb.

Looking into nature tells you to seek joy.

So why do I strive for undeserved honor?

     –Du Fu

 THE IMPERIAL ARMY RECOVERS HONAN AND HOPEI

Just now, here in Sichuan, news of a great victory!

Weeping for joy, tears soaking the front of my gown.

Turning to my wife and children–all my sorrow gone.

Scrambling around packing, quickly rolling up scrolls.

In the midday sun, singing out loud and guzzling wine.

The greening spring will be my travelling companion.

I’ll leave right away, passing through Pa Gorge to Wu Gorge,

sailing on to Xiangyang and then to Luoyang!

     –Du Fu

PAINTED HAWK

  

From blank white silk arise wind and frost– 

a blue hawk, painted in fine detail. 

Its body tenses, spotting a wily hare. 

Its eyes glare like an angry barbarian. 

The bright tether ring tempts your grasp. 

The high perch solicits your call. 

Would the great hawk then attack lesser birds, 

marring the green plain with blood and feathers? 

      –Du Fu

Not yet mown, the lawn 

full now of dandelions 

and grape hyacinth.

When the vet killed him, ending him and his misery, they rolled him away on a rough floor, ears twitching. Good Boy asleep and dreaming. When the vet killed him, ending him and his misery, they rolled him away on a rough floor, ears twitching, as if asleep and dreaming.

 

Marie Tuohy, 95, died of Covid pneumonia on January 24, 2021 at The Maplewood extended care facility in Webster, New York.  

Marie was born on March 5, 1925 to Charles Holmes and Elizabeth Krieger Holmes in Toledo, Ohio.  The family, including her younger brother, Charles H. Holmes, lived for many years in the Lagrange and Bancroft area of Toledo near the Krieger family home as did several of the families of her mother’s siblings.  Charles and Elizabeth moved the family to the Homeville development in the West End as Marie was attending Woodward High School.  Although she was then out of the district, she was able to continue at Woodward until her graduation in 1943.

After graduation, Marie went to work as a clerk on the dock at the Autolite plant in North Toledo.

Marie always loved music and often went out dancing at the Trianon Ballroom and other venues around town, frequently accompanied by one or more of her several cousins.

Marie met Paul Tuohy shortly before he enlisted in the Army Air Corps and they corresponded all through his deployment in the South Pacific.  When he returned from the war, they became a couple and were married in 1947. 

For several years, Marie stayed home with their children, Ronald, born in 1948, and Janet, born in 1952.  After taking some business classes, Marie got a job as a clerk in the local office of the Paul Revere Insurance Company.  Marie eventually rose to the position of office manager. She was very proud  of the multiple commendations received for the efficiency of her office and for new procedures that were implemented company wide.  She was also recognized for exposing the financial malfeasance of two local general managers.  When the Toledo office closed, Marie transferred to the Cincinnati office.   

Along with her formal employment, Marie also did bookkeeping for Paul’s auction business and often clerked for sales.  When Paul became involved with agencies serving disabled people, Marie often accompanied him to various functions and acquired many friends in this community.

She had the gift of a beautiful, and very powerful, soprano voice, which she further developed through some years of training. Wherever she lived, she sang in church choirs and community choruses, often as a soloist. 

In retirement Marie and Paul enjoyed theater and traveling. In 2005, when Marie could no longer care for Paul on her own, they moved to Rochester, New York near their daughter. After Paul’s death, Marie continued to enjoy singing and was active in her senior living community for many years.

Marie was preceded in death by her husband, Paul, and survived by son, Ronald (Beth) Tuohy, daughter, Janet (Mike Ball) Tuohy, grandchildren Jared Higgins, Jamie Higgins, Nathaniel (En-Chieh Chao) Tuohy, and Conor (Alexis) Tuohy, and by four great grandchildren.  

New Translations

HOUSE AT SOUTH HILL


In middle age, I found the Buddha Way.
In old age, I've settled here at South Hill.
Often on a whim I go walking alone:
small portions of nature known just to me.
I can trek up to the source of a stream
and sit down to see when the clouds will rise.
Sometimes I meet this old man in the woods
and we talk and laugh and forget to leave.
    --Wang Wei




WEI CITY SONG


A morning rain settles the light dust.
Willows by the inn green up again.
Have one more cup of wine here with me.
No old friends will be west of Yang Pass.
     --Wang Wei




FARM HOUSES BY WEI RIVER


Setting sun--slanting rays bright on the hills.
Sheep and cattle return to scruffy lanes.
In the field, old folks, leaning on their staffs,
watch for the herdboys by the fruitwood gate.
Pheasants call in rows of ripening wheat.
Silkworms sleep as mulberry leaves grow sparse.
Returning workers, still bearing their hoes,
stream together and linger long to chat.
Beginning to envy their end-of-day ease,
hopelessly then, I hum a song from the Odes.
     --Wang Wei

What is helpful to know here is that Wang Wei was a wealthy, highly educated  man, a painter and government official, as well as a poet.  He would have been steeped in the ancient classics, which included the Book of Odes.  And here he is observing the life of peasants, who presumably would not have been able to read that book.

The Last Stanza of My Every Poem

Such are the thoughts
to which have led
polymath heart
and punkin head.

Always Choose Less Evil

My friends, as the Democratic field narrows down, many of us have been disappointed to see our favorites drop out.  And whoever is the eventual nominee, more of us will be disappointed.  Some will think that the nominee has a repugnant political philosophy and will make a genuinely bad president. A choice between a good candidate and a bad candidate is easy. A choice between two good candidates in a general election may be difficult, but it is a rare and happy luxury.  A choice between two bad candidates is also very difficult, but paralyzingly distasteful. To cast a positive vote for a bad candidate offends moral sensibility. But it does not offend rational morality.  The lesser of two evils is--less evil. To discern which is the lesser evil, and then to choose it, may be the most consequential vote you have ever cast.  

It strikes me that these are Britishisms new or much more common in American English in the last decade or so:
     1. "spot on" in the sense of being exactly right
     2. "take a decision" rather than "make a decision"
     3. "go missing" in the sense of vanish or disappear
     4. "take a meeting" rather than "have a meeting"
I think I've noticed other expressions that I can't call to mind right now.  Not necessarily complaining. Anyone disagree or have other examples? 

 

"Madison thought impeachment 'indispensable...for defending the Community against the incapacity, negligence or perfidy of the chief Magistrate. The limitation of the period of service was not a sufficient security. He might lose his capacity after his appointment. He might pervert his administration into a scheme of peculation or oppression. He might betray his trust to foreign powers' "
--fr. High Crimes and Misdemeanors by Frank Bowman

Btw peculation is stealing or otherwise misappropriating something to yourself, esp. public funds or property that you have been entrusted with.

You should have known when Trump
     flogged a ridiculous theory abt Obama's birth
     was forced to close down his "university" and foundation because of corruption
     mocked a disabled reporter and tagged his primary opponents with schoolyard epithets
     encouraged violence against counter-demonstrators at his rallies
     appointed to high office person after person who had to resign because of corruption
     has continually demonstrated his ignorance of government, history, and world geography
     said he believes Putin more than he believes his own national security people
     from the beginning of his presidency, insulted allies and praised authoritarians
     has lied daily abt all manner of things, momentous and trivial
Now here we are and you should have known.
     

However much our fellow citizens abhor Trump's action in Syria, there hasn't been talk of its being impeachable.  But I think it should be.  In Frank Bowman's book High Crimes and Misdemeanors, he recounts the history of impeachments in Britain and in the American colonies that the framers would have drawn on and says this:  "Another persistent thread in British impeachments is the charge that the impeached minister had pursued a policy at odds with the nation's basic foreign policy interests."

In my view of life, the concept of honor has had little place.  The truly moral actions dictated by a sense of honor generally can be reasoned to by other ethical routes.  And the actions recommended by honor alone are, by my lights, often morally suspect.  However,  DJT's abandoning the Kurds, good and faithful allies, to death and possible ethnic cleansing, I think, I feel, has stained my country's honor.

ElecTORal College, I Hardly know Ye

It has seemed to me that the accent in "pastoral" and "electoral" has shifted quite rapidly, from PAStoral to pasTORal and from eLECtoral to elecTORal.   But recognizing that my perception of rapidity may be wrong, I consulted a couple online dictionaries, not for what they thought was "correct," but for what they thought people were saying.  Dictionary.com lists only the first version of each word.  Merriam-Webster lists both pronunciations for each word, but gives pasTORal second and labels elecTORal nonstandard.  I take this to mean that the pronunciations that sound right to me are older and were current in the general population whenever these dictionaries were last updated.

So probably there are many folks around who changed the way they pronounce these words.  Is language change so insensible to you that you just didn't notice?  Did you change because you deliberately change to whatever you most hear?  Or did you just give up for fear of being odd or unintelligible?   As I may soon have to do.  But can I really make myself say "Beethoven's PasTORal Symphony?"

Leonard Cohen's Prince Of Asturias Speech - No Overdubbing

Newest Translations

Far up the cold mountain, a sloping stone path.
Among the white colds, family dwellings.
Stop the carriage, loving evening in the maple wood.
Frosty leaves, redder than flowers of the second month.
     --Du Mu

THE FESTIVAL OF PURE BRIGHTNESS


Almost hopelessly turned around in driving rain
the traveller on the road for Tomb Sweeping Day
still asks politely the way to the nearest inn
and the shepherd boy points toward Peach Blossom Village.
     --Du Mu




DRUNKEN SLEEP


Autumn rain and well-made wine.
Cold house among falling leaves.
The hermit, who mostly sleeps,
pours and drains another cup.
     --Du Mu

Passover in Indonesia

Several years ago, my family and I attended a Passover Seder in Indonesia hosted by a Jewish couple doing post-grad research there.  The hosts were unable to find many of the traditional items for the Seder and gave interesting explanations of the meaning of each and of how they had settled on substitutes. We're non-theists, and so had no religious qualms about being there.  But there were also a number of Indonesian Muslims who came.  At the time, I admired their tolerance and their interest in other traditions.  But now I wonder if they attended at some risk to themselves.  Perhaps the risk was minimal, given that we were in Yogyakarta, one of the most liberal areas of the country.  But I would guess that the danger could have been considerable in a more religiously conservative area, like Aceh.

Why is the figurative sense of "to dunk on" used with the same meaning as "to dump on?"  The latter means something like "to heap opprobrium on."  A figurative use of the former in the context of debate perhaps ought to mean something like "to decisively score a point with verbal acumen." Maybe something like a Hitchslap.

I have managed to read the greater part of the Qur'an, tedious though it is. The bulk of it is taken up with many, many repetitions of a few ideas: 1. God is all-powerful and all-knowing and there's only one of him--and you can't fudge this principle by having this singular being appear in different manifestations, for example, as his own son ( although you'd think that, being omnipotent, he could if he wanted to). 2. The Qur'an is the record of God speaking through Mohammed. 3. If you believe 1 & 2 and do a few things attendant on that belief you will be rewarded in the afterlife and if you don't, you will be punished horribly. Actually, the threatening-horrible-punishment theme is a very large part of the the Qur'an. Now, it is true that there is the occasional pleasant-sounding bit, like the one about there being no compulsion in religion, but these are generally quite isolated islets in the sea of numbers 1, 2, and 3. They could be compiled into a little pamphlet of 3 or 4 pages. And if you read closely, it turns out that most of the nice bits can be construed to apply to only other Muslims.