… for UD‘s part of Maryland, so, if nothing else, she and Mr UD will avoid them in the Virginia mountains, where temperatures will be moderate during the day, and downright cold (cold!) at night. Their main tasks – they leave today – are two: To see the Perseid meteor shower at its absolute peak, and to celebrate UD‘s birthday at a restaurant in nearby Luray, where they’ll also go to Luray Caverns. I’ve been visiting those kitschy caves since I was a toddler.
Mr UD finally found our (dusty, discolored) copy of Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death, which I love; and this will be my light reading (rereading) for our trip. We’re not good at organizing our books, but eventually we do find the ones we’re looking for.
So the formal title of my trip will be The Denial of Death at Shenandoah National Park, and I will be offering you, my reader, snippets of nature description/life wisdom/Kierkegaardian dread/astronomical observations.
The whole thing, to quote Roger De Bris, will be drenched with goodies.
‘In mid-2019, Madoff began applying for an early release from his 150-year sentence, given that he was terminally ill…
The records showed that Madoff’s application was blocked more than once by the prison warden and general counsel, on the grounds that Madoff’s offense had been so great and that he had declined to undergo dialysis as recommended by staff.
Medical personnel eventually stated that Madoff met the criteria for compassionate release and the warden agreed to submit the request to the judge in Madoff’s case, even though he recommended against it. In June 2020, Judge Denny Chin denied Madoff’s request, stating that he believed, “Mr. Madoff was never truly remorseful, and that he was only sorry that his life as he knew it was collapsing around him.”’
There’s exclusivity, mes petites, and there’s BRUTE exclusivity, which, in close proximity to Pur Sang (“denounce him as a fascist pur sang” – Thomas Mann) makes Scathing Online Schoolmarm wonder just what futurist, vitalist Thing Bugatti’s trying to evoke in the ad copy (there’s exactly one of these vehicles, it’s track-only, and it costs over ten million dollars, so I think ‘ad copy’ isn’t correct) for the new Bolide.
And why is UD, who hasn’t driven a car in thirty years, deep into sixteen cylinder engines?
Simply because, on the verge of leaving for yet another perseid meteor shower viewing/birthday celebration, she has been studying up on the little buggers – learning phrases like Zenithal (stress on first syllable) Hourly Rate, and words like Bolide. Bolides (again, stress is on first syllable) are brilliant meteor fireballs; hence, in the words of Bugatti’s nasty, brutish copywriter, “Driving the Bolide is like riding on a cannonball.” I mean, when you Google “bolide,” you get to one page of definitions, and then immediately you land on Bugatti’s pure bloodlines.
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In a much more UD way, I’m also preparing for our trip by reading poems about meteors. Wallace Stevens, in a set of notes about poetry, wrote “A poem is a meteor,” so I guess brief brilliant powerful fireballs that light up existence could be understood literally (the Bugatti) as well as figuratively (a poem), as in
… the strange huge meteor procession, dazzling and
clear, shooting over our heads,(A moment, a moment long, it sail’d its balls of unearth-
ly light over our heads,Then departed, dropt in the night, and was gone;)—Of such, and fitful as they, I sing—with gleams from
them would I gleam and patch these chants; Your chants, O year all mottled with evil and good!
year of forebodings! year of the youth I love! Year of comets and meteors transient and strange!—lo!
even here, one equally transient and strange! As I flit through you hastily, soon to fall and be gone,
what is this book,
What am I myself but one of your meteors?
So poems are meteors and we are meteors as we burn brightly and quickly through our lives. Specks in the firmaments, we are nonetheless capable of ever-renewed self-creation:
And when we turned off lanterns to look skyward
for the Perseids (it was meteor season)
a comet rode queenly across the sky
before it arced and fell. Seeing myself
a speck in the firmament, I remembered
that rock may burn suddenly, blaze into flame,
and spin for centuries before it shines
wanting to be remade. Gray rock. The same
that sparkles with mica flecks by day
when breakers slap it clean.
Nothing is new. Nothing alive cannot be altered.
Where there’s light there’s hope, says the poet; we can always want to be remade, to flame up in some new clean self. We are not mere specks in the firmament.
Same idea, different poem: Viewing the perseids, “we are at once unnerved and somehow restored.”
Same, yet another one:
we waited, with nerves
and hearts as much as eyes,
as if we were waiting for new lives
to open up miraculously
or some spark to jolt us
into different ways of thinking.
I think we’re beginning to see a pattern:
Who said, out of nothing,
nothing can come? We do not lie
in a meadow to view the Perseids
but discover, behind a motel,
a vineyard, and gather wherever we go.
And another poet, in this same vein, is wakened/renewed by the meteoric jolt:
This vastness, this vertiginous awareness
mocking gravity on our speck of now,
wakes us with a recalibrating jolt.
But of course there’s the burning out part, too:
— I am like a slip of comet,
Scarce worth discovery, in some corner seen
Bridging the slender difference of two stars,
Come out of space, or suddenly engender’d
By heady elements…
… [The comet] goes out into the cavernous dark.
So I go out: my little sweet is done:
I have drawn heat from this contagious sun:
To not ungentle death now forth I run.
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As for Les UDs – to Shenandoah National Park’s Big Meadows they run, to lie back in beach chairs on a big dark field and see what they can see.
… are SO much more likely to be random assholes shooting each other than a terror incident. With four hundred million guns lying around, you need to get used to a lot of bangbang.
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Story is still developing, but it looks as though someone shot and killed a police officer at the site. Maybe suicide by cop?
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An officer died after being stabbed on Tuesday during a brief outbreak of violence at a transit station outside the Pentagon, on the outskirts of Washington DC, and a suspect in the incident was shot by law enforcement and died at the scene, officials said.
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For the granddaughter of a Russian-born, Jewish, general store owner in Port Deposit, Maryland, our UD has certainly rubbed noses with a lot of aristocrats. For starters, there’s Mr UD, descended from an old, pedigreed Polish family; and then there’s her friend of many years, Peter Galbraith, described as American aristocracy (see this post’s headline) in this rather insightful New York magazine piece about him.
UD, to be sure, grew up in Bethesda, where her father was a high-ranking NIH scientist; but as you know if you read this post, she didn’t even know what a private school was until her Goucher College roommate (who went to one) explained it to her. Her parents were clueless – and indifferent – in matters of class, and so was UD, for whom a writer like Tom Wolfe, who believed everything came down to status, was a kind of revelation. She recalls deciding that his satire in Bonfire of the Vanities was just that – an absurd, surreal, impossibly exaggerated account of humanity… Had to be…
But, you know, I had a lot o’ livin’ to do. And eventually UD took on board the fact that yeah a lot of people care a whole lot about status, which means, in America, gaining admission to the upper middle class. Here’s Paul Fussell on the subject, in his book Class:
If people with small imaginations and limited understandings aspire to get into the upper-middle class, the few with notable gifts of mind and perception aspire to disencumber themselves into X people. It’s only as an X, detached from the constraints and anxieties of the whole class racket, that an American can enjoy something like the LIBERTY promised on the coinage. And it’s in the X world, if anywhere, that an American can avoid some of the envy and ambition that pervert so many. De Tocqueville saw as early as 1845 what was likely to result from the official American reprehension of the aristocratic principle. “Desires still remain extremely enlarged,” he wrote, “while the means of satisfying them are diminished day by day.” And thus “on every side we trace the ravages of inordinate and unsuccessful ambition kindled in hearts which it consumes in secret and in vain.” The society of Xs is not large at the moment. It could be larger, for many can join who’ve not yet understood that they have received an invitation.
Now X’s are people who, in Fussell’s terminology, do not find reprehensible the aristocratic principle, which here clearly refers to people who do not care or know about the latest model Mercedes and who may indeed (as Fussell notes) be seen driving around (but they don’t drive much) in the same beat up old Saab (Peter’s father, John Kenneth Galbraith, drove a not-shiny Saab, as I recall) they’ve owned for twenty years. What they tend to care about is the pursuit of something meaningful that engrosses them – it could be Etruscan pottery or global diplomacy, but something meaningful and engrossing, pursued with personal passion and not because it impresses anyone or makes them rich.
Anyway, Peter and Karol carried, with thoughtless ease, all the goods the upper-middle strivers tend to be after – accomplished families, iconic private schools, the Ivy League, fancy friends, fancy international travel, etc. But what people missed about them was that they were – and are – Xs. Peter, as the New York article makes clear, is a moralist, consumed by the imperative to rescue a suffering corrupt world from suffering and corruption. This does not mean that Peter himself always behaves morally; it does mean that at seventy years of age he can be found day after day tramping through squalid ISIS prisoner camps, looking for people to rescue. That is what Peter’s doing with his retirement.
“A US-born 8-year-old girl who grew up with her ISIS parents has been rescued from a Syrian camp — and is now awaiting word to see if she can return to the US, according to a report… The girl’s rescue was made possible by [Peter] Galbraith and a Canadian woman who met her mother while living under ISIS, which she has since denounced…
Aminah’s mother, Ariel Bradley, was an evangelical Christian who converted to Islam and later married Yasin Mohamad, a Swedish Muslim, through an arranged marriage.
The family lived in Sweden but eventually relocated to ISIS-controlled territory in the Middle East, where they lived under the terror group’s rigid guidelines.
According to Buzzfeed, Mohamad was killed in an airstrike in June 2015, and [Aminah’s] mother remarried a devout ISIS follower, an Australian named Tareq Kamleh.
When both Bradley and Kamleh were killed in 2018, Aminah was turned over to another of her stepfather’s wives, a Somali woman who remained devoted to the terror group.”
Aminah is only the latest of Peter’s rescues; he seems committed to continuing the work. (That last link is to an extremely detailed account of Aminah’s dramatic rescue, and includes a photograph of Peter.)
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I try to imagine the military raid that freed Aminah from the fanatics hiding her in the camp (Peter convinced a Syrian Democratic Forces general to carry out the raid); I try to picture my friend of forty years gingerly approaching this thoroughly traumatized and abused child (I guess someone would first have removed the niqab they swaddled her in). My mind’s eye attempts to conjure a scene in which one of the most privileged people on the planet leans down to greet one of the planet’s most downtrodden — and I don’t want to sentimentalize it, because in my rendering the child is wailing since after all she has just violently been taken from the only facsimile of a “mother” she may ever have had much awareness of… And how could she not have tried loving this latest mother facsimile, since in her experience mothers are all shrouded fanatics, and fathers distant and then dead apparitions? And so, she says to herself, here’s the latest iteration of Aminah’s Childhood – all these nice Americans and Canadians and consular officials. And if she’s lucky and we take her back there will be the maternal grandparents, people who have been mourning the unaccountable life and death of their daughter, the daughter who they see in the eyes of the granddaughter who they have never met and who they will now love and raise…
