Not a huge number, but you had to be there. The bowl of the heavens, at Big Meadow, shone everywhere – not just in white clusters overhead, but along the tree and hill line. An eerie little breeze deepened the darkness as UD groped the ground for her binoculars and – when it grew chilly – her sweater.
Chilly – she thought of hellish, thunderish, DC while she lay back, somewhat shivering, in her beach chair.
The barred owls hoot all night here, a cosmic chorale. Last evening a distant storm made bright flashes across the field. We talked about lightyears of distance (one lightyear = about six trillion miles) and parsecs and made obvious remarks about our incapacity to grasp astronomical realities. Also, though, about how remarkably much we know (Mr UD reads a lot of astronomy/physics) about the massive black canvas. Galactic Hubble images came to me as I scanned the stars.
The Denial of Death in Shenandoah National Park
Cold air, barred owls, and the smell of smoke:
Only a little data here, to evoke
The August woods off the balcony.
Woods that always prompt philosophy.
As when I read, in Becker, a phrase like
“Immunity bath,’ meaning cultic rites
That cleanse the cultist of the dread of death
(Page 12) and sometimes even of its sight.
Or anti-vaxers who, with dying breath,
Admit they thought their breath would never end.
“Consciousness of death is the primary
Repression, not sexuality.” Mend
Your dread by bacchanal, or by fairy
Story, and you’ll still get badly scarred.
A death-accepter, say Kierkegaard,
Knows this is merely where the fun begins:
The wisest owls unbarred spin and spin
Out of smoke mythic immortality.
Take, among those I love, N., P., and D.
N. strode in to save Detroit, then broke down
At the vastness of it. P. circles round
The earth’s atrocities, repairing souls.
D., who must perceive the very world, stole
His life through abstraction. Hard led
By dread, N. is struggling, D. dead.
From the balcony again the smell of smoke —
Of our own ashy end an easy token.
… 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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