On festive and non-festive days, old UD loves to read the poems of James Merrill. In the last weeks of his life, he wrote Christmas Tree, in which his wasting body is compared to a holiday tree taken in and decorated by a celebrating family — he is made to feel loved and cared for and even prettied up, shined up, in his last days, although the poet/tree knows that, having been cut down, his/its days are very much numbered. The hospital was the tree farm, where the poet has been “looked after, kept still,” but now it’s clear “there [is] nothing more to do,” and the poet will have to leave the hospital and go home to die.

Yet it’s Merrill, the poet, who inexhaustibly, to the end, elaborates, accessorizes, decorates, warms, and bejewels life — as I said in my last post about him, he’s no discouraged Prufrock. He keeps going, keeps embellishing. He’s an artist, mes petites. We can’t rescue the family jewels from the fire, but he can. Even as he’s dying, he can. Surrounded by loved ones in his warm home, covered in thick “sables,” nonetheless jewels from life continue to “flash forth” around him from these coverings. He’s not buried yet. Propitiating miracle-makers (amulets, milagros) hang from his body and a song plays and replays – brilliant, magical life continues to be wound about him.

And in shadow behind me, a primitive IV
To keep the show going.

The holiday and the primitive at-home IV/ivy. To keep the blood going. Heart-stopping poetry if you ask me.

Yes, yes, what lay ahead
Was clear: the stripping, the cold street, my chemicals
Plowed back into the Earth for lives to come—

No bullshit about it, I’m all lit up and about to die; my festive duties done, my poems written, I’m about to be stripped of my jewels, with my poor naked trunk about to be revealed for the rail-thin thing it is. I’m about to be buried, pine/IV “needles and bone.” And I’m ready to go.

Last image from last moments – a world in dusk, to be sure, but dusk “aglow,” with candlelight, loving faces, gifts brought to the tree, brought by the tree.

Still to be so poised, so
Receptive. Still to recall, praise.

The last lines of the last poem echo Merrill’s endless reverberating theme, as in his great poem “Santorini: Stopping the Leak,” where he insists on walking the volcanic, gorgeous island, staying poised and balanced and upright, despite serious pain from ailments in his feet. The imperative always is to stay in the game, to remain receptive to all of life, to call and recall, and above all to lyrically praise.

Christmas Tree

⭐

To be
Brought down at last
From the cold sighing mountain
Where I and the others
Had been fed, looked after, kept still,
Meant, I knew—of course I knew—
That it would be only a matter of weeks,
That there was nothing more to do.
Warmly they took me in, made much of me,
The point from the start was to keep my spirits up.
I could assent to that. For honestly,
It did help to be wound in jewels, to send
Their colors flashing forth from vents in the deep
Fragrant sables that cloaked me head to foot.

Over me then they wove a spell of shining—
Purple and silver chains, eavesdripping tinsel,
Amulets, milagros: software of silver,
A heart, a little girl, a Model T,
Two staring eyes. Then angels, trumpets, BUD and BEA
(The children’s names) in clownlike capitals,
Somewhere a music box whose tiny song
Played and replayed I ended before long
By loving. And in shadow behind me, a primitive IV
To keep the show going. Yes, yes, what lay ahead
Was clear: the stripping, the cold street, my chemicals
Plowed back into the Earth for lives to come—
No doubt a blessing, a harvest, but one that doesn’t bear,
Now or ever, dwelling upon. To have grown so thin.
Needles and bone. The little boy’s hands meeting
About my spine. The mother’s voice: Holding up wonderfully!
No dread. No bitterness. The end beginning. Today’s

Dusk room aglow
For the last time
With candlelight.
Faces love-lit
Gifts underfoot.
Still to be so poised, so
Receptive. Still to recall, praise.

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Similar themes here.

Sometimes you wanna shoot
Where everybody else is gonna shoot
And they’re always glad you’re armed
You wanna be where you can see
The folks you shoot hey one two three
You wanna be where everybody knows you’re armed

Take these verses, call them today’s flower,

Cluster a rained‐in pupil might have scissored.

They too have suffered in the realm of hazard.

Sorry things all. Accepting them’s the art.

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The sad random childish awkward scissoring together of metaphor and sentiment makes of a poem a gift to the world, a gift to the lover.

This is clearly a pathetic gift, one of the sorry things all... The cluster the pupil makes means to be beautiful, a flower; but the pupil’s crude and cutting instrument of art – the scissors – guarantees a sorry thing, a thing unavoidably emerging from/entering into the realm of hazard, from our messy thrownness into being.

Would it have been worth while,

To have bitten off the matter with a smile,

To have squeezed the universe into a ball

To roll it towards some overwhelming question,

To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,

Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—

If one, settling a pillow by her head

               Should say: “That is not what I meant at all;

               That is not it, at all.”

Prufrock knows the lover will not accept his poem, his gift, his hazarded random thing that carries his love and his hoped-for transcendent meaning. She, pillowed in contingency, had not meant to excite that sentiment, that meaning, at all, and she shatters him and breaks his heart refusing it. She will shatter him – so he will withhold the gift out of self-protection. He won’t even try.

Merrill the poet tries and tries in every poem; and for him, rather than withdrawing from the field of love and meaning and beauty and gift-giving, we must simply keep trying. The art that matters is the art of accepting what gifts there are – the hopeless lover’s overtures indeed, but more importantly the conditions of existence themselves: dailiness, balanced meals (see the post below) and all. Therein lies the true art – not the always-inept creation of a poem, but an open forgiving ever-reanimated ever-hopeful embrace of the sad contingency even in the most achieved Shakespeare sonnet.

Thus in his great poem “After Greece,” when a depressed Merrill returns home from the exuberant liberating glories of Athens to the crimped waspy realities of his American upbringing – that particular existence into which he was thrown – he ends with a kind of prayer:

 May I
Also survive its meanings, and my own.

Best is to have the fortitude to take on the burden of your own sad contingencies — not head-on, because that would be ungeneratively painful (one of Merrill’s best-known collections is titled The Fire-Screen), as well as the sad contingencies of loved others. One will always be a clumsy “pupil” of life, expressively ‘reined in’ (Merrill loves to pun) by the repressive fire-screening in which all sane people must engage. The highest art is accepting those sorry things all — even as you forgive yourself for – speaking poetically, quoting Wallace Stevens – the intricate evasions of as.

The first I found in a review of James Merrill’s poetry; the second is from Nabokov’s Pnin. They attracted me because I’m starting my traditional end of/beginning of the year Life Wisdom blog post, and the sentiment seemed a good place to start.

But for now, just having arrived in Boston for Christmas, I’m going to take a nap.

[T]oddler fatally shoots mother with gun in Fresno

… Musselman admitted to shooting the victim’s truck but said he was aiming at a groundhog. Musselman told officers he used an AR-15 …

… in UD’s meditation garden.

On this morning’s walk.

I’m sure she is! I’m sure she is! It’s always good to let off steam, and blasting two rounds in an airport and scaring hundreds of people seems to have done the trick. Great.

The mean judge gave her five years anyway. Booooooo.

D.E.I. Official at University of Michigan Is Fired Over Antisemitism Claim

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She’s gonna sue all those rich fucking Jews.

… and Ours!

 James Madison, the principal author of the Bill of Rights, proposed two highly restrictive gun control bills in the Virginia legislature banning the carrying of guns outside of their owners’ property. They didn’t pass, but the effort indicates that Madison believed such laws were entirely allowed by the Constitution.

And this is not surprising. Madison was a smart guy, and regulating possession, sale, and use of deadly weapons is about the most legitimate activity imaginable for any state. For instance, Ancient Rome had strict rules about when and where weapons could be carried. Indeed, in Weberian terms, establishing control over the instruments of violence is part of what it means to be a state in the first place. The idea that a government scheme to, say, simply regulate the concealed carry of handguns is a priori illegitimate would have been regarded by all the drafters of the Constitution as staring madness. No idea so crazy would have even occurred to them.

… [T]he current American gun cult has little or nothing to do with either history, the Constitution, or plain common sense. 

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Then what’s it got to do with? The writer doesn’t specify.

UD thinks that whenever America births yet another insane gun baby, the handiwork of insane gun parents, the country is afforded an opportunity to gain focus about what many observers term the gun death cult here.

You often see the simpler formulation, gun cult, as if what’s going on in the nation is tens of millions of super-enthusiastic hobbyists buying and futzing with gun collections. Indeed, while the author of this piece uses the shorter phrase throughout, he titles it THE GUN DEATH CULT, which is the correct formulation. The word death deserves pride of place because Americans both delectate death and realize that, on a practical level – as with the enthusiastically applauded assassination of a representative of a disliked insurance system – guns solve or help solve many, many problems. They are the magic wand which makes people and organizations you don’t like go poof.

If you don’t like yourself, they remove you. American rates of suicide, especially in gunny states, astound. The love of death, wedded to our famous American pragmatism, extends to a delight and fascination with your own debraining.

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We can’t get enough of the bloody pragmatics of the gun. When mass shooting isn’t really mass – see the timid Madison psychotic who gunned herself down when she heard police and therefore only had time to kill two (maybe more – two children are currently trying to survive) – we feel cheated; whereas the bold Vegas shooter who kept going until he murdered 58 and injured 500 is far more satisfying.

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Take a town like Jackson Miss. The state has by far America’s highest gun violence rate, and Jackson has the state’s highest rate of same. It’s all made possible by a fantastic synergy between white Republican politicians who don’t seem to mind an 85% black city killing itself with guns, and a black population willing to kill itself with guns. White and black may have their differences, but all embrace the cult.

… mass shooting at a funeral home. (Introit, Missa pro modulus duae carbine, etc.)

Exsanguinatus in Pace Amen.

An X account believed to belong to Rupnow included a post shared within minutes of the time she opened fire featuring a person flashing the “OK” sign with their hand, a gesture linked to other school shooters, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

The account also shared video from the 2015 Trollhattan, Sweden, school stabbing attack, and another disturbing post days before the Madison slayings includes a video of somebody committing suicide at a gun range …

An account on social blogging platform Tumblr also believed to be connected to Rupnow features images of guns and other school shooting-related content, including a profile picture showing what appears to be a screenshot of surveillance footage from a shooting, authorities told ABC News.

The account also posted a picture of Parkland high school shooter Nicholas Cruz, and other posts mention a deadly 2007 school shooting in Jokela, Finland.

A CashApp account also reportedly linked to Rupnow features a picture of the Columbine shooters.

Her father, asked by a Facebook user if that was “Kiddo’’ in his shooting-range snapshot, replied, “sure is!!!!

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We have so many insane gun babies in this country that there’s no way we can really see them coming anymore. Most of their parents of course know all about them. But they don’t care.