That is the first line of a short poem by William Wordsworth, the English romantic poet.  What follows is “when I behold/A rainbow in the sky.”  Two magical happenings in my life recently have called Wordsworth to mind.  A close friend and I have gone first to Crex Meadows in WI and then to the Sherburne Wildlife Refuge in MN to watch as thousands of sand hill cranes have returned to their temporary home after a day of eating corn and other grasses (the WI trip) and waked up, talked over breakfast, and eventually taken off for the day eating corn and other grasses (the MN trip).   These events have let me know just what William experienced when he looked up to see color arcing across his sky.  Another poem of his has also been rustling around in my brain as I recall all those graceful birds coming and going.  On April 15, 1802, William and his devoted sister, Dorothy, were on a walking tour in their beloved Lake District.  Again, all of a sudden Nature surprises him and he writes “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.”  The line from that poem that I keep playing is “All at once I saw a crowd,/A host of golden daffodils.”

My friend and I surely watched a huge bunch of sand hill cranes, but I felt pretty sure “host” was not the correct venereal word for such a large number of them.  So I consulted my trusty book that tells me the proper venereal term for all manner of beings–An Exaltation of Larks by James Lipton.  There I learned that many cranes may be termed a “construction,” a “dance,” a “sedge,” a “siege,” or a “swoop.”  (My playful self decided I’d hold “swoop” in reserve until I might witness the fly pattern of whooping cranes–a swoop of whoops.)  What I saw in those skies feels like a dance since as one flock after the other came within binocular range, they seemed to make patterns of movement like aerial dancers given complete free reign over body movements and group formations.

At Crex Meadows, I stood looking up to watch some flocks flying away from the sunset.  These looked like horizontal black lines because their long, thin necks and even longer, thinner legs, both of which extremities were extended but compressed in order to promote swiftness, I suspect.  If I twisted about 90 degrees, the cranes overhead were flying directly into the setting sun.  As the fading rays touched their underbellies, I gasped in amazement.  Suddenly creatures I’d thought were dark or mottled gray with the signature little red dot atop their heads and the rather pronounced black bills glowed like magic lights.  It seems sand hill cranes have golden chests and undersides of the gray wings.  Because I felt immediate contact with something profoundly spiritual, I tended to keep looking at the thousands of birds that flew at that angle, marveling at their iridescent splendor.  I also felt humbled before such imminent beauty that was being offered to me with no restraints.  My mind flashed to Loren Eisley’s beautiful writings about the powerful mysteries he found in nature.  He often reflected, as has Annie Dillard, on just how extravagant Nature so often is, forming trees that drop tens of thousands of seedlings that will never become even a tiny stick in someone’s yard.  Both of these writers keep telling us to pay attention to this plenitude, and try not to be stingy in our own giving patterns.  That’s how I felt standing with a small assortment of other people equally entranced by all the cranes flying over us in wave after wave.  Nature was being hugely generous in sharing the cranes’ homing instincts with the motley group standing in the road, eyes upward, senses on alert.

Watching the slow lightening of the skies over the huge pond at Sherburne Wildlife Refuge, I felt a similar wonder and humility.  The mood of the cranes was quite different from that of the returning birds in Wisconsin.  As light slowly manifested, more and more cranes waked and began making quiet but persistent sounds.  Our excellent guide, Cody, told me they were “talking to each other,” ta concept that charmed me.  I know how sweet such first words of a morning can be for us humans, so I listened with interest, imagining how pleasing it was being for each waking crane to connect with her or his fellows before gathering enough energy to take flight and go find the corn fields.  It was cold in the early light and some folks went back to their cars to warm up, but I just stayed, not wanting to lose a moment of this magical experience.  It wasn’t until I was back in my car that I began to shiver, realizing that I was thoroughly chilled.  Audre Lorde has a trenchant essay titled “Uses of the Erotic:  The Erotic as Power.”  In it she defines what eroticism used to mean before too many men tarnished the notion.  Lorde says the erotic is any activity in which we engage where we lose ourselves.  She went on in her wry way to posit that, if we’re lucky, a few times in our lives that will happen while we are being sexual with someone.  But she asked readers to look closely inside ourselves and discover what it was in our lives that had this capacity to lift us out of our usual routines.  My immediate response the first time I read her essay was to say “it’s gardening,” because in my yard I lose track of time, forget terrible events in the world, and feel intimate connections with some life force far greater than myself.  As I kept training my binoculars on the next group of cranes, I realized I was having what Lorde would describe as an erotic experience.

So now my friend and I have completed a circle in relation to the “host” of cranes on the brink of migrating southward.  I feel profound gratitude to be open to mystery–on the wing, in the sky.  All I have to do is close my eyes, think “sandhill cranes,” and the experience washes back over me and my heart leaps up all over again.

During the Kavanaugh hearings, much was made of his heavy drinking during high school and college.  I am a recovering alcoholic who will mark 44 years of sobriety on October 23rd of this year.  My antennae are quick to pick up tell-tale signs of other people’s proclivity for alcohol; I am sure that Brett Kavanaugh could tick off lots of the boxes on any diagnostic questionnaire about whether one is alcohol dependent.  In fact, he could “ace” that particular test.   Many investigators into the language patterns of alcoholics point out that we often volunteer revealing information about our drinking behaviors.  During his testimony “under oath,” recall the repeated references about his relationship to beer:  “I like beer; I still like beer…1 beer, 3 beers…sometimes I have too many beers.”  If you listen to those statements, you’ll detect a certain bravado in his tonality, as if to say “so what, I have no problem, I could stop any time I chose.”  

But it was when I watched his rebuttal of Professor Christine Blasey Ford’s humble yet powerful words about the sexual assault she remembers by Kavanaugh that I became convinced of his alcohol dependency.  Her words were spoken first, in the morning, while his were reserved for the afternoon.  Over lunch, I suspect two things obtained:  he was instructed in what words to speak that would endear him to the president’s “base”; he was told not to drink one of his beloved beers because someone in the hearing room might smell alcohol on his breath.  During most of my own nineteen years of alcoholic drinking, I never lost a day of work and was a pretty good lecturer about English literature.  But I always requested morning classes, since I could perform easily before lunch.  But by mid-afternoon, sitting perhaps in one of innumerable boring meetings at my university, I began to fray at the edges.  I also had to be sure I had a Kleenex on my person to get rid of the sweat beads that began to form on my forehead and upper lip, no matter what I did to try and remain calm.  Finally, if a colleague or intrepid student engaged me in conversation, I could feel my nerves on edge, requiring me to work hard not to fly off the handle about the relative merits of some early modern poet.

As Kavanaugh began his afternoon delivery that swung between outrage and tearful self-pity, I turned off the sound for a while and just watched his facial expressions and hand gestures.  Sweat began to form on his forehead and upper lip but he must have felt it would be too revealing to try and wipe them away with a tissue, so they just stayed there.  His cheeks grew ever redder, attributed by many perhaps to the force of his denial of Dr. Ford’s accusations, but another sign to me of his body’s simple chemical response to not having a little alcoholic booster with his sandwich.  Alerted by these familiar markers, I turned the sound back on and heard the increasing anger and agitation as Kavanaugh came closer and closer to losing control completely of what was coming out of his mouth.  And his hand gestures, while again mimicking his commander-in-chief, also reminded me of my own skewed movements as I tried both to accent whatever point I was making at 3 p.m. and to do something with the “fidgets” overtaking me as the shakes came ever closer to the surface.

So I remain certain that the man who has just become the newest member of the highest court in the land was suffering from initial and inevitable early on-set withdrawal because he had not been allowed to feed the monkey on his back with a couple of those liked beers that usually let him maneuver his way to the cocktail hour when work was over.  So as I get ready to feel tremendous gratitude for having stopped my own alcoholic drinking so long ago, I shudder to think what may ensue unless Kavanaugh can admit his own dependence and get help.

The year I began teaching literature at the University of Minnesota in 1964, Leo Marx published his important book, The Machine in the Garden.  Though Marx was teaching literature in the newly minted department of American Studies, I never met him.  Because everyone spoke about him in hushed and reverential tones, however, I figured I should read this critical examination of the effects of machine technologies on the pastoral ideal that surrounded 19th century American literature.  What Marx wanted to show was the loss of national innocence many critics decried.  After all, when our Puritan fathers (and mothers, don’t forget) landed on the eastern shores of what would become North America, they believed they were coming to a virgin land, a “city on the hill” sort of place, even a paradise regained since many were fleeing repressive and corrupt systems across the Atlantic Ocean.  Scholars studying those early settlers report that in many of their chests and bags, only two books were found:  the Bible and John Milton’s Paradise Lost.  

Reality along that Eastern Seaboard probably looked a lot different from the idealized myth of unsullied and innocent nature, but by the 19th century the myth had taken hold in imaginations if not on the actual farms and in the emerging cities of this country.  Yet Marx and many others after him insisted on a story in which an essentially agricultural country was being infected and sullied by rapidly developing technologies that began cutting people off from their natural settings.  In England, a similar malaise developed around the Industrial Revolution.  Poets like Oliver Goldsmith (“The Deserted Village”) and William Wordsworth (“London, 1802” or “The World Is Too Much With Us”) told us of how factories and noisy farm machines were destroying the tranquility of the country side even as they were alienating humans from their work.  Well, in 2018, we’re a long way from any such bucolic ideal.  Assembly lines have existed for over a century now, becoming more and more mechanized until today robots are doing more and more in many factories turning out cars and other necessities of today’s ultra-urbanized culture.  And it is those very robots about which I want to speak briefly.  A few days ago, I heard a long program on National Public Radio (NPR) about a recent decision in Los Vegas to begin using robots to do the work in some of the giant casinos and their accompanying hotels/restaurants.  Already, a few mega-restaurants are using robotic salad choppers that can supply all the lettuce/cabbage/tomatoes and other ingredients for the thousands and thousands of salads served each day.  The program described in great detail a robotic device that could make a perfect daikari or whiskey sour.  This involves a large arm connected to supply sources holding the proper ingredients.  A patron clicks on the drink of choice and the arm begins putting into the right kind of glass exactly the right amount of alcohol to produce that cocktail.  The reporter involved interviewed some patrons who had used this arm and tasted the results.  One woman was quite eloquent when she said “Well, yes, it tasted like what I ordered, but it was no fun.  A big part of being at a bar is talking to the bar tender.”  I suppose the industries involved will now have to find a version of Watson who can “talk” to the patron while it’s cranking out the drink punched into a computer grid.

Like so much of current technological advances that seem to be exploding into our consciences and environments, it seems to me no one is asking much about the human consequences of our increasing reliance on robotic devices to perform routine tasks.  In the case of Los Vegas’ move toward using such machines to clean hotel rooms and allow restaurants to turn out food faster and more cheaply than is possible using human workers, what’s not being taken into serious account is the effects on a work force.  The NPR investigative reporter made abundantly clear just who will be impacted by this move into robotics.  He told us what we would would know if we thought about it for a few minutes:  the two groups that will be affected immediately are women and Hispanics.  Women and men from these populations currently perform the great bulk of this work in the casinos, so they will be the first to get pink slips as large metallic “arms” replace them in kitchens and bars and bedrooms.  The same reporter was equally clear that no re-education or re-training programs are being mandated that might allow such displaced workers to apply for other jobs in order to provide them with the means to live with a modicum of self respect and to support families if they have them.  

So, though few would call The Strip a “garden” of any kind, the new “machines” certainly will further alienate hard-working individuals from any serious guarantee of financial security.  That denial will in turn exacerbate the already-present worries and fears surrounding the groups of low-income workers directly involved.  And, not to be too pessimistic, already in place in some quarters, greedy corporations have their eyes on using appropriately designed robots to harvest this country’s dominant crops.  We all know whom that mechanical advantage will permanently disadvantage.  Leo Marx would be a lot sadder if he were breathing today.

When I set out to write about Jesmyn Ward’s novel, Salvage the Bones, I meant to speak about several aspects that have moved me and driven me to deep thought.  I became so wrapped up in talking about Skeetah’s relationship with his white pit bull, China, however, that I never ventured beyond that thread.  There is one more theme that I simply can’t let go unremarked, so I’m adding this coda to my initial entry about the book.  Very early in the story, Esch is talking about her efforts to appear sexy to a boy she fancies, Manny.  She tells us:  “I’d let boys have it [her “girly heart”]  because they wanted it, amd not because I wanted to give it.  I’d let boys have it because for a moment, I was Psyche or Eurydice or Daphne.  I was beloved….  I was bold as a Greek….”   Though I puzzled over this unprepared for and unexplained reference to classical Greek women, I didn’t pay much attention until later Ward has Esch remind us of her tendency to identify with such characters out of mythology.  She says “I could be Eurydice walking through the underworld to dissolve, unseen.”   Then about midway into the story, Esch begins to limit her Greek identifications to Medea the character who killed her own brother.  This story, occurring in the middle of her mythology text that she has vowed to read in its entirety, fascinates Esch, and Medea will come to her psychological aid several times as the hurricane strengthens and hits her family and community hard, and she struggles to figure out how to survive. She goes on to recount the two versions of how Medea’s brother dies–one has her deliver her brother to Jason who kills him while Medea watches; the other has Medea herself do the deed:  “she chops him into bits….and throws each part overboard so that her father, who is chasing them, slows down to pick up each part of his son.”  Esch reads this account repeatedly in order to get away “from the smell of Manny still on me a night and morning” after Manny has deserted her when he  learns she’s pregnant.  

A few scenes later, when Manny shows up, Esch attacks him yelling “I loved you!” followed by her immediate retreat into Greek mythology:  “This is Medea wielding the knife.  This is Medea cutting.”  And then a few more moments into this scene in which Esch becomes like Hurricane Katrina as well as her Greek alter ego, she muses: “When Jason betrayed Medea to exile so he could marry another woman, she killed his bride, the bride’s father, and last her own children, and then flew away into the wind on dragons.  She shrieked; Jason heard.” 

Ward’s final joining of her central female character to the powerful woman of Greek myth comes as the water from Katrina moves inexorably closer to Esch and her family in their vulnerable house.  Determined to believe they can weather the storm, Esch is drifting off to sleep, reading her book:  “In ancient Greece, for all her heroes, for Medea and her mutilated brother and her devastated father, water meant death.  In the bathroom on the toilet, I heard the clanking of metal against metal outside, some broken machine tilting like a sinking headstone against another, and I knew it was the wind pushing a heavy rain.”  On their last day to be able to be safe inside their house, Esch again is “trying to read by the oil lamp, but the sound of the words are not coming together over the sound of the wind and the rain relentlessly bearing down on the house; they are fragments.  Jason has remarried, and Medea is wailing.  An exile, oh God, oh God, alone.  And then By death, oh, by death, shall the conflict be decided.  Life’s little day ended.  I shut the book, don’t even mark my place, and sit on it.”  Finally, art and the old Greek story cannot help Esch and her family, so there are no more moments in which she relies on comparing herself to Medea.  Something stronger has attacked them all–the force and aftermath of Katrina–and surely Esch’s book, like Sheetah’s beloved dog, is washed away to join all the other debris, pieces of human life lost.

Not content to let the Medea parallels go completely, however, Ward has Esch make a final comparison, though this time not of her to the Greek murdering mother/wife.  She imagines an amazing connection between Medea and Katrina:  “Her [Katrina’s} chariot was a storm so great and black the Greeks would say it was harnessed to dragons.  She [Katrina] was the murderous mother who cut us to the bone, but let us alive, left us naked and bewildered as wrinkled newborn babies, as blind puppies, as sun-starved newly hatched baby snakes….  She [Katrina] left us to learn to crawl.  She [Katrina]left us to salvage.  Katrina is the mother we will remember until the next mother with large, merciless hands, committed to blood, comes.”  So Ward has tied this contemporary black family to one of Greek tragedy’s grimmest episodes.  She has equated the hurricane named for a woman to the maddened Greek woman who cannot stop herself from exacting mortal revenge on those who have ignored and betrayed her.  And the young Esch has the imagination to see this conflation and use the past to help her make minimal sense out of her present.