The first day of May has several public meanings attached to it.  In Mexico, it is Labor Day, though I suspect that most Mexicans who “labor” won’t get the day off to celebrate themselves.  In the world of leftist politics, it’s a major day in which many countries remember those who have struggled to get human rights for the oppressed or marginalized or forgotten.  For me personally, the day floods me with a specific and happy memory.  Since I grew up in Alabama, by May 1st we were in the middle of spring, well on our way to another hot summer.  That meant flowers were blooming galore, so the huge garden my mother created as she was carrying me inside her was on full display.

I slept under a canopy bed that usually kept me from jumping on it when very small or, later, from playing “conductor” of whatever classical record I might be playing on my 45 rpm box player.   If I dared be that active, one of the little pine cone posts that held the canopy in place was dislodged and the whole anachronistic contraption fell onto my head.  But on May Day, when I waked up, what I saw hanging from the curved frame was a big basket full of blooms from my mother’s garden–snap dragons for sure, tiny yellow daisies, usually a single pink rose bud, two or three baby zinnias, and if I was lucky, a single bloom from my favorite flower–a spider lily.  She would have gone out in her night gown and light-weight robe, very early, and picked these.  Then she would have found just the right sized wicker basket into which she put the glass jar holding all the beauties.  I felt special.

When I waked half an hour before the alarm was to go off, I registered that it was May 1st, so I lay quietly in my bed and thought of Mamie’s yearly gift all those years ago.  Somehow that clean positive memory of being loved by my mother is a special gift as we all work to stay connected with those we love while the corona virus works its will on the world.

When I see the name Vermeer, I think of Johannes Vermeer, the 17th century Dutch painter (1632-1675) who focused on the play of light in interior scenes depicting middle class life in Delft.  His most famous painting is “The Girl With the Pearl Earring.”  That painting became the subject of the 2003 movie by the same title, thus propelling the painting itself into contemporary consciousness.   Another well-known painting of his is called “The Milk Maid,” and employs the same mesmerizing shade of blue as found in the head scarf worn by the girl with her pearl.  Vermeer’s paintings are displayed in museums all over the world, but the Riijsmuseum in Amsterdam houses the most under one roof.  Vermeer was fascinated with the play of light across people’s faces and around the locations where they sat or stood or worked. Interestingly enough he most often painted women–reading or writing or playing musical instruments or adorning themselves with beautiful jewelry.  While that last choice conformed with traditional roles for middle class Dutch women of his time, the rest clearly did not.  And even in “The Girl With the Pearl,” he invests his subject with an inner complexity far more evocative than the brightness of the pearl.

So, imagine my puzzlement about a week ago as I was walking my usual early morning route down one street of my neighborhood for about two miles before going over one block to return on the next street over.  I noticed a group of workmen in their bright yellow vests working on and in a large hole they’d just dug, a process that had involved tearing up several sidewalk slabs and dumping the concrete shards into the street for later collection, I assumed.  As I looked past the actual workers at the massive machine that had clearly done the digging, I saw written on its metal face in giant letters “VERMEER.”  For most of that morning’s walk, I worried over that name on that imposing and ungraceful contraption, remembering most of what I’ve just written about the evocative Dutchman with the same name.  At one point, the title of a book written long ago by a man who taught in the English Department at the University of Minnesota where I used to teach came into my mind:  The Machine In the Garden (1964).  Its author, Leo Marx, wrote convincingly about what it meant to American literature when the Industrial Revolution came across the Atlantic from England and rapidly erased whatever idyllic notions might have been floating around in the American psyche about this country’s being Edenic.  He’d have understood my dismay over the name on the large yellow and black machine that could chew up concrete as it it were mashed potatoes.

Once I was over the shock of this expropriation of the painter’s name, I Googled “Vermeer machine,” and got lots of entries extolling the virtues of their main contribution to present-day urban life.  The thing parked in my neighborhood was called a Vermeer vacuum excavator, and the Vermeer people, located in Pella, Iowa, were eager to tell me why their version of this item was the very best way to handle close and deep work in our cities.  Certainly the hole in question was both small and deep and had been made no wider than the sidewalk slabs it demolished.  So clearly Vermeer excavators do what they advertise themselves to do, just as Johannes painted image after image of comfortable Dutch people carrying on most often in their small rooms .

I don’t have any simple moral to offer; I just know a few days later when the Vermeer machine had moved to the next block to make the next cavity that is going to house 5G installations, I chose to picture the profile of that elusive girl with her little pearl, letting my painter take pride of place over the digger carrying his name.

I believe John Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost, offers us helpful words for most of life’s puzzles and quandaries.  In his preface to that poem, C. S. Lewis said that anyone who sits down to read this work is a different person when they get up from their chair.  For my part, I had never read a word of it before I was pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin.  I took a course in Milton from Y. Merritt Hughes, one of the major 20th century editors of Milton’s work.  Because we were reading lots of the poetry and a good bit of the prose, we didn’t concentrate on the 12,000+ line poem.  A few years later I was drafted to offer a second section of the required Milton course at the University of Minnesota where I was an assistant professor that I read it straight through.  Since I expected the students to read all the twelve books, so I had to do that with added vigor.  My initial response was to be amazed at how he could have written all those lines when he was entirely blind, no matter how faithful his daughters were as amanuenses, taking down his words day after day.  What seemed impossible to me was his inability to look at one day’s work the next day.  Even if he had his words read back to him, we all know oral review is very different from being able to see words on a piece of paper.

As I continued to teach Milton year after year, my experience with Paradise Lost became much more varied and subtle and profound.  When feminist thought/criticism began to seep into the academy, I didn’t agree with those who protested against Milton’s blatant chauvinism and sexism that they thought permeated the poem.  While I didn’t warm to the few lines in which he is sexist–“He for God only, she for God in him,” I kept seeing passages in which Milton was intent on rejecting conventional ideas about females and males.  For instance, he gives the power of naming to both of them–Adam has animals while Eve had flowers in that ur garden.  As an inveterate gardener myself, it seemed much nicer to think of names like “trillium” or “hibiscus” or just “daffodil” (though I did wish he’d called those early spring yellow beauties “jonquils”) than “lion” or “whale” or “eagle.”  And I was so moved by lines in which Milton has Eve walk along paths every morning as tiny flowers each raised their heads to greet their loving tender.  

I also didn’t think it was so bad that Eve left Adam and his albeit very bad teacher Raphael to their long abstract sessions, preferring to have Adam give her the gists when they were happily in bed each evening.  Milton casts Eve as a prototypical experiential learner, something I could relate to because that was the way I learned fastest and most easily.  But the clearest example of Milton’s not being the sexist writer some of my feminist colleagues felt him to be came for me in the late books after they’ve eaten the forbidden apple.  When God comes to judge them, Adam is  quick to be typically sexist by insisting to God that “Eve made me do it.”  Eve offers no excuses as she awaits what judgment will come to her.  God, however, stops Adam’s tirade by telling him that he is the superior intellect perhaps but that entails responsibilities.  In essence, God says Adam can’t have it both ways–he can’t be “superior” and then too weak to resist the first temptation put on his path.  I tried to get students to see the basic fairness inherent in Milton’s idea of an albeit sexist credo.  Since men still try to exert superiority while blaming us women for overpowering them, I often think of those late books in Milton’s poem to find clarity about what patriarchy might actually entail for the patriarchs.

Since retiring from regular teaching in 2001, I’ve found marvelous ways to keep talking about books with splendid grown-ups.  While people are happy to read Shakespeare or any contemporary writer with me, I have a very hard time roping folks into reading Milton.  But on two occasions enough brave souls agreed and we read my beloved  Paradise Lost together.  It’s been marvelous for me and, I believe, quite good and even surprising for those working with me.  Perhaps the most rewarding new insight for me has come in relation to the actual temptation scene in Book IX.  The story line is simple:  Once Adam and Eve stop weeding together, Satan is excited to approach Eve alone.  His temptation is simple:  he argues that she is too beautiful and smart just to be admired by her husband. Then he offers himself as proof that eating the forbidden fruit will not kill her since here he is in front of her and he’s eaten lots of apples.  Finally and importantly for Milton who believed knowledge was what distinguishes us from the rest of the animal kingdom, Satan tells Eve she will gain fantastic new knowledge by biting the round red apple. When Adam meets her for lunch, dropping the rapidly wilting bouquet he’s brought her, he makes a decision to join her in disobeying and eating the apple because he can’t conceive of life without her.  And, while Milton allows Eve to refuse Satan’s advances several times, he has Adam assent in the disobedience without any effort at all.

Eve’s sin is hubris–she puts knowledge above God–while Adam’s sin is uxoriousness–he puts Eve above God.  Eve’s sin is vertical while Adam’s is horizontal.  And while Milton’s God punishes them both by expelling them from Eden, Milton gives God lines that clearly place a more severe judgment on Adam than on his wife.  I had not understood this before sitting with people in my own living room and gradually letting the words sink in and stay put.   Maybe it took me that long to free myself completely of an inherited reading of this epic poem.  Or just maybe it took those intrepid people who sat with me while I pondered.