Category: No Name for It

Early, So Early and Thinking of Franz Liszt

I like writing early in the morning. The day’s many entanglements haven’t gotten me. Things are still quiet in my neighborhood. Soon enough there will be the doorbell. The person on business from Porlock will arrive. 

Now here’s the thing: I wish for the faint sound of someone playing the piano. I do. Once upon a time when I was walking an unfamiliar neighborhood in Houston, TX of all places I heard someone playing Liszt because their window was open though it was Texas and hot as Satan’s outhouse. 

It was lyric in the inhospitable: “Tre sonetti di Petrarca” and Liszt with his cataracts, his dropsy, his failing heart, asthma, insomnia, Liszt placed his hands on my shoulders. 

And this from Anthropic’s Claude: 

“It was a peculiar late chapter: a man who’d been Europe’s first great musical superstar spending his last decades as a wandering, half-monastic figure, writing music decades ahead of its time.”

 

 

Halfway Up the Mountain

No one can describe the happiness of others. We’re like dogs barking at hieroglyphs when we talk about emotion. I’ve spent years studying poetry and I know its all a dream, this business of inter-personal connection and comprehension. I hardly know myself. About my life I recognize only a few bare details. I’ve a better chance calming the wind than understanding my life.

I take comfort from Winnie the Pooh: 

“Rabbit’s clever,” said Pooh thoughtfully.

“Yes,” said Piglet, “Rabbit’s clever.”

“And he has Brain.”

“Yes,” said Piglet, “Rabbit has Brain.”

There was a long silence.

“I suppose,” said Pooh, “that that’s why he never understands anything.” 

― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

Ah, understanding! The state we never achieve except in small ways. 

What is to be done? A few years ago, in a state of both loneliness and wonderment I wrote a poem about Heraclitus, “the dark one” who understood that time is a game with string. Back then I owned a horse named Luigi with my wife. Luigi was a rescued “off the track thoroughbred” and as he aged he was quite soulful in the way of horses. I can’t explain it. He was, in my view an equine phenomenologist. He was the incitement for the poem as one evening when it was late in the autumn I caught him looking—gazing really—out the window of his stall. I was also thinking of the poet Robert Bly who was enormously kind and supportive of me when I was young and confused. 

This is the title poem from the book: 

“Old Horse, What Is to Be Done?”

—for Robert Bly

I also want to live tonight 

My pockets filled with ghost silver 

The real coins I spent long ago 

There are weeks, whole months

When I read only the ancients

I mean the dark one the river compulsive 

A man who made clocks from string…

Time is a game played beautifully by children

Lately this is all I can think of

When I was very small I lived by a meadow 

You loved me and I wasn’t confused

**

Its the small way we always must take. 

In a July 1965 letter to Tomas Transformer, Robert Bly, writing of his trip to Norway says something which is easy to overlook and yet remarkable:

Dear Tomas,

Here we are, in the old Heimat! old Bleie, whose stones have been stained by Bleie-feet for ten thousand years or so, is still here, supporting apples and cows and some taciturn Norwegians. We are in a magnificent camping place at Lofthus, with the Sørfjord under us, and those wonderful mountains with snow across the fjord. Every day or so I start plunging up the mountain, get halfway up, and then sit down in a sheep-shed for the rest of the morning.”

The remarkable thing is of course plunging up the mountain, getting halfway, and then sitting alone in a sheep shed. The overlooked thing is how skillfully Bly has left the wind out of this story since wind is always present above the fjords. It’s the excision of a constellating factor that marks his best poems and which pulses, unspoken as a source of incitements these poems. Because Bly’s popularity on the lecture circuit was a consequence of his opposition to the Viet Nam War and later, his insistent views on spiritualism and psychoanalysis took prominence one can forget his fidelity to the quiet and often snapped connections between things—what I’m here calling “the wind left out.”

“The wind left out” means nothing is innocent. The grass growing unevenly under apple trees turns the poet’s casual glance from a train window to thoughts of death and dying—it’s in effect Whitman’s grass:

“Passing an Orchard by Train”

Grass high under apple trees.

The bark of the trees rough and sexual,

The grass growing heavy and uneven.

We cannot bear disaster, like

The rocks—

Swaying nakedly

In open fields.

One slight bruise and we die!

I know no one on this train.

A man comes walking down the aisle.

I want to tell him

That I forgive him, that I want him

To forgive me.

This jump from grass “heavy and uneven” to proleptic disaster, to the inevitability of death is not spelled out. The grass is Whitman’s hieroglyphic, suggesting burials or natural graves. Either way the leap to solid rocks, the suggestion that humans sway nakedly, vulnerable, derives from a Whitmanic incitement: “And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.” This is what I mean when I say the wind left out is not innocent. That wind may come from allusions or it can arrive by way of subjective emotional candor—feeling bruised by thoughts of dying and alone on a train the poet wants to tell a stranger that he forgives him, a Christ-like moment of despair and tenderness which in normal society must be left out. There’s a hint of theodicy here: a vindication of God’s goodness made manifest by lovingkindness. Notice that Bly doesn’t say the words. One thinks of Thoreau’s observation: “There are many fine things which we cannot say if we have to shout.” Bly fine tunes this to suggest the things we cannot say without intuition.

The details in poems multiply of our perceptions. That each thing may or not be true emanates from the phenomenological imagination. 

In his Introduction to Phenomenology Robert Sokolowski notes that where phenomenology is concerned: “there are no ‘mere’ appearances, and nothing is ‘just’ an appearance. Appearances are real; they belong to being. Things do show up. Phenomenology allows us to recognize and to restore the world that seemed to have been lost when we were locked into our own internal world by philosophical confusions. Things that had been declared to be merely psychological are now found to be ontological, part of the being of things. Pictures, words, symbols, perceived objects, states of affairs, other minds, laws, and social conventions are all acknowledged as truly there, as sharing in being and as capable of appearing according to their own proper style.” 1 (p. 34) 

Ontology is oddly enough (mixing metaphors) a proper style; lyric findings are constituent parts of being. Proleptic imagination anticipates surprise, refuting commonplace assumptions about our surroundings as a leaden intelligence. This is “the imagination” hardened and yet buoyant, like the figurehead of a sailing ship. Arthur Schopenhauer wrote: “The world in which a man lives shapes itself chiefly by the way in which he looks at it, and so it proves different to different men; to one it is barren, dull, and superficial; to another rich, interesting, and full of meaning. On hearing of the interesting events which have happened in the course of a man’s experience, many people will wish that similar things had happened in their lives too, completely forgetting that they should be envious rather of the mental aptitude which lent those events the significance they possess when he describes them; to a man of genius they were interesting adventures; but to the dull perceptions of an ordinary individual they would have been stale, everyday occurrences. This is in the highest degree the case with many of Goethe’s and Byron’s poems, which are obviously founded upon actual facts; where it is open to a foolish reader to envy the poet because so many delightful things happened to him, instead of envying that mighty power of phantasy which was capable of turning a fairly common experience into something so great and beautiful.” 2 (p. 9)

Excerpt From: Arthur Schopenhauer. “The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/CLZo6.l 

Proleptic conception is movement and aptitude. It assumes shapes by driving ahead. It is not, however, simply freedom in the service of pleasure—that Western idea of the self as a noble enjoyer of its surroundings or its body. The traditional Enlightenment “self” is a free acquirer of sights, objects, tastes, sounds, and is understood to be a discerning tourist, a Thomas Jefferson in Paris if you will. Speaking of the individual and his happiness Schopenhauer says: 

“We have already seen, in general, that what a man is contributes much more to his happiness than what he has, or how he is regarded by others. What a man is, and so what he has in his own person, is always the chief thing to consider; for his individuality accompanies him always and everywhere, and gives its color to all his experiences. In every kind of enjoyment, for instance, the pleasure depends principally upon the man himself. Every one admits this in regard to physical, and how much truer it is of intellectual, pleasure. When we use that English expression, “to enjoy one’s self,” we are employing a very striking and appropriate phrase; for observe—one says, not “he enjoys Paris,” but “he enjoys himself in Paris.” To a man possessed of an ill-conditioned individuality, all pleasure is like delicate wine in a mouth made bitter with gall. Therefore, in the blessings as well as in the ills of life, less depends upon what befalls us than upon the way in which it is met, that is, upon the kind and degree of our general susceptibility. What a man is and has in himself,—in a word personality, with all it entails, is the only immediate and direct factor in his happiness and welfare. All else is mediate and indirect, and its influence can be neutralized and frustrated; but the influence of personality never. This is why the envy which personal qualities excite is the most implacable of all,—as it is also the most carefully dissembled.” 3 (p. 24)

Excerpt From: Arthur Schopenhauer. “The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/CLZo6.l

One can think of Bly in his most delicate perceptions as resisting ill conditioned individuality. “I am alone yet someone else is with me.” Such positions are both a matter of individuality and a directed intelligence precisely because we are aware of the incorporeality of symbolism—whether we’re talking of Georg Trakl, or Wallace Stevens—the former can write: 

I am a shadow far from darkening villages. 

I drank the silence of God

Out of the stream in the trees.

Stevens writes: 

Twenty men crossing a bridge,

Into a village,

Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges,

Into twenty villages,

Or one man

Crossing a single bridge into a village.

The world is (entirely) our acquaintanceship with shadows and unfixed forms. Hazarded imagining is nearly always providential. We find by indirection the particles of revery. 

One may say this is true of all lyric poetry but in the case of Bly the poetics is always a gamble—the discoveries are impossible to have imagined before the poem itself; there is no framing of the scene, no anticipation of vision, but a sequence of astonishments. He relays them back to the reader much in the way a shaman tells a story of something discovered beyond the physical world. This is Romanticism but Bly is closer to Thoreau than Keats. He owes more to Walden than to Wordsworth. Returning to Schopenhauer the wind left out is all that constitutes personality. Thoreau looking down at the bedrock of the pond sees a natural fact but understands something of his soul. Bly writes:

“SOME NOVEMBER PRIVACY POEMS”

I am comforted

by a crack in dry ground

nearly smoothed over with winter dust.

•

How marvelous to look out and see

the boulders

that have been gloomy since the earth began

now with a faint dusting of snow.

•

Mist: no one on the other shore.

It may be the trees I see have consciousness

and this desire to weep comes from them.

•

Most birds have gone south.

Grass heels over in the wind.

The feminine hooves of the horse

stand side by side as he eats.”

Excerpt From

Collected Poems

Robert Bly

This desire to weep is a moral concern. The ethical life, which is concerned with honoring and preserving living things is nearly indescribable. As Tomas Transtromer once wrote: 

I come too seldom down to the water. But I am here now,

Among large stones with peaceful backs.

Stones which slowly migrated backwards up out of the waves.

Who are we when we’re set against natural facts? We say we are here. And the poems say this means something. Thoreau: “Draw lines through the length & breadth of the aggregate of a man’s particular daily experiences and volumes of life into his coves and inlets—and where they intersect will be the height or depth of his character.”

One can add that intersection is where the wind is left out.

Notebook Soliloquy

Have you ever thought of your notebook as your best friend? That friend who doesn’t judge you.

In my head I’m sitting at Emily Dickinson’s north facing window. The page is mine.

I wonder what Emily Dickinson would have thought about jazz.

I wonder if, in heaven, Miles Davis and Emily are properly acquainted.

Meanwhile the north facing window overtakes the page.

As I grow older my hands open more slowly…

My hands are today helpless. I used them to vote against fascism just last week. It was foolish of my hands to think they had power. Today my hands are grieving and their grief differs from that of the head or heart: my hands are those of a sailor who desperately wants to put the ship on the right course—hands that are educated, seasoned, and moral.

As I grow older my hands open more slowly. Maybe they know more? What’s empty turns its face to us, said a good poet, long ago. My hands read Braille poorly. My hands which have touched Marcel Duchamp’s bicycle wheel. Hands that pull the voting lever for freedom.

There are several good books about hands. One of my favorites is “Victorian Hands: The Manual Turn in Nineteenth Century Body Studies” edited by Peter J. Capuano and Sue Zemka. Hands are transformed by the industrial revolution—they become vulnerable instruments seemingly designed through evolution to operating machines. They are all too often dismembered. Hands become “throw aways” as much as anything else.

My hands are today helpless. I used them to vote against fascism just last week. It was foolish of my hands to think they had power. Today my hands are grieving and their grief differs from that of the head or heart: my hands are those of a sailor who desperately wants to put the ship on the right course—hands that are educated, seasoned, and moral.

What about the hands of those who voted for fascism you say. These are the descendent hands of industrial labor, desperately caught up in the machines of their own doom. They voted, essentially, for “throw away” hands.

My favorite poem about hands is by Jane Hirshfield

A hand is not four fingers and a thumb.
Nor is it palm and knuckles,
not ligaments or the fat’s yellow pillow,
not tendons, star of the wristbone, meander of veins.

A hand is not the thick thatch of its lines
with their infinite dramas,
nor what it has written,
not on the page,
not on the ecstatic body.

Nor is the hand its meadows of holding, of shaping—
not sponge of rising yeast-bread,
not rotor pin’s smoothness,
not ink.

The maple’s green hands do not cup
the proliferant rain.
What empties itself falls into the place that is open.
A hand turned upward holds only a single, transparent question.
Unanswerable, humming like bees, it rises, swarms, departs.

The ADA @ 30, “Why It’s Like Poetry”

I can’t tell you how to laugh or love someone. I certainly can’t tell you where poems come from or what will stir my heart or yours, say, in the next hour. 

The things I can’t tell you make a considerable list. I won’t write it. You have your own even if you don’t generally acknowledge it. 

I love a photo of the great opera tenor Enrico Caruso who is gently guiding Helen Keller’s cosmic finger tips across his throat as he sings for her Samson’s aria about losing his sight. Caruso was a genuine peasant and grew up in terrible poverty in Naples. By the tine of the photograph he was as famous as Theodore Roosevelt. Helen Keller was certainly just as much a public figure. And there they are, having what a later generation would recognize as a “Vulcan Mind Meld” and whenever I think of this photo I want to be Helen’s fingertips. I want to feel the luscious electrolysis of mystery-static coming through. Imagine! Touching Caruso’s throat! 

I write poems in rain and in the sun. I fall down stairs. Once when I was much younger than I am now I successfully stood on my head while a young woman I loved fed me jelly beans. I fell over. 

I lie down and dream of Edgar Poe’s best laugh. It was a vengeful laughter and probably more than that for it was likely mean spirited. It probably came after he met Walt Whitman who he thought a simpleton. Then there was Whitman’s laugh, which came later, at Pfaff’s saloon, and which had no Poe in it. 

Where does the bitterness go?  I can’t tell you.

I can’t tell you about the winds of my boyhood which kept me awake at night. I’m not that boy any longer. The winds produced stories in me. I don’t remember them now. I do recall that I always insisted to my father that he leave the window open. Even in winter I wanted it open just a crack.

I most certainly cannot tell you how in private I launder my shirt of happiness.

Can’t describe how the stars lean close when I’m mumbling “it’s alright, it’s alright” to an aging dog.

Can’t tell you how it is I can forgive the walls.

Of the ADA @ 30 I can’t tell you what it means. I stop wet faced, inner tears of joy and desperation welling. 

There are substantial obstacles. There are miracles that have not yet healed. 

I can’t describe poetry. I’ve the law on my side. 

Whether you’re disabled or not I can’t say when cordiality or affection will come. 

I wear an imaginary sapphire on my finger. 

I eat the white flowers from a table and the rich people don’t notice. 

Blind, crossing the street. 

Like all disabled I work out things in my peculiar way.

Poetry? What is that?

I’m lighter than a child’s hand. 

Hay Scratching Hay

When I was a kid I fell in love with a Victrola in my grandmother’s attic. What was I doing up there? It was summer. Kids were playing ball. And there I was with a wind up gramophone with a metal horn. Blind kid alone with an old fashioned record player at the top of a Victorian house. I fell in love with that machine. It worked perfectly and there were dozens of records featuring the great Enrico Caruso. You have to picture me, five years old, a little lonely, and then stunned to hear such a voice under the eaves. I’ve loved Caruso’s voice all my life and yet, even now, sixty years later, hearing him pulls me back to my provincial first opera house.

There were lots of artifacts in that attic. A raccoon coat, a sea captain’s chest, a cracked boudoir mirror, cane chairs that were eaten through, dusty books, a sewing machine, oddments of all kinds, tools I couldn’t identify. I explored with my hands while the great tenor sang of vengeance or a broken heart.

Think about your private opera. I was lonesome as a cricket. I was in love with a strange singer.. Best of all I’d no one to tell.

I still hear the needle hitting the record. The sound of hay scratching hay.

In my case poetry has always been a kind of forsakenness. The solitude glitters. Do you know this feeling? Rain runs down the window and you press your forehead there. You see you need nothing.

D. H. Lawrence wrote: “It’s no good trying to get rid of your own aloneness. You’ve got to stick to it all your life. Only at times, at times, the gap will be filled in. At times! But you have to wait for the times. Accept your own aloneness and stick to it, all your life. And then accept the times when the gap is filled in, when they come. But they’ve got to come. You can’t force them.”

Yes there are moments when the fire warms and the inn is open. Family and lovers; neighbors, strangers well met—a trusty dog. Behind this scrim is the solitude. It was me. It was the voice of a tenor singing in the dark.

Wood Work

In Finland they’re hunting for mushrooms and berries—
Time to make the old soup.
Here in America I stare at my hands.
I write some words about faith.
Last night a stray dog came to my door.
Summer will be ending soon.
Sometimes a poem is a way of sitting at the end of a bench
With an imaginary cap over your ears.
Which hat will I wear this winter?
I’m the king of the unswerving.
Watch as I whittle this stick.

Thinking of Cesar Vallejo, Early Morning, in the Age of Police Brutality

I want to begin with a short poem by the great Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo, translated by Robert Bly: 

Black Stone Lying On A White Stone

I will die in Paris, on a rainy day,

on some day I can already remember.

I will die in Paris—and I don’t step aside—

perhaps on a Thursday, as today is Thursday, in autumn.

   It will be a Thursday, because today, Thursday, setting down

these lines, I have put my upper arm bones on 

wrong, and never so much as today have I found myself

with all the road ahead of me, alone.

   César Vallejo is dead.  Everyone beat him

although he never does anything to them;

they beat him hard with a stick and hard also

   with a rope.  These are the witnesses:

the Thursdays, and the bones of my arms,

the solitude, and the rain, and the roads. . .

This poem has been much on my mind for several reasons. Vallejo wrote it in despair and weariness. As a Marxist poet living in exile in Paris he was hounded by the police, was frequently arrested and subjected to beatings. His is the true story of literary exile in Paris as opposed to the white privilege story of Hemingway and his circle. Hemingway’s crowd held no political positions and fought for no causes. 

It’s also been in my thoughts because it’s about life inside the broken body which to my mind makes it a disability poem. His upper arm bones are wrong, his will can’t change the fact, and like so many cripples he finds himself alone. The only witnesses? The opaque and unfeeling days. 

The third reason the poem’s been in my thoughts is that we’re living in a globalized police state now. From Minneapolis to Mumbai; from Atlanta to Ashgabat police violence is not just the norm, it’s welcomed by the ruling classes. This poem is about the toll this takes “on the inside”—what this does to “the inner life.”

The poet will die in Paris on a rainy day—a day he can already remember, for death by persecution really never ends. 

It’s a brave poem. It skips the contemporary American penchant for lyric poems that sentimentalize the glories of nature or the joys of sex.  

It’s a brave poem. There’s a hint of Orwell. (The jackboot that’s going to step on you throughout eternity.) 

It’s a brave poem. Cesar Vallejo never does anything to anyone and they beat him for his very consciousness and his foreign appearance. 

It’s a brave poem because he wrote it without sentimentally. 

It is much on my mind. 

Disabled in the Faculty Ranks, A Tiresome Tale…

If you’re like me and you’ve a disability and you work in higher education you know that discrimination on the basis of physical difference is just as rampant from the left as the right. If you’re a faculty member who requires accommodations in the workplace you’re a nuisance. You might even be an embarrassment. I’ll never forget walking in a faculty procession with my guide dog and actually hearing a university trustee snicker as I passed. The chuckle wasn’t friendly and it spoke volumes. “Look! There goes our esteemed faculty! I always told you they didn’t know anything!” This happened at Syracuse University and yet it could have occurred on any campus. Disabled faculty are not the norm. Worse, we face bureaucratic delay and dismissive arguments when we bring up the inaccessibility of physical and digital spaces.   

I submit it’s hard to avoid growing bitter. It’s hard to feel the very apparent lack of interest in disability discrimination even from faculty who hail from other marginalized positions. No one wants to imagine disability as being intersectional. Diversity and inclusion generally doesn’t include the cripples. Because this is so, the loneliness of being disabled in the faculty ranks is considerable. Ableism is a machine for isolation and deprivation. When you say, well people of color also have disabilities people look at their watches. The great liberal fiction is that universities are welcoming. All of this came to the surface for me this morning when I read about two black professors at the University of Virginia who were denied tenure. The academy does not welcome bodies of difference and while I’m not a person of color I can say I’ve seen the discriminatory daily routines “up close and personal” and I’m getting pretty close to being worn out. 

Not so long ago I was called an “ignoramus” by a fellow faculty member who was snotty to me and my white cane. I know, it’s hard to believe. Of course It is never appropriate to call anyone an ignoramus in an educational setting for the term’s antonym s are “brain “ and “genius” and its synonyms include: airhead, birdbrain, blockhead, bonehead, bubblehead, chowderhead, chucklehead, clodpoll (or clodpole), clot [British], cluck, clunk, cretin, cuddy (or cuddie) [British dialect], deadhead, dim bulb [slang], dimwit, dip, dodo, dolt, donkey, doofus [slang], dope, dork [slang], dullard, dum-dum, dumbbell, dumbhead, dummkopf, dummy, dunce, dunderhead, fathead, gander, golem, goof, goon, half-wit, hammerhead, hardhead, idiot, imbecile, jackass, know-nothing, knucklehead, lamebrain, loggerhead [chiefly dialect], loon, lump, lunkhead, meathead, mome [archaic], moron, mug [chiefly British], mutt, natural, nimrod [slang], nincompoop, ninny, ninnyhammer, nit [chiefly British], nitwit, noddy, noodle, numskull (or numbskull), oaf, pinhead, prat [British], ratbag [chiefly Australian], saphead, schlub (also shlub) [slang], schnook [slang], simpleton, stock, stupe, stupid, thickhead, turkey, woodenhead, yahoo, yo-yo…

As a disabled person I know full well what the delegitimizing effects of language can do to anyone who hails from a historically marginalized background but where disability is concerned the labeling I’ve described has a particularly specious and ugly history. Idiot, moron, half-wit, dolt, cretin are all familiar to the disabled. One would expect relief from these terms at a university. What’s particularly galling is that the subject I was discussing with the professor in question was ableism—namely that I’d said hello to him on an elevator, I, a blind man with a white cane, and he simply stared at me. No acknowledgement. When two students got on the elevator he lit up and talked breezily about how he hates snow. I followed him to his office and said that by not acknowledging a blind person he creates a social dynamic that feels off-putting and I wanted to discuss the matter. He became instantly contemptuous.

Now of course that’s because of the synonyms above. In this man’s antediluvian world view the disabled really shouldn’t be in the academy. Ableism is not only more pervasive than people generally understand its also more consistent at universities than is commonly recognized.

As for me, I’m an ignorant man to professor “p” for that’s what I’m calling him. “P” for privileged.

He doesn’t know it yet, but incapacities likely await him.

Some day, long after I’m dead colleges and universities will be welcoming places for all. And disabled folks who are people of color will thrive. And yes blind people will not be laughed at. 

Of Floating Barrels in Virus Time

In Mark Twain’s “Life on the Mississippi” which I consider to be his greatest accomplishment (for it is Twain as scholar, essayist, and social psychologist) he describes a crew of riverboat men who think they’re being followed by a floating barrel of supernatural origin:

“Everybody was sober and down in the mouth all day. I don’t mean the kind of sober that comes of leaving liquor alone—not that. They was quiet, but they all drunk more than usual—not together—but each man sidled off and took it private, by himself.”

Now a barrel is just a barrel and a virus is just what it is. The virus does’t care about your mood and while you can use war metaphors all you like it is not your enemy. This is why Donald Trump’s press conferences are so dreadful. Dr. Fauci recognizes the virus is just what it is and needs to be confronted with reason. Trump turns it into a figure of sinister foreign origins or a hoax or a political cudgel.

^^

I carried around with me for years a tattered copy of the “Oxford Book of Superstitions” and I think I still have it somewhere. In Scotland it was believed as late as the 18th century that upon leaving the house if a man or woman met a blind person they would go blind UNLESS they went to the woods and located a tree with two trunks—a tree with a crotch filled with water. They had to gather that water and, as they say in cookbooks, put it aside. Then they had to find a black cat and burn it. Retrieve the water and mix it with the cat ash. Rub this fetid unguent in your eyes. The “Oxford Book of Superstitions” does not say where this apothecary and alchemical nonsense originated.

**

I hope you’re too wise for superstition. If you’re American I have my doubts of course. In general the great migrations of the late 19th century brought plenty of evil eyes and hats on the beds to the good old USA. My Finnish grandmother once shook hands with Richard Nixon and she didn’t wash her hand for a whole month. Imagine.

I’m guessing my good old Finnish grandmother thought Nixon’s handshake a harbinger of luck. She’d have been better off hanging a golden horseshoe above her door.

Did you know the Romans used to hang horseshoes above their doors to ward of plague?

**

Americans also like to “knock on wood” and cross their fingers.

My favorite widely believed contemporary superstition is “the itchy palm”:

There are many variations on this superstition. But the idea of having an itchy palm generally refers to someone who is greedy or has an insatiable desire for money.

In Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” Brutus says, “Let me tell you, Cassius, you yourself are much condemned to have an itching palm.”

Some believe that if the right palm itches you will meet someone new, while an itchy left palm means that money is coming.

Others say that an itchy right palm means money coming in and a left-handed itch foretells money going out.

The superstition warns you not to scratch your palm unless you want to counteract the effect. The only way to scratch it without stopping the effect is to use lucky wood or brass.

https://www.everydayhealth.com/healthy-living/10-common-superstitions/

**

The disabled are thought to bring bad luck and if you think I’m joking just look at the ableist narratives going around. Our lives are deemed in many quarters to be sacrificial.