🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger for ultimate February; as I wrote yesterday, in “Rabbits massed at the month’s border”
[on 2/28] tigers pounce, to devour the month. And then on Saturday, the hordes of rabbits (bearing leeks and daffodils for St. Dafydd’s Day, purely as ornaments, since both are toxic to rabbits) that have been massing at the month’s borders will stream in and overwhelm us all
So it’s St Dafydd’s Eve, and I hoped to have finished a travesty of Keats’s The Eve of St Agnes (1820) made appropriate to my life (the creatures in the woolly fold will be woolly mammoths) and the date (tomorrow is Rabbit Day, a day for hares, even ones that limp).
Plus some comments on hordes massed at borders: from my childhood, hysterical tales of millions of Communist Chinese soldiers massed at the Mexican border, which managed to combined a Red Scare with two separate threads of xenophobia (no doubt the subconscious source of my image of rabbits massed at the month’s borders); and then from two weeks ago, an America-Firster alarm about, yes, “Chinese foreign nationals infiltrating our southern border”.
And some response to Hana Filip’s on-the-nose comment about yesterday’s posting:
What touched me about this blog post is the oscillation between happiness or satisfaction due to the “haze of domesticity” and deep, fundamental existential angst described in your message to Elizabeth [Daingerfield Zwicky]
With the next chapter in this oscillation, as described in this note to HF:
And again this morning — after a satisfying and restorative sleep I awaken to the cry “Verloren!” — Tamino’s “Zu Hilfe! zu Hilfe! sonst bin ich verloren, / Der listigen Schlange zum Opfer erkoren” that opens Die Zauberflöte — and then have to bring my blood pressure down with mind tricks. Here I am, battling serpents of death with magical music (I am, of course, the peasant Papageno with his magic bells rather than the noble Tamino with his magic flute) — and, yes, I understand that intellectualizing my anxiety is a way of contending with it, bringing it under control.
I intended to stitch all this together into a posting. But the unimaginably outrageous actions of Bluto Thinskin and his sidekick Jed Vacuous have consumed my day. I am undone.
But wait, there’s more. Just now, as I was starting to assemble my feelings of admiration and respect for Volodymyr Zelenskyy, my fears for his personal safety, and my concern for the fate of his country, I recalled a salient piece of personal information about VZ, that his natural presentation of himself is radically egalitarian; he treats everyone he interacts with as his equal, no one his inferior, no one his superior (though he has learned the skills of both military command and diplomacy as required by his roles in Ukraine) — like the Swiss, the Friends / Quakers, and, well, me, as sketched in my 2/19 note “A coat of arms”. Something else to put in that dream posting for 2/28. Or whenever.
