Baby It's Cold Outside

Per me si va ne la città dolente,
per me si va ne l'etterno dolore,
per me si va tra la perduta gente.

Through me the way into the suffering city,
Through me the way to the eternal pain,
Throuigh me the way that runs among the lost.

Dante, INFERNO CANTO 03 Mandelbaum Tr.

The poor east coast! Sorry about the snow. Brought back delightful memories of my childhood in Suburban Washington DC. Shared memories with grown and dispersed siblings. I’ve been in So. Cal too long. I’d love to be there now. Snowed in and walking down the middle of the divided highway to the neighborhood grocery store to buy canned food and stale bread.

I have to confess I’m feeling no pain here: sunny and in the mid seventies F. Afternoon breeze near the coast taking on the faint fog of a chilly night as the wet wind blows inland from the Pacific ocean.

Went out with J to get our faces threaded. We go to these Indian ladies in a half empty shopping mall, doing henna tattoos and using sewing thread to twist it around their fingers and snip off my ‘stache and shape my eyebrows. I paid $35 to get my whole face threaded. Along my hairline, I now have a tidy line of demarcation. The benefit is that a lot of what went was gray hair. I felt some especially long wild hairs yanked out of my chin. Gross.

The lady who did me, Saba, was extra patient because I couldn’t hear half of her instructions to me about where to pull my lips tight, my hairline straight etc. Not to worry, I’m an old white lady: I tip good. She did mention that I should consider coming more frequently…

While waiting for J to finish, we observed two independent groups of local high school girls – one set waiting to start, the other waiting for their friend to finish. As they sat in the waiting area, texting to friends naturally, they realized they have friends in common and knew who each other was. An interesting example of how the Internetz is keeping them all hooked up. Also an interesting example of the kind of small town community I grew up in but now exists mostly in first-generation immigrant communities. In this case, girls of obvious Mexican descent, speaking accent-less English. You wouldn’t find that in the days spas I’m more likely to frequent, baby.

Now, this wasn’t exactly Dante’s Inferno-painful. But the cocktail at BJ’s after went down particularly well: Jack Daniel’s and butterscotch liquor with smooshed sugar on the rocks. Think I’ll have another and toast family and friends suffering the eternal pain trapped in suffering snow-bound cities, without electricity. Thank goodness for iPhones.

Drawing in My Feet

"Faced with that truth which seems a lie, a man
should always close his lips as long as he can –
to tell it shames him, even though he’s blameless;
But here I can’t be still; and by the lines
of this my Comedy, reader, I swear –
and may my verse find favor for long years –
that through the dense and darkened air I saw
a figure swimming, rising up, enough
to bring amazement to the firmest heart,
like one returning from the waves where he
went down to loose an anchor snagged upon
a reef or something else hid in the sea,
who stretches upward and draws in his feet."
Dante, The Divine Comedy (Inf. XVI, 124-136)

I’m intrigued by “a truth which seems a lie”. It’s true that Spring is here, but it feels outside my door like late summer - when the moisture is so wrung out of the air that you get thirsty just smelling flowers. But I think Dante had something more mundane in mind. He was talking about deceitful people, con artists, defrauders, liars.

Having avoiding looking at the balance in my tax-sheltered annuities these past few months, I have no idea what the greed of others has cost me in terms of money. I’m pretty comfortable with my material goods inventory, so I don’t worry about losing my home, my health, or my life’s work. But others do, and that sucks.

Dante says he can’t be silent in the face of such lies. He then promptly swears on the very poem we’re reading that he saw what he saw. Sounds a bit like my financial adviser telling me late last autumn to look at the market as a long term investment, and not worry about short-term losses and gains. I’m now feeling like I’m stuck on a reef in a stormy sea, stretching up and drawing in my feet to avoid being lost in the deluge. Greedy sons of bitches, those financial people. And like Dante, it shames me that I believed them. Not only was I naive, I was greedy in wanting something for nothing.

Habeas Pocus

'Twas he had summon'd to her silent Bed
The Morning Dream that hover'd o'er her Head.
Dante, Paridiso, Canto 1

I saw Habeas Pocus as a headline on Countdown the other night. It got me thinking, and here’s what I dreamed I read in the year 2020. (Disclaimer: this post is not about my garden.)

Habeas Pocus is the legal principal whereby smoke is produced in lieu of direct proof of a defendant’s case. This legal theory was established by the U. S. Supreme Court in People v Mukasey, 2009. At issue in the case was whether blatant high crimes and treason by members of the Executive Branch would be pursued by the Attorney General (Hint: the AG is also a member of the EB). Asserting the Government’s right to protection against self-incrimination, then-Attorney General Mukasey refused to prosecute criminal action by the White House – from the President down to the guy with the floor buffer in the Oval Office when the call came at 3:00 AM. The People, in an unusual class action, sued him. The Supreme Court decided the case in 2009.

Pursuant to People v Mukasey, Habeas Pocus is the right to conclusively prove innocence by submitting spurious lies and smoke. The majority opinion, by Justice Roberts, also denied opposing council the right to submit known and objectively-verifiable evidence as proof of guilt. The majority opinion ended with the now-infamous: “Problem solved!” The equally famous dissent, by Justice Ginsburg consisted of a single acronym: “WTF?”

It remains to be seen how this legal theory will stand the test of time, although certain legal experts think it won’t. American voters, after forgiving the Supremes for electing the Criminal in Chief in the first place, were not so much consternated after hearing the verdict, as they were seriously pissed. History will remember this moment with garden blogger Weeping Sore’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning photo of the President, Vice President, and Chief Justice, hanging upside down in the foreground, with the Supreme Court in the background.

The picture also includes the spontaneous pyre beneath them. Instead of creating a shrine of plush toys and wilting flowers, melting in candle wax at the site of the Upside-down Trio, Americans created a bonfire of SUVs and burned the logos of Big Oil, Big Pharma and other assorted war criminals. The fire charred the torn robes of the hanging bodies, making the picture look almost black and white, reminiscent of Mussolini hanging out with his gal back in the bad old days.

While times were uncertain for a while after this decision, it turns out most people were better off with this precedent in the long run. The legal theory of Habeas Pocus was seen by many pundits afterwords, as the last straw that broke the back of the capitalist pigs. While initially permitting war criminals to go unpunished by the justice system, this decision was later seen as the first step in making the world safe from corporate greed, self-interest and corrupt politicians.

In my dream, I read this in Wikipedia, so I’m not sure how accurate it will be.

Reap What You Sow

"O how abundant is the harvest heaped
In those rich storage-bins of souls who were,
While down on earth, the sowers of good seed!"
- Dante, Paradiso, Canto XXIII, Verse 130

This is the season of the vivid, the lurid, the clashes between colors, and I don’t just mean the seemingly endless presidential campaign as covered by American media.

I mean in my garden, where things are out of control. Clashing colors careen madly together, plants have outgrown their pots and become promiscuously entwined with each other, and planting beds are overrun armies of volunteers. The garden exceeds the gardener’s most inspired visions this month. The garden has taken upon the autonomous power to redesign and propagate itself.

Prosaic gardens may be pretty. My garden is not your uninspired cottage garden, dainty in it’s gently nodding cheerleader pastels. My garden is neither prosaic nor pretty. My garden a dirty girl, grown plump and looking older than her years in the glare of the harsh summer sun. The plants have outgrown their beds, in places looking like a fat girl in a prom dress two sizes too small – sweaty folds of skin spilling voluptuously out of desperately stretched fabric.

Despite being slightly slutty, my garden is sublime in it’s profligate boisterous life, enchanting in it’s effect. The sunflowers are few but noisy. The lab-lab (purple hyacinth bean) clashing next to the garish orange and brown wildflowers (who knows their name, they’ve returned in different places in the yard for years).

My pending harvest will be small – tomatoes are shriveling in the dry heat and eggplants never even bothered to hold onto their flowers, let alone fruit. But so, what if I won’t reap an abundant harvest to fill rich storage bins? The best part about being a gardener in this season (before the heat parks just outside the window and stares me down inside) is having no regrets. Whatever didn’t grow, despite desperate coaxing or profane cursing is barely missed. What is growing is no longer my problem. I’m just sitting back, enjoying it all more than ever this year.

My garden of delights proves there are other, more hopeful, meanings to the caution that we reap what we sow.