Nothing To See Here
"The saddest noise/the sweetest noise"
I charge my phone in the bedroom, but I have good “sleep hygiene,” so I silence it and do not look at its screen, even if I have insomnia. If I have trouble sleeping, I put a super-talky show or an audiobook on my tablet, turn my back to its screen and just let the words wash over me. OK, so maybe I don’t have good sleep hygiene.
When I awaken, usually without the benefit of an alarm, I reach for my phone, check my two WhatsApp groups, then pull up Google News, which currently believes that I care about vintage clothes, travel, retirement, New Orleans, real housewives, Baltimore, and poetry. Google News is not wrong. On the morning of March 26, I first read an Emily Dickinson poem that was new to me, part of The Guardian’s poem of the week series. Here it is, in full.
The saddest noise, the sweetest noise (No 1789)
The saddest noise, the sweetest noise,
The maddest noise that grows, —
The birds, they make it in the spring,
At night’s delicious close,
Between the March and April line —
That magical frontier
Beyond which summer hesitates,
Almost too heavenly near.
It makes us think of all the dead
That sauntered with us here,
By separation’s sorcery
Made cruelly more dear.
It makes us think of what we had,
And what we now deplore.
We almost wish those siren throats
Would go and sing no more.
An ear can break a human heart
As quickly as a spear.
We wish the ear had not a heart
So dangerously near.
Semi-trained in the practice of close reading, I lingered over those last four lines. What is the “heart” so dangerously close to the ear? It can’t be an actual heart, which is a comfortable distance from the ear, or so it seems to me. Is it the brain, where memories live and are easily triggered by familiar tunes? Is Dickinson reminding us that the organ that really runs the show is in our heads? I could go on all day. (No, really, all day. You should see my posts about tracks/splinters in Dickinson #566 in the ModPo forums last fall.) (You shouldn’t.)
Anyway, I closed that link and continued to scroll and the next thing I saw was the news of the bridge collapse.
My first reaction to cataclysm is to scale it down, deny it. On Sept. 11, 2001, I turned on my TV and saw the first tower collapse and thought, “Was there a planned demolition of the World Trade Towers that I didn’t know about?” When I saw the words “Francis Scott Key Bridge collapses” on March 26, I thought it couldn’t be a real collapse, or maybe there was another FSK bridge. Later, one of the (many, many) (lovely) people who reached out told me they thought it was an AI creation. That made sense, too.
The sunrise photos I publish on Twitter — yep, still calling it that— are scenes from a working harbor. Domino Sugar is a real place that employs more than 500 people and expanded its storage capacity within the last two years. I usually choose to edit out the parts that remind people I’m walking through a pretty expensive swath of real estate, at least by Baltimore standards: the Ritz-Carlton residences, the pleasure crafts docked in various marinas, Kevin Spacey’s perhaps now former home. But I know the dangers of romanticizing Baltimore’s past and try to avoid it. It’s been a long time since Baltimore was a blue-collar town and Baltimore nostalgia can be disturbingly white/Euro-centric.
Plenty of people have already pointed out that the men who lost their lives on the bridge were immigrants; I’d like to emphasize how many people were working, or going to work, at 1:30 a.m. on a Tuesday — the construction workers filling potholes, the police who managed to close the bridge to traffic, the crew on the Dali, the tug boat operators that responded to the mayday, a man en route to his bakery job, one of the last people to cross the bridge. If you’ve never worked a lobster shift, as my newspaper union called it, well, I’m happy for you; I did it for exactly one week during my Evening Sun days and loathed every minute. But I also had a roommate and a husband who worked overnight shifts regularly for long stretches and it was my observation that humans never really adjust to that schedule. Except, perhaps, the late and glorious Dick Irwin, who seemed to prefer the overnight shift at the Evening Sun.
I think one of the big problems facing our country right now is that a lot of people think they’re the only ones working hard,. Everyone else is freeloading, taking shortcuts, just a world full of grasshoppers with a few solitary ants. What if we begin with the assumption that most people work hard? What would happen if we could park our resentments and grudges and just acknowledge that life is fucking hard for pretty much everyone right now? It’s not a contest. We really are all in this together. I could quote W.H. Auden here, but for once I’ll show some restraint.
The view from the seawall at Fort McHenry on March 31. Cue “Big Yellow Taxi.”
Read/reading: Leaving, Roxana Robinson; Help Wanted, Adelle Waldman; Day (audio), Michael Cunningham; Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changes Movies Forever (audio), Matt Singer.
Rereading: Kitchen Yarns, Ann Hood; Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan; Money, A Memoir, Liz Perle.
Me, Me, Me: Lady in the Lake was one of 24 books recommended in a reading list for Women's History Month, but as the headline notes, you can read it whenever you want.
Links: I know, everyone does links, so I’m going to do only those that I think you won’t find anywhere else. Poetry scholar Marjorie Perloff died last month. This podcast is a glorious introduction to her. It was, in fact, my introduction to her, just a few months ago. I love the lively discussion of what is dirty in Frank O’Hara’s “Song (Is it dirty).” Look, I’m not proud that I’m learning very basic poetry stuff so late in life, but if you’re going to be ashamed of starting things late in life, you’ll end up never doing anything new at all.
Finally: Baseball is back! Here are some of my sartorial salutes to Birdland.
"What if we begin with the assumption that most people work hard?" I am so glad you wrote this. One of my grandsons (11 y.o.) is giving his teachers grief. He thinks it's cool and he thinks his teachers are just there to spoil his fun. This is my argument to him - that it's okay to not like your teachers, but remember that they are there trying to make a living, and they have 20-30 kids like him. I try to keep this in mind when I'm frustrated.
I live for the Guardian's Poem of the Week. And that Emily Dickinson selection is a heartbreaker. (Though frankly, I think her poems would never be published if she were alive today. They would be considered too old-fashioned -- rhyme and meter?! -- oh, the horror! -- which in itself is heartbreaking. But then I think so much contemporary poetry is banal: diary entries with line breaks.)
I confess I'd only ever crossed the Key Bridge twice in my life, both times accidentally. But I loved seeing its graceful arc across the water -- so elegant, so delicate. A beautiful design.
Re the Orioles-inspired outfits, love the gingham check and those fab orange sunglasses the best!