Dearest Bleaders,
It isn’t Wednesday and now it isn’t Thursday either. Let’s call it Friday. Things got away from me. You think I was on a deadine? I was with the Dolly Llama.
So it’s not even Lincoln’s birthday anymore, but you know, I wanted to say a few words and those words are these. Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address says, “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.” It is my longstanding contention that “We Will Never Forget” means “It is Heartbreaking that We Will So Soon Forget".
Now consider please Shakespeare’s sonnet that begins: “"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? ” (to which happenstancily, we referred last week}. He answers his own question, in paraphrase: You are prettier and calmer and you linger longer than a summer day, also sometimes the sun is too hot in summer and sometimes it is cloudy and cold, and everything beautiful is eventually ruined, whether by accident or just naturally, by the passage of time:
But thy eternal Summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wanderest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
This Sonnet, 18, is the turn in the mood of the sonnets, from friendship with a fair youth (maybe William Herbert 3rd Earl of Pembrook, who was a cutie and looked good in tights), to something a lot hotter. (Everybody swung both ways, that's just the way they made the mental hinges back then.)
So so so so, what do words preserve? And what things preserve words? Will Lincoln turn out to be right? Two hundred years from now the US may be overrun by barbarians so sophisticated that they see our presidents as symbols of a dark age and they Taliban the hell out of Mount Rushmore, in disgust. But say my imaginary future friends save those beautiful battlefields because the deer have made them their home (because there are signs that say "No Shooting On the Battlefield" so when you drive past them at night you see a sea of yellow lights, which are your headlights off a hundred deer eyes) and so never destroy the stone ground testimonies to the scores upon four scores of boys dead and buried in the ground there. I love where Lincoln says, "It is altogether fitting and proper that we do this." about burying them there, where they died. I am only learning how to know what is altogether fitting and proper, ever.
Consider this on a Brooklyn library:
Words! Everything we have is in words! The dead are words, and so perhaps the living. Oh their God, if words ever break we'll loose everything.
But even with the words, what do we properly know of the dead soldiers, shot dead in the mud by other Americans; and what do we know of William Herbert 3rd Earl of Pembrook?
You can't slow it down and you can't stop it, you gotta just let go and let go and let go. What words will let the future know no one knows. What do words and life even have in common? I hang all my hopes on the second L in llama. I'm taking it one letter at a time.
and what is more:
not because my case is exhausted, but because it has said enough, i rest my case.
a big kiss,
Jennifer