A Panther In The Snow

Rabbit, rabbit! How is it Pesach already? Open the door to the stranger. The most important thing.

Not being a person who celebrates April Fool's, I found it unnecessary to spend more than an hour waiting in the office after my ophthalmologist's appointment in order to discover that the hold-up was my insurance refusing to cover every single relevant ointment in this country to which I am not allergic, but spatch met me afterward with two boxes of matzah and a tiny surprise salt maple chess pie that we have until sunset to disappear and a postcard from regshoe was waiting for me when I got home.

I really feel like last month just broke up in parts around me, or vice versa. Yesterday my afternoon was devoted to MGH. Hestia purred sleekly and a little excitably as therapy.

On the one hand, I have an incipient double ear infection to match my eyes and probable RSV as the cause of it all and in consequence have just slammed a dosage of prednisone intended to open my head like a Saturn V. On the other, partly because I make references of this nature in conversation with doctors and partly because of the tone of voice, apparently, in which I exclaimed during a discussion of the over-prescription of antibiotics, "You're a homeostasis! Don't kick it!" the urgent care doctor who is four chapters into Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary (2021) declared that she is going to hear the rest of the book in my voice, which I am counting as a win.

On top of being flat, I appear to be actually sick with some kind of non-flu, non-COVID crud which makes my entire body feel as though it has a fever and my thermometer disagree with me. I was doing fine with just the two eye infections and the unremitting headache. My major achievement of the day besides feeding the cat and bringing a bag of groceries inside has been reading, most pleasantly Donald Swann's The Space Between the Bars: A Book of Reflections (1968).

As a reading experience, it suggests a journal that got away from its keeper. Despite several autobiographical chapters, it is not a memoir; it interrupts itself to redirect the disappointed reader toward the available oral histories of Flanders and Swann and it ends with the author in a devil's advocate argument with himself about the entire project. "Green baize flags! Good idea." The style throughout is conversational and the structure consciously disorganized on the principle that some of the most insightful traffic of ideas occurs at odd hours by chance, like the radio conversation in Chicago in 1961 which he assumed would be a ten-minute promotional spot when he agreed to it and which ran instead from eleven-thirty at night until two in the morning when the station turned out the lights. After the fashion of letters, or a column, or a blog, he will mention periodically that he is writing from a coffee shop in New York where the Muzak annoys him or that he has just taken a break from his chapter about Christmas Eve to see Mai Zetterling's Night Games (1966). I had no idea he had attended the Easter 1967 Central Park be-in, where he looked like a total square and had a wonderful time: he found the hippie ethos congenial and if he wasn't personally into the psychedelic scene, he respected its mystical side. "To the English eye, there was a resemblance to a good humoured Bank Holiday crowd, only the clothes were weirder." It would have been near the end of the tour of At the Drop of Another Hat. I had known about his Anglo-Russian, half-Muslim parentage which accounted for the Ibrahim in the middle of his otherwise amiably English-sounding name, but it was never clear to me how far he thought of himself as a mixed person and the answer seems to have been thoroughly. He is amazingly anti-nationalist, in a way that differentiates itself carefully from the love of people and places which he falls into on a regular basis, sometimes naively, always sincerely, sometimes without any roses in his glasses at all. Greece knocked him sideways during his time with the Friends' Ambulance Unit, but territorially, specifically, Epirus, Thesprotia, Igoumenitsa. A week in Tonga and he is already recording some of his favorite vocabulary and the musical notation. "If you were to draw me out on aspects of Britain that I admire I could run on for ages, from underground trains, an impartial judiciary and kippers, to its new fashion flair and its sudden ability to make coffee." His Christianity is a constant lens and it is similarly anarchic. He likes ritual, not organization. Syncretism thrills him as much as sectarianism gets him down. He has a perfectly lucid analysis of his experience of revelation climbing down the Mount of Olives at the age of twenty-one, having been relegated by dysentery from his work in a refugee camp in—call the projectionist, the millennium's stuck again—Gaza. "We are all minus each other, there is no one who cannot be my saviour." I can't tell if he knows that at one point he is quoting Hillel, but I have to hope from his paean to the cracks in things that before the end of his life he managed to discover Leonard Cohen. For that matter, I hope he remained a socialist. He was not unaware that his optimism was working uphill: "I assure you that after World War Two people talked the way I am doing now; they really thought there would be human rights, and had meetings about them . . . I am trying to reset the stage for a one world consciousness, and every morning newspaper is stopping me." I respect his intention not to have written a funny book, but Michael Flanders was not the only chronically clever case in that partnership. Also it is very difficult to tell people with a straight face that you almost fell off the Great Pyramid of Giza. Anyway, aside from making me feel justified in my longstanding affection for Swann based on little more originally than his tongue-twister modern Greek and his chaotic laugh, this unwieldily absorbing set of meditations provided a piece of invaluable intelligence:

"They are all pacifists there," said a man at a party in Boston to me. He had just been on a businessman's trip to GHQ Omaha, where they push the button that sets off the H bombs. Fortunately Tom Lehrer was also listening and he said: "Why don't they invite some Chinese and Russian generals instead of businessmen?" That stopped that.

I had never been sure if they knew one another socially outside of the shelves of record collections. Now I know. I have so many questions. Look at what can happen when you realize you have spent an entire month singing "20 Tons of TNT."