September 27, 2022

Dear Benjamin,

Please consider this immediate continuation of my letter as a neurological plumbing problem: what should one do about a spigot resistant to being turned on, whose rustiness then proves an impediment to its being turned off; at the same time a demonstration of language as an epitomy of neural networks that make the connectivity of neurons dynamically apparent, reminiscent of the surface tension which forces the iridescent drops of the waterfall into laminar flow first in the stream, then in the river on its way to the ocean. 

Sometimes my dreams are acutely and painfully poignant recapitulations of the contests of the day that is fading into the past. Then they may linger for hours or days as embarrassing monuments to issues I was unable to remove or circumvent. My dreams last night were so frivolous that I cannot remember them,much as I would like them preserved for their humor. 

From the window sill immediately behind my head, I retrieve the thick cataract glasses which my father obtained perhaps 57 years ago and push the onto my nose. Now I can see relatively clearly.  As obligato to the quasi desperate urgency and difficulty of getting up and out of bed, I hear an echo of my father's existential declaration: "Jetzt kommt der Moment wo der Frosch ins Wasser springt." [Now comes the moment when the frog hits the water.]

My getting up is choreographed. Supporting myself with both arms, I nudge my semi-immobile legs, one heel at a time, over the edge of the bed. To steady myself, I slip the fingers of my left hand between the mattress and the box spring. With my right hand, I swing the U-shaped frame of the aluminum walker into its most protective position immediately in front of me, I separate my feet as much as I can, and grasp the walker's upper transverse bar. Then stemming and pushing by left fist into the mattress behind me, and with my right hand on the walker pulling myself up, I try to raise myself into another day of vertical existence. As I do so, I cannot avoid tilting the walker backwards. Its wheels in front are lifted off the floor, and there ensues a second of instability when pulling myself up from the mattress I simultaneously tilt the walker backwards, the walker indifferent to turning over, but I tottering at the edge of doom, uncertain whether I will be able to recover stability by leaning forwards and pushing the front legs of the walker onto the floor, or whether both of us, the walker's polished aluminum and my 92 year old frame entangled with arthritis and spinal compression, will slip and slide onto if not into the ground.

Classical mechanics does not, but arguably quantum mechanics may have the answer: Entanglement: support from a distant invisible pediment, so remote that Albert Einstein called it "spooky", but whose reality is vouchsafed to me by music, specifically by BWV 19, with its aria:

Bleibt, ihr Engel, bleibt bei mir!
Führet mich auf beiden Seiten,
Daß mein Fuß nicht möge gleiten!
Aber lehrt mich auch allhier
Euer großes Heilig singen
Und dem Höchsten Dank zu bringen!

English translation:
Bleibt, ihr Engel, bleibt bei mir!
Stay, you angels, stay with me!
Führet mich auf beiden Seiten,
Lead me on both sides,
Daß mein Fuß nicht möge gleiten!
so that my foot might not slip!
Aber lehrt mich auch allhier
But teach me also here 
Euer großes Heilig singen
to sing your great Halleluia
Und dem Höchsten Dank zu bringen!
and to give thanks to the Almighty!

perhaps not the classical angels, of which Rilke reported: "Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich," (Each and every angel is frightening) but I have one or more personal angels of my own, on whom I rely, but whose identity must remain concealed.

Finally, I am standing upright.  My day has begun but I am unable to lift either foot.  I twist and push my walker to the window immediately to the left, and drag my feet and myself behind it.  There at the right hand edge of the sill stands an empty 32 oz. plastic yogurt container of which I take hold with my right hand, while with the left, grasping the walker, I steady myself.  Then I carefully place the container, now partially filled, back in its place on the window sill. Some mornings I feel so relieved that I forget to empty the container, and leave it standing there.  But usually I remember. Holding onto the walker with my left hand, I crank open the casement window to about 45 degrees, then pour the yogurt container's contents into the dry gravel-surfaced moat below, hoping that the miniature waterfall of what I pretend to be "gray water", as the plumbing trade calls it, is not observed by my eminently proper German-American neighbors from Heidelberg just to the north.

The exercise has sufficiently limbered my arthritic joints to enable me to shuffle to my seat at my all-purpose table. I lower myself into one of the sturdy armchairs which I acquired perhaps 55 years ago to furnish my waiting rooms in Cambridge and on Nantucket.

Next I insert my contact lenses using saliva. In the twenty-seven years since I had my first cataract extraction, I have proved that saliva is "safe and effective" and, in fact that the natural mucus is an optimal disinfectant and lubricant for rigid gas permeable contact lenses. This is a circumstance which a society committed to the worship of Adam Smith could never accept, and which I myself, when I practiced ophthalmology, would never have dared to disclose to my patients. 

Once the contact lenses are in place, I turn on the laptop computer in front of me and scan the e-mail which has accumulated during the night, - usually just junk - but much more important, and in fact indispensable to refresh my memory, I read the files of what I had on my mind and wrote down the day before. Which brings me to the real beginning of my letter.

When I wrote to you yesterday, I was reminded of G.B.A., my English A instructor in my first semester at Harvard in 1946.  My initial reaction to this reminiscence was one of mild remorse, that I had never recognized G.B.A. as a reader, perhaps the only one ever, who took my writing seriously, however critical he might have been.  Accordingly, this morning, with my contact lenses finally in place, I directed my computer's browser to my website: http://ernstjmeyer.ddns.net/essays01/essays01_index.html to reread  G.B.A.'s criticism of the essays of my adolescence, and to look as it were into this electronic mirror of the past, to try to understand the person I was 76 years ago.  Then, as I reread G.B.A.'s comments on my writing, I remembered how arbitrary, capricious and destructive they in fact had been, and understood once more why I had chosen to "opt out" of the second semester of G.B.A.'s course which was no longer required of me because of the grades my writing had received in the first semester.

My thinking hovers over Shakespeare's sonnet and its powerful dialectic.  I notice that it purports to celebrate not the marriage of humans of flesh and blood, but the "marriage of true minds".  Obviously there is a difference.  Presumably it is the pitfalls of marriages not "of true minds", which the poet, and presumably in his footsteps the marriage partner "of true mind" are determined to demonstrate.  The sonnet then becomes a dialectical expression of experience, it contrasts the reality of what goes on in daily life, with the reality of mind, as that reality of mind is reflected in language.  For me the dialectic is crucial.  To understand life (and marriage) as tragedy is to understand them as fate, as "Schicksal", as moira ...  and it is then, and perhaps only then, that one can tolerate the vicissitudes of existence and survive.

My love to both of you. Jochen