Zeitgeist
  
  
      And we are here, as on a darkling plain
      Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
      While ignorant armies clash by night.
  
                         Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”
  
  
 Each day, we find new roads closed. 
 Evenings now, after jack hammers still, street barricades
 are stacked haphazardly, a little jauntily. When the sun
 slips away, their orange lollipop lights begin to blink,
 not at all in sync, shooting confused instructions
 for caution into all the houses on our street.
  
 Days contract for the duration of this disruption. 
 What age are we in? Gold? Silver? Bronze? No—
 Silicon or Microbe. Of social media
 and social distance. Of masks and doubled-locked
 doors, small panics, and tidier drawers. 
   
 Not an age of Oak or Ash. No way is pure
 or clear. A kind of Plywood Age, strong
 in its way, and useful if—viewed edgewise—
 unbeautiful. Insights and erosions laid
 in layers like phyllo or millefiori, then folded
  
 into new shape, new tesseractive points
 of view. Innocence and Anxiety are commingling.
 Something else is coming, cloudy and stormy
 as the birth of a star. Perhaps a coalescing,
 expanded sense of who we are.
  
  
 Leslie Schultz 

I was reminded this morning that it was the British Victorian poet Matthew Arnold who coined from German the English word “Zeitgeist” or “Spirit of the Age” in order to describe the social unrest of the Industrial Age, the widespread disruptions and erosions caused by a move away from hand tools toward machines, away from pastures and fields into cities. We still have ignorance clashing with insight, of course, because we are humans, but I am grateful to be standing on my particular corner of this darkling plain. I find I am quite interested to find out what will happen next.

We have come to the end of the alphabet sequence but not to the end of the month. Who know what tomorrow will inspire?

LESLIE