Bocage

I had a wonderful word in mind for my June 6 post: bocage. This year we marked the 70th anniversary of D-Day on that day, when the Allied armies mounted the greatest invasion in our history to take back the European continent from the Nazis.

According to the Wikipedia entry, bocage is a Norman French and English word typically meaning fields broken up by woodland thickets, which act as both windbreak and boundary. In American English, the word bocage came to mean hedgerow. The soldiers who stormed the beaches and pushed into Normandy encountered heavy resistance both from the enemy and from the very dense bocage.

The day I started working on this post was Hallowe'en, a good day to post about words like Samhain, hallow, or soul cake.

But I could not make myself write about a word or phrase with a Hallowe'en theme. If this is what you are looking for, please let me refer you to the Writer's Almanac, by Garrison Keillor, where you will find an appropriate Hallowe'en entry, as well as other interesting notes about the date, October 31.

I do not know if Garrison Keillor is a dreamer or not, although I imagine that as a writer he must have some characteristics of the dreamer. But the man also has a staff to help write seasonally appropriate entries, even out of season. (Note to self: what would it take for me to do this? More than I have, or not?)

Of course, having a staff also makes the possibility for mistakes even greater. In the Hallowe'en post, he (or, as I imagine, one of his staff) says, "Martin Luther was a monk who disagreed with the Catholic Church's practice of selling indulgences, which forgave the punishment for sins." In fact, the indulgence--that is, the payment you had to make for forgiveness--is the punishment, and, in return for the payment, you got forgiveness. So this should read: ". . . selling indulgences, by which you could have your sins forgiven."

Forgetfulness

One factor of aging is that old memories tend to return; hence, as I mentioned in the wicker-cage post, you may be fortunate enough to remember parts of famous passages you once memorized.

Another factor of aging is that some memories tend to slip away, old and new alike, a process aptly described in Billy Collins's "Forgetfulness." The poem first came to my attention on Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac for Tuesday, March 22, 2011, on National Public Radio (http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/?date=2011%2F03%2F22).

Now, Billy Collins was born in 1941, in March, nearly eight months before Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941). So before the United States entered World War II. As his poem suggests, he had to memorize the names of the nine muses in school (or maybe he did not have to, but was a very eager student who took it upon himself to do so).

I was born at the end of World War II, exactly nine months and two weeks after V-J, Victory over Japan, Day (August 15, 1945). And since memorization had become unfashionable in education, a discipline much swayed by fashion, I did not have to memorize the names of the nine muses, although I had to have read their names over at least once and learned where to look them up.

So, I think, as I hear the poem on the radio or read it over for myself, who are they, these nine muses? What are their names and what creative endeavor is each associated with? There is something to be learned here, and, since it's classical, probably something with some interesting follow-ups. Wikipedia to the rescue: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muse!

So we have Calliope (epic poetry), Clio (history), Erato (love poetry), Euterpe (song and elegaic poetry), Melpomene (tragedy), Polyhymnia (hymns), Terpsichore (dance), Thalia (comedy), Urania (astronomy). Soon enough, you will notice that I rarely pass up an opportunity to spoon up (or force feed) the classics.

And what of import did we learn here? Well, sadly, not much. But my faith in the knowledge of the classics remains unswerving, and, the next time I post, I will be sure to call upon my muse, Thalia.