#greyspring

I had a professor once. Most of us did-- I mean, not all of us, but maybe most of us, some of us at least. Some of us had a professor once. I had a professor once, in Ohio and it was spring. It was cold and rainy, but it was spring because there were daffodils everywhere. Rooting out of the dirt and beaming against the grey. 

A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Yeah, the breeze had a wind chill and the lake was a puddle. The trees, they were trees, that’s accurate enough and the daffodils, they were surely dancing, but the dancing wasn’t idyllic, nor classical. It was more the emulation of a Hari krishna or pop-lock-dropper, more with the March in Ohio version of ‘breeze’. 

I could say that at times, I wandered lonely as a cloud among them, these daffodils. Don’t we all? But anyway, this professor. He was into romantic poetry, you know, the Coleridge, Byron, Wordsworth type? ? ‘Bliss in solitude...vacant, pensive moods’, the opium ridden haven of the mind, that racket? He was pretty into it, nay, very into it, so into it, in fact that he was teaching a class about it, which would have been nerdy as hell but for the fact that my peers and I were taking that class and eating it up. Every single of us airheaded undergrads, drooling and eager.  Every word out of prof’s mouth, we knew was from up high somewhere (if up high somewhere was a ghosty London or lake district in the clouds where all the dead romantics lived). Myself, I was so into it that when I experienced hallucinogenics for the first time later that year, I took on the persona of Blake himself, and when not him, of ‘the tiger tiger burning bright, in the darkness of the night’ (it was definitely day-time, but I was definitely also an idiot, so there).    

Back to it. Prof was teaching of the gods of beauty and as their messenger, he was a demi-god. That’s why, what he has told me about daffodils, I keep.

Don’t pick the daffodils, you stupid freshman. There they are in the damp, so beautiful in the grey, so plentiful in the cold, a common good for us all to wander lonely as we want among. If you pick them, they are beautiful no longer. They are a private possession for you alone, to be shared only with those you deem worthy. Don’t privatize that glory, don’t degrade it to a mason jar, don’t keep it under fluorescence. Leave it in the cold, leave it in the grey, leave it in the sight-line of  humanity, leave it so humanity may be cheered by it. We need all the help we can get. Just don’t pick them.