The Bee Dance: A Virtual Commonplace Book

Little Packages

2012-01-07T14:35:00.000-06:00

Women think in little packages. I understand nothing in the way their minds work. They make an envelope for each subject, attach a label to it, and that's the end of the matter. Little packages. Little packages.

---Edgar Degas, in conversation, Oct 1891 [included in the Degas exhibit at the Naples Museum of Art]

Hmmmm....Well, I've always heard that women were not terribly good at compartmentalizing. According to Degas, that's a falsehood.

Forty-five

2011-05-25T22:14:00.000-05:00

A month after turning forty-five, every last egg in her body is a Rockette doing the can-can. Use me use me use me, they cry, I’ll be the easy child, the I-won’t-wake-you-up-in-the-night child. Wasn’t she through with all that – after years, on streets, in restaurants when all she saw were schlepping, wrung out, haphazard, misbuttoned mothers pushing strollers loaded with groceries, a dreadful toddler riding shotgun?

Now every city block boasts the popular miracle of children’s faces. Keep away, she says to civilized men who stop at crosswalks, Do you see this glittered fertility, this fishnet stocking hunger?

The possible calls and the body lunges – rapacious – for what? – every last urgency to be the body?

--Victoria Redel, "Suddenly" just published in Granta (2010) [Follow link].

A very interesting vignette that explores the physical origins of what we might suppose are merely psychological urgings. Redel's piece does not offer the sentimental rendering of last chances that we might expect, but instead, leaves us to contemplate what one becomes when one is no longer a "productive" body. Can one pass this threshold without a "lunge" ---smoothly, gently, oblivous?

Like the Knife of the Carver

2011-05-25T19:16:00.000-05:00

Language is the principal tool with which the Eskimo make the natural world a human world. They use many words for snow, which permits fine distinctions, not simply because they are much concerned with snow, but because snow takes its form from the actions in which it participates: sledding, falling, igloo-building. Different kinds of snow are brought into existence by the Eskimo as they experience their environment and speak; words do not label things already there. Words are like the knife of the carver: they free the idea, the thing, from the general formlessness of the outside. As a man speaks, not only is his language in a state of birth but also is the very thing about which he is talking.

---Edmund Carpenter, "Arctic Realities." Taken from the exhibition pamphlet for "Upside Down: Arctic Realities" on display at the Menil Collection, April 15-July 17, 2011.

Modern

2011-04-28T09:45:00.000-05:00

"Anna is 'modern'---I believe that's what it's called when you read unsettling books and admire hideous pictures."

---Edith Wharton, The Reef (1912)

A Bee in a Pot of Honey

2011-04-27T17:36:00.000-05:00

"....I want to make beauty, not be drowned in the ready-made, like a bee in a pot of honey."

---Edith Wharton, The Reef (1912)

The next few entries will feature Edith Wharton's The Reef.

A Flood of Lava

2011-04-02T14:09:00.000-05:00

The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted this submergence as philosophically as all her other trails, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the centre of which the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation. A flight of smooth double chins led down to the dizzy depths of a still-snowy bosom veiled in snowy muslins that were held in place by a miniature portrait of the late Mr. Mingott and around and below , wave after wave of black silk surged away over the edges of a capacious armchair, with two tiny white hands poised like gulls on the surface of the billows .

---Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (1920)

So Awfully Happy

2011-03-14T21:29:00.000-05:00

"Did you have to give up all your jewels when you were divorced?"

"Divorced---?" Susy threw her head back against the pillows and laughed. "Why, what are you thinking of? Don't you remember that I wasn't even married the last time you saw me?"

"Yes; I do. But that was two years ago." The little girl wound her arms about Susy's neck and leaned against her caressingly. "Are you going to be soon, then? I'll promise not to tell if you don't want me to."

"Going to be divorced? Of course not! What in the world made you think so?"

"Because you look so awfully happy," said Clarissa Vanderlyn simply.

---Edith Wharton, The Glimpses of the Moon (1922)

Wharton's novel about the possibility of love in a culture of divorce. Here, a child who has been abandoned (for all practical purposes) by her mother, mistakes newlywed bliss for the exuberant freedom of the soon-to-be divorcee.

Souvenir Spoons

2011-03-07T15:58:00.000-06:00

The very word, "spoon" conjures up visions of pleasure. Its very presence sets the salivary glands in action. The gluttonous nature innate in all is aroused at its picture, and juicy ragouts, steaming soups and fricassees, stews and bouillabaisses pass before the vision. All love the spoon, the emblem of plenty, of fulness and content...The glass, the tankard, the loving cup, bring as much sorrow as pleasure into the world; the spoon all pleasure. The loving ladle enters into broils, the spoon does not. The statement may partake of jocularity, but it is truth.

---Anton Hardt, Souvenir Spoons of the 90's As Pictured and Described in 'The Jewelers' Circular' & The James Catalogue in 1891 (1962)

Privileged Paths of Access

2011-01-21T18:53:00.000-06:00

All humans undergo a passage from birth, through nurturing and aging, to death. En route they experience the realities of the physical world: gravity, a sense of up and down, awareness of night and day, of straight, curved and crooked, of enclosure and exclusion. Through the channels of the senses they taste sweet, sour and bitter, smell the acrid and the fragrant, hear sounds loud and quiet, perceive through touch the difference between rough and smooth, hot and cold, wet and dry; and see colors and shapes. They know hunger and thirst, illness and health, pain, sexual passion, bodily functions, loss and discovery, laughter and real tears. The human body constantly provides a sense of scale. It all adds up to a tremendous body of experience that is common and transcultural. That experience is transformed into belief that finds material expression in artifacts, the analysis of which---material culture--provides privileged paths of access for us to an understanding of other peoples and other cultures, of other times and other places.

----Jules David Prown, "The Truth of Material Culture: History or Fiction?" In American Artifacts: Essays in Material Culture (2000)

When the Wind and Sea Dream...

2011-01-10T17:31:00.000-06:00

"When the wind and sea dream the storms stop."

Magnetic poetry found at the Snow City Cafe in Anchorage, Alaska. August 2010.

To Do List

2010-11-05T18:09:00.002-05:00

"She wants to, you know, dear--your mother always wants to see you, [...] But look at her list---just for this morning!" the secretary continued, handing over a tall morocco-framed tablet, on which was inscribed, in the colourless secretarial hand:

"7.30 Mental uplift. 7.45 Breakfast. 8. Psycho-analysis. 8.15 See cook. 8.30 Silent Meditation. 8.45 Facial Massage. 9. Man with Persian Miniatures. 9.15 Correspondence. 9.30 Manicure. 9.45 Eurythmic exercises. 10. Hair waved. 10.15 Sit for bus. 10.30 Receive Mothers' Day deputation. 11. Dancing lesson. 11.30 Birth Control committee at Mrs. --------"

----Edith Wharton, Twilight Sleep (1927)

Taken from the very first page of Wharton's novel, Mrs. Manford's busy day typifies modernity. The "birth control committee"meeting sounds especially fun, which is why I have created an entirely new category here on The Bee Dance just for this one element of this fictional to-do list. For other interesting to-do lists, see the To Do List blog, which "celebrates the world of the overlooked and the mundane."

The Little Burst

2010-11-03T20:50:00.004-05:00

Today's lengthy selections are devoted to a scene taken from the short story, "A Little Burst," included in Elizabeth Strout's Pulitzer Prize winning collection of stories, Olive Kitteridge.   The stories focus on the life of a retired schoolteacher in coastal Maine. A 21st century counterpart to Sarah Orne Jewett's late nineteenth century stories about the changes of the once familiar coastal communities of Maine in the aftermath of the Civil War, Strout's collection documents change, loss, and disappointment as well as life's unexpected tendernesses. Much like Jewett's unconventional heroine from The Country of the Pointed Firs, Mrs. Todd, Strout's own heroine looms large, literally and physically. She is a formidable and yet comforting presence in the collection, which is told not only from her perspective, but from those whose lives are entwined with hers.   In the best of the regionalist tradition, we grasp the importance of perspective from the collection's own shifting viewpoints, which position Olive at center-stage as well as on the periphery. (This aspect of the collection reminds me a bit of Jewett's Strangers and Wayfarers).  In this story, Olive introduces a theory about life that she describes as "big bursts" and "little bursts":

Big bursts are things like marriage or children, intimacies that keep you afloat, but these big bursts hold dangerous, unseen currents.   Which is why you need the little bursts as well: a friendly clerk at Bradlee's, let's say, or the waitress at Dunkin' Donuts who knows how you like your coffee. Tricky business, really.

Yet this wholesome definition of the "little burst" is soon revised when Olive is at her son's wedding and she overhears her new daughter-in-law (the perfectionist therapist, "Dr. Suzanne Bernstein, MD PhD")  making fun of her flowered dress and critiquing her parenting of Christopher.   Crushed, she retreats to the couple's bedroom. Snooping in the closet and drawers, she is further humiliated by Sue's petite clothing, which only reminds her of her own large physique. Soon, however, she discovers a way of diminishing Dr. Sue:

Olive slides open the top drawer of the bureau. Once a place for a boy's sock and T-shirts, the drawer is now filled with her daughter-in-law's underwear---tumbled together, slippery, lacy, colorful things. Olive tugs on a strap and out comes a shiny pale blue bra, small-cupped and delicate. She turns it slowly in her thick hand, then balls it up and pokes it down into her roomy handbag.

Then, she marks a sweater:

The beige sweater is thick, and this is good, because it means the girl won't wear it until fall. Olive unfolds it quickly and smears a black line of Magic Marker down one arm. Then she holds the marker in her mouth and refolds the sweater hurriedly, folding it again, and even again, to get it as neat as it was at first.

And finally she steals just one shoe, satisfied that in introducing chaos into her daughter-in-law's life, that she will subject her to the common denominator of self-doubt:

It does not help much, but it does help some, to know that at least there will be moments now when Suzanne will doubt herself. Calling out, "Christopher, are you sure you haven't seen my shoe? Looking through the laundry, her underwear drawer, some anxiety will flutter through her. "I must be losing my mind, I can't keep track of anything....And my God, what happened to my sweater?"   And she would never know, would she? Because who would mark a sweater, steal a bra, take one shoe?

The story ends with a sharp revision of the earlier notion of a "little burst." As it turns out, life's little lifts are not simply a matter of human kindness, but are equally produced by our less magnaminous acts--our attempts to correct and compensate, even devilishly, for life's injustices:

As a matter of fact, there is no reason, if Dr. Sue is going to live near Olive, that Olive can't occasionally take a little of this, a little of that---just to keep the self-doubt alive. Give herself a little burst. Because Christopher doesn't need to be living with a woman who thinks she knows everything. Nobody knows everything--they shouldn't think they do."

---Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge (2008)

Damn straight.

Every Party Has a Pooper

2010-11-02T19:48:00.000-05:00

"But my dear sir," cried Mr. Weston, "if Emma comes away early, it will be breaking up the party."

"And no great harm if it does," said Mr. Woodhouse, "The sooner every party breaks up, the better."

----Jane Austen, Emma (1815)

It's hard to argue with this.

Hooray for You

2010-10-22T12:59:00.002-05:00

"You don't have to bend the whole world.   I think it's better to just enjoy it. Pay your dues. And enjoy it. If you shoot an arrow and it goes real high....hooray for you."

          ---Dorian Corey, in Paris is Burning (1991) directed by Jennie Livingston

Today's quote is taken from Jennie Livingston's controversial, award-winning documentary Paris is Burning.  This film documents the black and Latino tranvestite subculture of New York City and their performances at balls. Livingston introduces her audience to some of the key terms of the ball culture, such as "voguing," "shading," ""mopping," "legendary," and most importantly "realness."   Ball participants perform in a wide range of categories in which the goal is to look and act as much like one's white, straight (and most often upper-class) counterpart as possible.

Livingston's work has been praised for the way that it exposes identity as largely performative. Yet her film also underscores the impenetrability of racial, sexual, and class-based boundaries in defiance of the American myth of the self-made individual.

Dorian Corey is one of the older drag queens and his sage reflections provide a unifying narrative thread to the film. His musings point to the possibilities and the ironies of life, not only within the drag community, but for the white, straight audience that Livingston seems to anticipate may be viewing her film. This quote--the final line before the credits---is not uttered with resignation as much as amusement and the knowledge that comes from years of successes as well as disappointments.  Corey's wry humor in addressing people we might well refer to as life's "archers" keeps his commentary from succumbing to the mere cliche.

Twilight Love

2010-10-16T15:36:00.001-05:00

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon these boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self that seals up all in rest
In me thou seest the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the deathbed where on it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by
This thou perceivst, which makes thy love more strong
To love that well, which thou must leave ere long

--Shakespeare, Sonnet 73

Shakespeare on love and impending loss. The best of his sonnets, in my opinion.

Memory is the Lining of Forgetting

2010-10-15T10:14:00.000-05:00

"I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember, we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten."

---Chris Marker, Sans Soleil (1982)

In his documentary film Sans Soleil, Chris Marker casts memory as a creative act as opposed to a retrieval act.

Be Well

2010-10-08T09:38:00.001-05:00

Today's entry is taken directly from the Dictionary.Com Word of the Day. This is a wonderful and absolutely free service---a little bit of knowledge dispensed daily to your e-mail inbox.

Wassail is both a hearty beverage and a best wish for the recipient---Waes haeil! Be Well.

Word of the Day for Friday, October 8, 2010

wassail \WAH-sul; wah-SAYL\, noun:

1. An expression of good wishes on a festive occasion, especially in drinking to someone.

2. An occasion on which such good wishes are expressed in drinking; a drinking bout; a carouse.

3. The liquor used for a wassail; especially, a beverage formerly much used in England at Christmas and other festivals, made of ale (or wine) flavored with spices, sugar, toast, roasted apples, etc.

adjective:

1. Of or pertaining to wassail, or to a wassail; convivial; as, a wassail bowl.

transitive verb:

1. To drink to the health of; a toast.
Intransitive verb:

1. To drink a wassail.

Christmas often means plum pudding, fruitcake, roast goose and wassail.

-- Florence Fabricant, "Recipes to Summon the Holiday Spirit", New York Times, December 21, 1988

But have you ever tried to spear a buffalo after a hard night at theold wassail bowl?

-- Gore Vidal, The Smithsonian Institution

Wassail is from the Middle English expression of festive benevolence, wæs hæil!, be well!, from Old Norse ves heill, be (ves) well (heill).

Hands and Feet

2010-08-25T08:30:00.001-05:00

   "Mentally, it is tough cutting into the foot because I know how sensitive my own feet are. Cutting into any part of my body could hurt, but there is something about the feet (as there was about the hands) that makes me squirm at every poke."

---Marcus

   "Today we did the hand. Now I am on the crosstown bus back to the West Side, and I can't stop looking at people's hands. I feel like tapping someone on the shoulder and saying, 'I know what it looks like inside there---it's beautiful!'
     What incredible organization: it's simple and complex at the same time.   I strum the back of my seat with my fingers and try to visualize all that is going on inside, like which muscle groups are involved, which nerves, and the order of their electrical commands. I think of my son and how small his hands are and how everything is there functioning, but in miniature. It's miraculous. And then I remember backing into our cadaver's rigid left hand, splayed open, palm-side up at the end of his outstretched yellow arm."

---Michael

Journal entries from first year medical students in Gross Anatomy class. Excerpted from
Anatomy of Anatomy: in images and words (2000)  by Meryl Levin

Memento Mori

2010-06-25T11:12:00.002-05:00

"He drew open the two bottom drawers and found little of immediate interest. There were boxes of writing-paper and envelopes, notepads, a wooden box containing a collection of ballpoint pens and, in the bottom drawer, two folded hand towels and a toilet bag containing soap, a toothbrush and toothpaste. A smaller zipped bag held Venetia Aldridge's make-up, a small bottle of moisturizer, a compact of pressed powder, a single lipstick.

Kate said: 'Expensive but minimal.'

Dalgliesh heard in her voice what he himself had so often felt. It was the small chosen artefacts of daily life which produced the most poignant memento mori. "

--P.D. James, A Certain Justice (1997)

Is it true that the most quotidian material objects most aptly characterize and memorialize a person? Or is it the keepsakes and treasured objects? Or is it those meant for public exhibition and display--the furnishings, paintings, hard-covered books? While all such objects say something about a person, I suspect that murder mystery writer P.D. James correctly discerns that everyday material culture--particularly items such as toiletries which are most intimately in contact with a body--are the most revelatory.

James also interestingly adapts the meaning of memento mori in this passage. Typically, such "reminders of death" are meant to underscore life's brevity and to remind the living that they too are soon to die. Memento mori as such perform a kind of leveling fuction as opposed to making one person distinct. However, the half-used cosmetic or sundry item is one of the most powerful conveyors of absence, loss, and indeed, the brevity of life.

They

2010-06-23T08:43:00.000-05:00

"Who's 'they'? Why don't you all get together and be 'they' yourselves?"

---Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (1920)

Indeed.

Empty as Lettuce

2010-06-22T20:02:00.006-05:00

"Over the weekend, while the Baby sleeps, the Mother and Husband sit together in the Tiny Tim Lounge. The Husband is restless and makes cafeteria and sundry runs, running errands for everyone. In his absence, the other parents regale her further with their sagas. Pediatric cancer and chemo stories: the children's amputations, blood poisoning, teeth flaking like shale, the learning delays and disabilities caused by chemo frying the young, budding brain. But strangely optimistic codas are tacked on---endings as stiff and loopy as carpenter's lace, crisp and empty as lettuce, reticulate as a net--ah, words.   'After all that business with the tutor, he's better now, and fitted with new incisors by my wife's cousin's husband, who did dental school in two and half years, if you can believe that. We hope for the best. We take things as they come. Life is hard.'

'Life's a big problem,' agrees the Mother....Together, the parents huddle all day in the Tiny Tim Lounge--no need to watch Oprah. They leave Oprah in the dust. Oprah has nothing on them. They chat matter-of-factly, then fall silent and watch Dune or Star Wars, in which there are bright and shiny robots, whom the Mother now sees not as robots at all but as human beings who have had terrible things happen to them."

---Lorrie Moore, "People Like That Are The Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk" in Birds of America (1998)

The title of Moore's story references a comment made by a friend of "The Mother " who is surprised by the "bromides" through which the parents in the ward narrate their experiences. I read that after the publication of the story, that some parents at a hospital near to Moore became upset, thinking that her critique was directed at them.

There is something about Moore's piece that seems to hover at the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction and that could lead an unknowing reader--one unfamiliar with Moore-- to misread her piece and its genre. I suspect though that these parents correctly surmise that Moore's intent is to expose the conventions of tales of illness (the mandate to "stay positive!" is fairly conventional these days) to reveal the lack of control that underpins such talk, such posturing.  Yet she also shows that the parents' platitudes serve as important guideposts as they navigate through their harrowing journeys. For the Mother, who has not yet been fully inducted into this world, they can only seem horrifically discordant, part of the nauseous atmosphere of the ward.

Wine of Christ

2010-06-22T19:52:00.009-05:00

"We'll see how the surgery and histology go. Then we'll start with chemo the week following. A little light chemo: vincristine and----"

"Vincristine?" interrupts the Mother. "Wine of Christ?"

"The names are strange, I know. The other one we use is actinomycin-D. Sometimes called 'dactinomycin.' People move the D around to the front."

"They move the D around to the front," repeats the Mother.

"Yup!" the Oncologist says. "I don't know why--they just do!"

"Christ didn't survive his wine," says the Husband.

"But of course he did," says the Oncologist, and nods toward the Baby, who has now found a cupboard full of hospital linens and bandages and is yanking them all out onto the floor. "I'll see you guys tomorrow, after the surgery." And with that, the Oncologist leaves.

"Or rather, Christ was his wine," mumbles the Husband. Everything he knows about the New Testament, he has gleaned from the sound track of Godspell. "His blood was the wine. What a great beverage idea."

"A little light chemo. Don't you like that one?" says the Mother. "Eine kleine dactinomycin. I'd like to see Mozart write that one up for a big wad o'cash."

---Lorrie Moore, "People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk" in Birds of America (1998)

Moore's story originally ran in The New Yorker; while there are many passages that more adequately capture the subject matter, tone, and unique style of this piece, oddly enough, this is one that I recall from my initial reading of the piece in the magazine over a decade ago. Moore's depiction of the typical Oncologist as part mathematician, part "mad, overcaffienated scientist" is exemplified through this dialogue in which the doctor's superficial and somewhat lighthearted description ("Yup!") of the chemotherapeutic agents stands in stark contrast to the desperation, confusion, and enervation of parents in the pediatric oncology ward.

The story is told through the perspective of "The Mother," a writer whose point of view shifts precariously between the darkly comedic and the abject. Her eighteen month old son has been diagnosed with Wilms' tumor, a kidney cancer, and the reader follows her on her dizzying journey into the pediatric oncology ward and the experiences of parents who endure the ineffable. The narrator's stream of consciousness disorients and then reorients the reader, revealing that what seems as surreal as a nightmare is actually a reality.

The next entry will also come from this piece.

Linear Danger Area

2010-06-09T12:41:00.001-05:00

The Black Snake

When the black snake
flashed onto the morning road,
and the truck could not swerve---
death, that is how it happens.

Now he lies looped and useless
as an old bicycle tire.
I stop the car
and carry him into the bushes.

He is as cool and gleaming
as a braided whip, he is as beautiful and quiet
as a dead brother.
I leave him under the leaves

and drive on, thinking
about death: its suddenness,
its terrible weight,
its certain coming. Yet under

reason burns a brighter fire, which the bones
have always preferred.
It is the story of endless fortune.
It says to oblivion: not me!

It is the light at the center of every cell.
It is what sent the snake coiling and flowing forward
happily all spring through the green leaves before
he came to the road.

---Mary Oliver, "The Black Snake"

"Up!"

2010-05-19T15:04:00.000-05:00

There is Command in the Word of the King;
Justice in the Word of the Law;
Reverence in the Word of the Scripture;
But Rapture in the Word of the Babe.

On this 6th
day of July
18 97

Baby Spoke its First Word

Saying

"Up"

---F. Scott Fitzgerald's baby book (entries recorded by his mother Mollie McQuillan Fitzgerald)

Reprinted in The Romantic Egoists: a pictorial autobiography from the scrapbooks and albums of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Eds. Matthew J. Bruccoli, Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, and Joan P. Kerr with art editor Margareta F. Lyons (1974)

Unraveled, Mended, Unraveled, Mended

2010-05-17T21:16:00.007-05:00

     "From a needlework book, I learned to cast on. In the test piece, I got the gauge and correct tension. Knit and purl came naturally, as though my fingers had been rubbed in spiderwebs at birth. The sliding of the needles was as rhythmic as water.
     Learning to knit was the obvious thing. The separation of tangled threads, the working-together of raveled ends into something tangible and whole--this mending was as confounding as the groom who drives into a stop sign on the way to his wedding. Because symptoms mean just what they are. What about the woman whose empty hand won't close because she cannot grasp that her child is gone?
     [...]
     Beg, sl tog, inc, cont, rep.
     Begin, slip together, increase, continue, repeat."

---Amy Hempel, "Beg, sl tog, inc, cont, rep"

In this story, knitting is a metaphor for the narrator's painful feelings of loss following an abortion--a symbol of her attempts at self-repair. Knitting fascinates the narrator for its "compression of language into code," the shorthand instructions that only she and others who study the craft can comprehend.

Yet knitting is not merely a motif for loss within this story. The knitting patterns or "codes" also capture in microcosm the work of the short story itself---its compression and encoding of the human experience, line by line. In the course of the story, not only yarn, but hair, pasta primavera, and tinsel, become fodder for the narrator's obsession with knitting. "That was the great thing about knitting," the narrator observes, "everything is fiber, the world a world of natural resources." Similarly, ordinary happenings and tragedies alike become the substance of fiction which captures human unraveling at its darkest moments, yet also offers the glimmer of the possibility of wholeness (however piecemeal) as do the final lines of Hempel's story:

"K tog rem st. Knit together remaining stitches.
Cast off loosely."

Thus the story is hardly limited by its subject matter.   Fiction compresses and encodes life--- the patterns are recognizable.

Dementia

2010-05-15T10:02:00.001-05:00

The word dementia has its root in the Latin dementare, meaning "senseless." Yet I have found my senses heightened folllowing the loss of intellectual force. My responsiveness to odor is so strong that sometimes I think I've become a beagle. Intense spices---Indian, Thai, Mexican--feel exaggerated in their richness; I can become exhausted and confused by eating these foods. My skin often tingles, sometimes for no discernible reason, sometimes in response to the slightest stimulus. The same process that stripped me of significant intellectual capacity and numbed my mind seems to have triggered an almost corresponding heightening of sensory and emotional awareness. Sometimes this can be a maelstrom, sometimes a baptismal immersion. So when "demented" breaks down into "de" for "out of" and "ment" for "mind"--literally "out of mind,"---I interpret the verbal construction as having positive connotations. Not loony, but liberated. Forced out of the mind, forced away from my customary cerebral mode of encounter, I have found myself dwelling more in the wilder realms of sense and emotion. Out of mind and into body, into heart. An altered state.

--Floyd Skloot, "Wild in the Woods: Confessions of a Demented Man" in In the Shadow of Memory (2003)

In 1988, Floyd Skloot contracted a virus that invaded and damaged his brain. Here he describes his loss of "intellectual capacity" in terms of a gain in "emotional awareness."" Skloot's account is not a saccharine one, however, and his description of his enhanced sensorial perceptions and feelings (throughout the book as a whole) is at turns ironic, humiliating, surprising, bittersweet. I love his attentiveness here to the etymology of dementia and the way that his reading of the word through the lens of his own experience draws our attention to the ways in which we tend to privilege the intellect. If clarity of thinking illuminates our world, it does so only by limiting what we can perceive.

Signature Colors

2010-04-25T08:55:00.000-05:00

A different color of ink identified each year: 1956 was green and 1957 a ribbon of red, replaced the following year by bright lavender, and now, in 1959, she had decided upon a dignified blue. But as in every manifestation, she continued to tinker with her handwriting, slanting it to the right or to the left, shaping it roundly or steeply, loosely or stingily--as though she were asking, "Is this Nancy? Or that? Or that? Which is me?"

---Truman Capote, In Cold Blood (1966)

Truman Capote's "non-fiction novel" In Cold Blood was inspired by the murder of the Herbert Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas in 1959. In this quote, Capote recreates the character of Nancy Clutter, the family's sixteen year old daughter. While Capote's characterizations can become tedious at times, he offers a valid interpretation of what is an almost universal teenage activity---filling notebooks with variations of one's signature.

Magnificent Asparagus Fountain

2010-04-24T10:50:00.004-05:00

The care with which the rain is
wrong and the green is wrong and
the white is wrong, the care with
which there is a chair and
plenty of breathing. The care with
which there is incredible justice
and likeness, all this makes
a magnificent asparagus, and
also a fountain.

---Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons (1914)

To be brief, Stein's off-beat allusion to material objects, weather, colors, foods, bodily functions, and domestic work in this ground-breaking collection of poetry conveys the excitement and pleasure of possession in its deepest and most intangible sense. Vitality!

[Side note: observe Stein's use of the word care. See also this entry, HERE]

Embroidery

2010-04-23T23:09:00.005-05:00

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle
Everything I do is stitched with its color

---W.S. Merwin, "Separation," 1973

Merwin's use of sewing as a metaphor reveals that the experience of separation is not that of absence, but rather, a painful kind of presence.

One Delicious Compound

2010-04-21T09:48:00.007-05:00

We also, I say, ought to copy the bees, and sift whatever we have gathered from a varied course of reading, for such things are better preserved if they are kept separate; then, by applying the supervising care with which our nature has endowed us...we could so blend those several flavors into one delicious compound that, even though it betrays its origin, yet it nevertheless is clearly a different thing from that whence it came.

---Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius, Letter 84 "On Gathering Ideas"

Seneca discusses the art of commonplacing and the alchemy of composition. His words reassure the shaky and insecure young writer that although he/she gathers pollen (quotes) from flowers (the writing of other authors) the "honey" he/she produces from this raw material will indeed be something new--and more importantly, something delicious.

[Note Seneca's reference to the word care in this quote. The word care and the word curate have the same root. To care for something is to preserve or maintain--but it also suggests selection, arrangement, and exhibition. Thus copying quotes is not meant to be a derivative act but a generative one--much as a museum exhibition makes a new argument through the presentation of pre-existing objects, so too do authors produce new ideas by drawing upon those already in existence. ]

A Gallop Down Memory Lane....On a Seahorse

2010-04-16T21:43:00.005-05:00

How are memories retrieved? The part of the brain called the "hippocampus" is believed to be integral in this process. This region of the cerebrum has a broad S-shaped sweep; its elegant curvature reminded classical anatomists of a seahorse, so it was given the Greek name for that creature. One type of memory that the hippocampus mediates is "declarative memory," which we experience when we consciously reach back in our minds for previous experiences. The hippocampus also appears to contribute to the linking of objects and events around us with past experiences.

---Jerome Groopman, The Anatomy of Hope: How People Prevail in the Face of Illness (2004)

A Circular Staircase

2010-04-15T18:19:00.004-05:00

Acceptance, I finally
reach it.
But something is wrong.
Grief is a circular staircase.
I have lost you.

---Linda Pastan, excerpted from the poem "The Five Stages of Grief" reprinted in On Doctoring: Stories, Poems, Essays (Eds. Richard Reynolds and John Stone)

In this wry, and a certain points, satiric poem Linda Pastan exposes the less clinical side of the experience of grief. I selected this poem because its final lines manage to convey the feeling of futility--the sisyphean experience of grief. One vicariously senses not only circularity but falling down the staircase. Here is the poem in full:

The night I lost you
someone pointed me towards
the Five Stages of Grief.
Go that way, they said,
it's easy, like learning to climb
stairs after an amputation.
And so I climbed.
Denial was first.
I sat down at breakfast
carefully setting the table
for two. I passed you the toast--
you sat there. I passed
you the paper--you hid
behind it.
Anger seemed more familiar.
I burned the toast, snatched
the paper and read the headlines myself.
But they mentioned your departure,
and so I moved on to
Bargaining. What can I exchange
for you? The silence
after storms? My typing fingers?
Before I could decide, Depression
came puffing up, a poor relation
its suitcase tied together
with string. In the suitcase
were bandages for the eyes
and bottles of sleep. I slid
all the way down the stairs
feeling nothing.
And all the time Hope
flashed on and off
in defective neon.
Hope was a signpost pointing straight in the air.
Hope was my uncle's middle name,
he died of it.
After a year I am still climbing
thought my feet slip on your stone face.
The treeline
has long since disappeared;
green is a color
I have forgotten.
But now I see what I am climbing
towards: Acceptance
written in capital letters,
a special headline:
Acceptance,
its name in lights.
I struggle on,
waving and shouting,
Below, my whole life spreads its surf,
all the landscapes I've ever known
or dreamed of. Below
a fish jumps: the pulse
in your neck.
Acceptance, I finally
reach it.
But something is wrong.
Grief is a circular staircase.
I have lost you.

Botched

2010-04-14T12:38:00.004-05:00

When I was a month pregnant, the great
clots of blood appeared in the pale
green swaying water of the toilet.
Dark red like black in the salty
translucent brine, like forms of life
appearing, jelly-fish with the clear-cut
shapes of fungi.

That was the only appearance made by that
child, the dark, scalloped shapes
falling slowly. A month later
our son was conceived, and I never went back
to mourn the one who came as far as the
sill with its information: that we could
botch something, you and I. All wrapped in purple it floated away, like a messenger
put to death for bearing bad news.

---Sharon Olds, "Miscarriage" reprinted in On Doctoring: Stories, Poems, Essays (Eds. Richard Reynolds and John Stone)

I really love Olds' choice of words--especially "information" and "messenger" in this quote. But the most memorable part of this poem is the information offered at the sill : " ...that we could botch something, you and I."

Joy

2010-04-11T10:50:00.002-05:00

"IN A DREAM YOU SAW A WAY TO SURVIVE AND YOU WERE FULL OF JOY"

---Jenny Holzer Untitled (In A Dream)

Note that joy and happiness are not exactly the same thing. Look HERE and closer HERE, and HERE and my favorite, HERE. (scroll down)

Dream House Part V: Outer Space, Andrea Dezsö, and "Sometimes in My Dreams I Fly"

2010-04-08T21:34:00.005-05:00

"The imaginary lunar landscapes reference the Apollo 13 expedition, which never actually made a landing on the Moon. 'Houston we have a problem' was uttered during the mission and continues to be a magically compelling turn of phrase. What captured my imagination is how not being able to go somewhere physically opens the possibility of epic mental Odysseys, and how we can stuff empty space full with rich imaginary worlds, then move in."

     ---Andrea Dezsö (b. 1968), "Sometimes in My Dreams I Fly," Exhibition Pamphlet, Rice Gallery (2010)

In "Sometimes in My Dreams I Fly" now on exhibition at Rice Gallery in Houston, Romanian-born artist Andrea Dezsö creates an enchanting dream world inspired by space travel. As Dezsö explains, as a child growing up in Communist Romania without a passport, travel was an impossibility. The space missions of the 1960s and 1970s offered her the vicarious pleasure of the odyssey, catalyzing her artistic vision of a whimsical other-world, untethered by the limitations of reality.

Known for her "tunnel books,"  Dezsö translates this smaller scale media form into the larger space of Rice gallery. Through small and odd-shaped windows placed at different heights, we gaze into multi-layered laser-cut tunnels up to six feet in length extending back into the gallery space.  Against the softly glowing cerulean and sea-green landscape, we see the silhouettes of those who populate this space---mythical figures that intermingle the features of humans, insects, and plant-life. Dancing on the edges of these tunnels, the joyous poses of Dezso's surreal characters welcome us and make these vistas seem less remote and less austere than most depictions of outer space.

Along these lines, I am most taken with Dezsö's characterization of her work as a domestic endeavor. Perhaps the allure of this space is not visitability but inhabitability--the desire to "move in" as she expresses it. Dezsö, while new to this art form, thus grasps the inherent play between interiority and exteriority that large scale installation invites.  The mind's eye creates both voyage and destination, but the medium of art turns this imaginative world into a physical reality.  Much as Dezsö longed to travel, we desire to cross the glass window of the gallery to occupy this world. Yet although this is an impossibility, her exhibit also reminds us of the possibilities for creating the worlds that we wish to inhabit. Dream houses are precisely that--the architecture of the imagination.

On exhibit at Rice Gallery April 8th through August 8th.

Dream House Part IV: The Dugout

2010-04-04T17:44:00.002-05:00

     "All around that door green vines were growing out of the grassy bank, and they were full of flowers. Red and blue and purple and rosy-pink and white and striped flowers all had their throats wide open as if they were singing glory to the monring. They were morning-glory flowers.
     Laura went under those singing flowers into the dugout. It was one room, all white. The earth walls had been smoothed and white-washed. The earth floor was smooth and hard.
     When Ma and Mary stood in the doorway the light went dim. There was a small greased-paper window beside the door. But the wall was so thick that the light from the window stayed near the window.
     That front wall was built of sod. Mr. Hanson had dug out his house, and then he had cut long strips of prairie sod and laid them on top of one another, to make the front wall. It was a good, thick wall with not one crack in it.   No cold could get through that wall.
....The ceiling was made of hay. Willow boughs had been laid across and their branches woven together, but here and there the hay that had been spread on them showed through...
     They all went up the path and stood on the roof of that house. No one could have guessed it was a roof. Grass grew on it and waved in the wind just like all the grasses along the creek bank.
     'Goodness,' said Ma. 'Anybody could walk over this house and never know it's here.'
     But Laura spied something. She bent over and parted the grasses with her hands, and then she cried. 'I've found the stovepipe hole! Look, Mary, Look!'
     Ma and Mary stopped to look, and Carried leaned out from Ma's arm and looked, and Jack came pushing to look. They could look right down into the whitewashed room under the grass."

---Laura Ingalls Wilder, "The House in the Ground," in On the Banks of Plum Creek

Today's entry features a dark and hidden house built under morning glories.   Nearly all of the homes featured in Wilder's series are idealized in some way as evidence of the family's industry, innovation, thrift, creativity, love of beauty, and order. The books certainly espouse a very particular political stance--especially considering the date of their publication if not the date of their setting.  Yet there is a narrative of loss that underwrites every volume. These losses, I suspect, are only visible to the adult reader.

Dream House Part III: Cliff-Dwellings

2010-04-02T22:24:00.004-05:00

"The moon was up, though the sun hadn't set, and it had that glittering silveriness the early stars have in high altitudes. The heavenly bodies look so much more remote from the bottom of a deep canyon than they do from the level. The climb of the walls helps out the eye, somehow. I lay down on a solitary rock that was like an island in the bottom of the valley, and looked up. The grey sage-brush and the blue-grey rock around me were already in shadow, but high above me the canyon walls were dyed flame-colour with the sunset, and the Cliff City lay in a gold haze against its dark cavern. In a few minutes it, too, was grey, and only the rim rock at the top held the red light. When that was gone, I could still see the copper glow in the pinons along the edge of the top ledges. The arc of sky over the canyon was silvery blue, with its pale yellow moon, and presently stars shivered into it, like crystals dropped into perfectly clear water."

---Willa Cather, The Professor's House (1925)

In this scene from Cather's novel of modern life, The Professor's House (1925), the orphaned cowhand, Tom, describes the enchanting cliff-dwellings of the Mesa Verde. Once inhabited by the Anasazi Indians, these dwellings have remained untouched for centuries, preserved as if in "amber" by the sun and the dry climate. In Tom's account, he narrates his discovery of the dwellings and the amateurish archaeological project that he, his friend Roddy, and their housekeeper, Henry, pursue in the hope that the Smithsonian will take an interest in their findings. When Tom returns to the Mesa following an unsuccessful trip to Washington, he discovers that Roddy has sold the artifacts to a German trader. After a bitter feud, Tom evicts Roddy and remains on the mesa for a solitary summer.

This particular scene follows the loss of the men's friendship, their idealized family housekeeping-museum project, and the loss of the relics. Tom's description of these homes from a position below is one of the most vivid passages within the novel, and its detail and splendor suggests an oneiric home. The dismantling of the idealized or utopian home is a modern conceit for Cather, and this story is set within a longer story about (in the simplest sense) the loss of cultural meaning in the 1920s. Yet the intensity and purity of Tom's final experience on the mesa resonates with our very contemporary longing for wholeness and well-being. As Tom discerns, the unadulterated happiness he experiences in these final months will only be temporary. In a similar way, while we strive for happiness (almost as if it were a state that could be attained or sustained for any length of time) such moments are likely to be unpredictable and fleeting--something we grasp from a distance, in a flash of quickly changing color and light.

Dream House Part II: Islands

2010-03-28T11:35:00.007-05:00

"'T was the same little house her father had built him when he was a bachelor, with one livin'-room, and a little mite of a bedroom out of it where she slept, but 't was neat as a ship's cabin. There was some old chairs, an' a seat made of a long box that might have held boat tackle an' things to lock up in his fishin' days, and a good enough stove so anybody could cook and keep warm in cold weather....Joanna had done one thing very pretty. There was a little piece o'swamp on the island where good rushes grew plenty, and she'd gathered 'em, and braided some beautiful mats for the floor and a thick cushion for the long bunk. She'd showed a good deal of invention; you see there was a nice chance to pick up pieces o'wood and boards that drove ashore, and she'd made good use o'what she found. There was n't no clock, but she had a few dishes on a shelf, and flowers set about in shells fixed to the walls...."

---Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896)

In this section of Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) we hear the painful story of Joanna Todd, the cousin by marriage of main character Almira Todd. Jilted by her fiance, Joanna is so distraught over her fate that she determines that she can no longer reside within the community. Relocating to "Shell Heap Island," she takes up residence in her father's bachelor house, were she lives as a hermit until her death. As she explains, her extreme bitterness and complete loss of "hope" not only make her "want to be alone" but make her unfit for social life. Joanna's makeshift efforts at domesticating her home, as recorded above, evidence her innovation, but also the loss of the true creative power which is inextricably tied to hope--the idea that the future will be better than the past. Joanna understands such hope as a prerequisite for community life.

Joanna's island home is a dream home not because it represents something utopian, but because it represents something universal. When the narrator of the story makes a pilgrimage to Shell-Heap Island, decades after Joanna's death, only a foundation of stones from her home and a few flowers from the garden remain. Yet as her commentary suggests, this kind of island home resides in all of us in the more figurative sense: "In the life of life of each of us, I said to myself, there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness; we are each the uncompanioned hermit and recluse of an hour or a day; we understand our fellows of the cell to whatever age of history they may belong." Our fellows of the cell....love that, Jewett.

Dream House Part I: Nests

2010-03-25T22:06:00.004-05:00

"If we go deeper into daydreams of nests, we soon encounter a sort of paradox of sensibility. A nest--and this we understand right away---is a precarious thing, and yet it sets us to daydreaming of security. Why does this obvious precariousness not arrest daydreams of this kind? The answer to this paradox is simple: when we dream...in a sort of naive way, we relive the instinct of the bird, taking pleasure in accentuating the mimetic features of the green nest in green leaves. We definitely saw it, but we say that it is well hidden. This center of animal life is concealed by the immense volume of vegetable life. The nest is a lyrical bouquet of leaves...when we examine a nest, we place ourselves at the origin of confidence in the world, we receive a beginning of confidence, an urge toward cosmic confidence. Would a bird build its nest if it did not have its instinct for confidence in the world?"

---Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

The next few entries will feature utopian homes. In this entry taken from philosopher Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space, the nest is not simply a dream home, but a home that catalyzes reveries of security, in spite of its essential insecurity. The nest of the real world--constructed of natural ephemera---is fragile and vulnerable. Yet the nest exists not only in the real world but in our imagination as an ideal space that is protective and intimate as well as open and ethereal.

A few days ago, I saw a broken egg on the cement beneath a tree. But this disturbing sight conjured the nest from which it had came and then, comically, the Swiss Family Robinson (a family in a nest in a tree) and finally a house on a mountain top. To reside on top of the world, surrounded by a "lyrical bouquet of leaves," would be the ultimate domesticity. Cosmic....confidence!

A Worn-Out Baseball

2010-03-21T18:14:00.003-05:00

"When my father's father died in the French Quarter of New Orleans sixty years ago, the popularly accepted story was that on a humid night in mid-August, he had eaten a dozen bananas and then taken a cold bath. He was a man of eighty-seven whose life had been a strenuous assertion of his appetites, and this explanation suited him, just as it suited his friends in the French Quarter. It would be more satisfying to me, it would allow me to feel that I owned my illness, if my urologist were to say: 'You know, you've beat the hell out of this prostate of yours. It looks like a worn-out baseball.' Nobody wants an anonymous illness. I'd much rather think that I brought it on myself than that it was a mere accident of nature."

---Anatole Broyard, "Doctor, Talk to Me"

Today's selection is taken from On Doctoring: Stories, Poems, Essays edited by Richard Reynolds, MD and John Stone, MD (with Lois LaCivita Nixon PhD, M.P.H. and Delese Wear, PhD). This book is given to all first year medical students in the United States and includes literary works (plays, poems, short stories, excerpts) by dozens of well-known authors on the subject of doctoring and what it entails. Some of these authors, such as the American modernist poet, William Carlos Williams, were doctors themselves and share their unique insights into the doctor-patient relationship.

Broyard is both wise and humorous in acknowledging the importance of fitting the diagnosis to the patient's needs and personality. This does not entail misconstruing the illness, but rather shaping the narrative of that illness so that it is consistent with the life of the suffering subject. This is not a small distinction. In the case of Broyard's grandfather who over-indulged, the tale of the bananas and cold baths that brought him to his death is wildly improbable, yet nonetheless "fits" the character of the man. His death, far from happening to him, is cast simply as the natural culmination of a life lived at a high pitch.

In the similar case of Broyard himself, it is clear that he desires agency. He does not want the doctor's reassurance that his prostate cancer is not his fault, a mere chance or accidental happening. Rather, he wants to know that his prostate was expended--hilariously "beat" (got to love that verb choice) through over-use. As Broyard concludes, "If only the patient could be allowed to see his illness as not so much a failure of his body as a natural consumption of it."

Erosion

2010-03-18T20:35:00.002-05:00

"Adults had a drink, they said, to take the edge off, so that's how she came to understand growing up: erosion. She was all edges, on tender hooks, which is what she thought the expression was."

---Beth Ann Fennelly, excerpt from the poem "Waiting for the Heart to Moderate" in Tender Hooks

Sagging jaw-lines, drooping breasts and stomachs and behinds, fuzzy thinking, and enervated tempers---aging is the process whereby the sharpness, tautness, firmness, elasticity, flexibility and endurance of youth give way to softening edges of all sorts. Ironically, we seek one anaesthetic or another to bring us comfort, to soften us further, to numb us to the sharpness we perceive in our environment. However, Fennelly is wise enough to know that we lay down new sediment in addition to eroding. Aging isn't entirely a disappearing act.

Plum Blossoms and Moonlight

2010-03-17T20:36:00.001-05:00

Taken from the back of a box of Metropolitan Museum of Art Correspondence Cards featuring a plum blossom design modeled on a woodblock print by Suzuki Harunobu:

" One Japanese Poet said, 'On a spring night when the moon shines through a blossoming plum tree growing by the eaves, the moonbeams themselves seem filled with perfume.' "

Iron Bones

2010-03-14T21:56:00.004-05:00

"Iron Bones Giving Birth to Spring"

"Learning from Bamboo's Lofty Spirit Though it is Hollow;
     Following the example of Plum Blossoms Which Bloom on Iron Boughs"

"Before Peach and Pear Trees Come into Bloom, Winter
     Plum Blossoms Spring out of Iron-like Trunks"

"Tested by Wind and Frost, Plum Blossoms Smell Stronger;
     People Who Expect Nothing Have More Noble Quality"

---Wang Chengxi, titles from his paintings, collected in A Hundred Plum Blossom Paintings (1992)

Wang Chengxi, a contemporary painter of plum blossoms, continues a tradition in existence since the Tang Dynasty.   In explaining his interest in the plum blossom, Chengzi echoes those of the artists and poets who preceded him who appropriated the plum blossom to signify the coming of spring in both the literal as well as the more figurative sense--rejuvenation after a difficult time, such as illness. Chengxi writes, "Braving snow and frost, plum trees blossom defiantly to spread their fragrance . The noble character and morals of the people can be likened to plum blossoms which are burst forth in adverse circumstances and bring encouragement to the world."

The plum blossom is one of the "Three Friends of the Cold" (which includes pine and bamboo, mentioned above) as well as one of "The Four Gentlemen" , which includes orchid (spring) bamboo (summer) and chrysanthemum (autumn). The plum blossom is an example of what we might call the spiritual underpinnings of the material world.   The strength of the plum tree's "iron bones" which bring forth blossoms in abundance even amidst cold and ice offers us a narrative of resurrection.

Tomorrow's entry will feature plum blossoms once more to celebrate the advent of spring.

The Word of the Street

2010-03-06T09:52:00.006-06:00

[...] "Don't you know that the secret to understanding a city and its people is to learn--what is the word of the street?"

Then he went on to explain, in a mixture of English, Italian and hand gestures, that every city has a single word that defines it, that identifies most people who live there. If you could read people's thoughts as they were passing you on the streets of any given place, you would discover that most of them are thinking the same thought. Whatever that majority thought might be---that is the word of the city. And if your personal word does not match the word of the city, then you don't really belong there.

"What's Rome's word?" I asked.

"SEX," he announced.

"But isn't that a stereotype about Rome?"

"No."

"But surely there are some people in Rome thinking about other things than sex?"

Giulio insisted: "No. All of them, all day, all they are thinking about is SEX."

"Even over at the Vatican?"

"That's different. The Vatican isn't part of Rome. They have a different word over there. Their word is POWER."

"You'd think it would be FAITH."

"It's POWER," he repeated. "Trust me. But the word in Rome---it's SEX."

---Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love (2006)

In this scene from Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert reflects on why the city of Rome, the first leg of her year-long journey, is intensely pleasurable for her, yet does not afford her a sense of belonging. As her friend Giulio explains, experiencing such a sense of place requires that one's own "word" coincide with the "word of the street." Gilbert's "word" as she notes is "SEEKER" and thus she is out of sync with Rome's own point of orientation. She will remain a visitor and not a resident--she is "not fully living" in Rome. In the conversation that follows, Gilbert identifies New York City's "word" as "ACHIEVE," and distinguishes it from the word of Los Angeles, which is "SUCCEED." Stockholm's word is "CONFORM," and Naples' word is "FIGHT."

Gilbert's distinction between "achieve" and "succeed" rings true. This is one of those examples of words that we typically think of as interchangeable, yet are essentially different. In reading this, I'm also reminded of Henry James's efforts to distinguish between jealousy and envy, which I wrote about here. [Donald Sutherland's comment to Mary Tyler Moore in "Ordinary People" in which he declares that she is "very determined" but "not really strong" curiously comes to mind as well. ] This kind of exercise forces us to be precise, to think about what words mean, what they reference.

But the larger point of the passage is to reflect on the differences between space and place--to contemplate what makes a space "fit" with our own sense of ourselves. This is the difference between habitability and visitability. I've tried to think of a single word that describes my own hometown city (Washington DC and the metropolitan area that is its extension.) I think the word is "ANGLE." I'ts not suprising then that I have little desire to return except as a visitor. I am not sure of my own word--but it is not "ANGLE."

Fortune Cookies Speak Truth

2010-03-04T10:00:00.003-06:00

In the spirit of modernist poets and artists such as Marianne Moore and Joseph Cornell who juxtaposed the stuff and substance of high culture with pop cultural treasure, I offer you all of the fortune cookie fortunes that I am currently carrying in my wallet:

Take the advice of a faithful friend.

You find what you're looking for; just open your eyes!

Look forward to great fortune and a new lease on life!

Do not mistake temptation for opportunity.

Opportunity always ahead if you look and think.

You will always be surrounded by true firends. [sic]

Although a few of these fortunes sound a bit ominous, on the whole they offer solid advice and generous predictions about my future. Few things are as reassuring as a good fortune, or as disappointing as an unfavorable one. While some might place the fortune cookie in the realm of superstition, it is uncanny that so many people look for assurance, confirmation, and validation in material signs, whether from a beneficent sky, a successful shake of the Magic 8 Ball, or the serendipitous find of a four-leafed clover. Perhaps my favorite example is that of Mary Baker Eddy's reassurance during a troubling time upon opening a drawer and finding a rubber band that had curled into the shape of a heart. (Mary Ann Caws refers to this in her fabulous book on Joseph Cornell)

Let The Air In

2010-03-03T09:04:00.003-06:00

"I said the mountains looked like white elephants. Wasn't that bright?"

"That was bright."

"I wanted to try this new drink. That's all we do, isn't it--look at things and try new drinks?"

"I guess so."

The girl looked across at the hills.

"They're lovely hills," she said. "They don't really look like white elephants. I just meant the coloring of their skin through the trees."

"Should we have another drink?"

"All right."

The warm wind blew the bead curtain against the table.

"The beer's nice and cool," the man said.

"It's lovely," the girl said.

"It's really an awfully simple operation, Jig," the man said. "It's not really an operation at all."

The girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on.

"I know you wouldn't mind it, Jig. It's really not anything. It's just to let the air in."

The girl did not say anything.

"I'll go with you and I'll stay with you all the time. They just let the air in and then it's all perfectly natural."

"Then what will we do afterward?"

"We'll be fine afterward. Just like we were before."

"What makes you think so?"

"That's the only thing that bothers us. It's the only thing that's made us unhappy."

The girl looked at the bead curtain, put her hand out and took hold of two of the strings of beads.

"And you think then we'll be all right and be happy."

"I know we will. You don't have to be afraid. I've known lots of people that have done it."

"So have I," said the girl. "And afterward they were all so happy."

"Well," the man said, "if you want to you don't have to. I wouldn't have you do it if you didn't want to. But I know it's perfectly simple."

"And you really want to?"

"I think it's the best thing to do. But I don't want you to do it if you don't really want to."

"And if I do it you'll be happy and things will be like they were and you'll love me?"

"I love you now. You know I love you."

"I know. But if I do it, then it will be nice again if I say things are like white elephants, and you'll like it?"

---Ernest Hemingway, "Hills Like White Elephants"

It isn't the unnamed operation that is the subject matter of this quote that interests me, but its painful recognition of the ephemerality of any moment of well-being or balance. That desire to return and recapture an earlier idealized state--things "like they were"-- is universal. Flinging open the window, or here in this passage, "let[ting] the air in" in the more clinical sense, seems to promise to end stuffiness, to restore simplicity and clarity. The girl knows better. Returning to the ideal state once the line has been crossed is a near impossiblity.

Social Intercourse: Sounds Like a Drag

2010-03-01T10:01:00.004-06:00

"I do not want to spend too long a time with boring people, but then I do not want to spend too long a time with amusing ones. I find social intercourse fatiguing. Most persons, I think, are both exhilarated and rested by conversation; to me it has always been an effort. When I was young and stammered, to talk for long singularly exhausted me, and even now I have to some extent cured myself, it is a strain. It is a relief to me when I can get away and read a book."

----W. Somerset Maugham, "The Summing Up"

I concur. Less conversation and less social engagement does a body good.

Masculine Charms

2010-02-15T16:37:00.004-06:00

"Woodcarver Bert Ohnstad carved canes, bowls, totem poles, and a number of sculptures, but his masterpiece was his Friendship Cane, to which he devoted more than fifty years in the making. The cedar limb used to make the cane was cut in 1928, as Ohnstad led a Boy Scout troop on a hike in Oklahoma. A fellow scout leader gave Ohnstad a memento to attach to it, a tiny gold heart with an inscription of the Lord's Prayer. From then on, people gave him tiny charms and keepsakes to attach to what he had begun to call his Friendship Cane. Ohnstad carved little niches into the cane and embedded such wonders as a tiny 64-square checkerboard, a shark's tooth, and a petite compass taken from a deceased German soldier's wrist during World War I. Close inspection reveals six miniature peek-holes embedded into the body of the cane, which reveal glimpses of Niagara Falls ,the Golden Gate Bridge, the White House, a Greek nymph, the Washington Monument, and the Lord's Prayer. Other attachments include a diamond-studded Rotary pin, a gold coin, a locket, a tiny "arrow head," a Scottie dog charm, a charm commemorating the Piccard statosphere flight, an eagle mascot pin from the 15th Wisconsin Regiment of the Civil War, and a Norse Immigration Centennial Medallion. Ohnstad counted more than one hundred objects and images carved into, attached to, or embedded into the cane, which exists as a travel diary, masculine version of a charm bracelet, and a remarkable piece of art and Americana."

--Leslie Umberger, Messages & Magic: 100 Years of Collage and Assemblage in American Art

Leslie Umberger's account of Bert Ohnstad's Friendship Cane, a part of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center Collection, gives us a glimpse of an art form that clearly draws upon the much older tradition of the reliquary as well as the Victorian interest in keepsakes, secular relics, and tokens of friendship and memory. Ohnstad's cane, produced between 1928 and 1979, is the material record of those with whom his life intersected through friendship. His efforts to embed keepsakes within the cane and to create nostalgic "peep holes" suggests privacy, insight, and interiority--a glimpse of the artist and of the era. Yet in transforming the typically utilitarian cane into a numinous object, Ohnstad's artwork also prompts us to reflect more deeply about our own private history.

Sweet and Sour

2010-02-05T14:04:00.007-06:00

Stick Candy

Traubel records, "Mrs Davis handed him a bag of mint-candy and he at once gave me a stick. 'You favor it?' he asked, and then dilated like a child on his own fancy for it."

Lemonade

While planning the menu for his seventieth birthday banquet, Whitman remarked: 'It's a damnable drink, I wouldn't have it.'

--qtd. in Gary Schmidgall,editor, Intimate with Walt: Selections from Whitman's Conversations with Horace Traubel 1888-1892 (2001)

So there you have it. Walt Whitman loved mints and hated lemonade. He also loved cheap books, sweet corn, and molasses candy and disliked tobacco, fireworks, comedians, and church. Little details of this sort--theorist Roland Barthes would call them biographemes--seem terribly important, but not simply because they offer intimate glimpses into one particular famous person's private life. Rather, they emphasize private history (as opposed to public or grand history) more generally. I suspect that private history--and what one loved most or humorously hated most--is most relevant and precious to us at the end of our lives. Our preferences mark our points of intersection with the world--in a sense they are more important than political events, cultural movements, economic changes, scientific discoveries. Horace Traubel, who visited and assisted Whitman during the last four years of his life evidently recognized their importance as well.

Iridescent

2010-02-02T10:16:00.001-06:00

"You and Tobias are hopping around in the sprinkler. The sprinkler is a magnificent invention because it exposes raindrops to sunshine. That does occur in nature, but it is rare. When I was in seminary I used to go sometimes to watch the Baptists down at the river. It was something to see the preacher lifting the one who was being baptized up out of the water and the water pouring off the garments and the hair. It did look like a birth or a resurrection. For us the water just heightens the touch of the pastor's hand on the sweet bones of the head, sort of like making an electrical connection. I've always loved to baptize people, though I have sometimes wished there were more shimmer and splash involved in the way we go about it. Well, but you two are dancing around in your iridescent little downpour, whooping and stomping as sane people ought to do when they encounter a thing so miraculous as water."

---Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (2004)

Sunlit raindrops (and hummingbirds and opal rings) embody the fancy and wonder we attribute to childhood. Baptism, of course, is a renewal of the human spirit--the process of beginning again. I love the gentleness of this passage. But most of all, I appreciate its seriousness in praising the sprinkler for its production of rainbows rather than for its hydration of plants.

It's A Match

2010-01-29T21:23:00.003-06:00

     Leo had led Salzman to the only clear place in the room, a table near a window that overlooked the lamp-lit city. He seated himself at the matchmaker's side but facing him, attempting by an act of will to suppress the unpleasant tickle in his throat. Salzman eagerly unstrapped his portfolio and removed a loose rubber band from a thin packet of much-handled cards.....When Leo's eyes fell upon the cards, he counted six spread out in Salzman's hand.
     "So few?" he asked in disappointment.
     "You wouldn't believe me how much cards I got in my office," Salzman replied. "The drawers are already filled to the top, so I keep them now in a barrel, but is every girl good for a new rabbi?"

     ---Bernard Malamud, "The Magic Barrel" in The Magic Barrel (1958)

In the title story of Bernard Malamud's National Book Award winning collection, a rabbinical student, Leo Finkle, secures the services of a "commercial cupid"--the marriage broker, Pinye Salzman.   Salzman cleverly limits his options, initially presenting him with the potential match of "Sophie P." a twenty-four year old widow; "Ruth K." a nineteen year old beauty with a lame foot; and "Lily H." a woman he insists is only twenty-nine (Leo's brief meeting with her confirms that but she is at least thirty-five and "aging rapidly"). Rattled by his date with Lily, who believes him to be a true man of God, Leo gives up on the notion of an arranged marriage. At this point, Salzman offers his a packet of photographs of clients, which Leo leaves unopened for many months. Finally, in a miserable state, he examines the images, and falls in love with one very familiar image. Rushing to Salzman, he asks him to arrange a meeting with this woman. Salzman protests, insisting that this image was left in the packet only by accident. Pressing him, Leo learns that this is a photo of Salzman's daughter--a woman of a very questionable past who is now "dead" to her father. Suspecting that Salzman had been scheming to arrange this match all along, Leo nonetheless falls for the woman, seeing in her weary yet compelling face, his own salvation.

This is a story of immigrant culture but also and more importantly of the nature of love. I am most drawn to the image of the "magic" barrel--referred to only as a barrel in the text, and one that exists only in the imagination. The contrast of the limitless possibilities of the barrel--the thing we think we want--and the slender options that Salzman strategically presents is the locus of fascination for me. The perfect match (people, objects, situations) always resides in the future of the distance---it is always unidentifiable, or inaccessible, or unobtainable. Salzman cleverly creates a match that presents as the match--someone who suggests to Leo what love means: "he examined the face and found it good: good for Leo Finkle. Only such a one could understand him and help him seek whatever he was seeking. She might, perhaps, love him."

Kismet

2010-01-26T10:00:00.001-06:00

Kismet. [Turk. kismet, Pers. quismat, a. Aarb. qisma(t) portion, lot, fate, f. qasama to divide.]

Destiny, fate.

1849 E.B. EASTWICK Dry Leaves 46 One day a man related to me a story of Kismat or destiny. 1865 MRS. GASKELL in Cornh. Mag. Feb. 219 It's a pity when these old Saxon houses vanish off the land; but it is 'kismet' with the Hamleys. 1883 F.M.CRAWFORD Mr. Isaccs i. 19 The stars or the fates...or whatever you like to term your kismet.

---Definition courtesy of the Oxofrd English Dictionary

Today's quote is a definition of one of my favorite words--Kismet. As the quotes above suggest, this word of Arabic origin entered the English language in the mid to late 1800s. In English, kismet suggests a kind of magic, good fortune, crossing paths, the perfect alliance of the stars, an overarching order. It has a romantic quality, suggesting that things are "meant to be"--despite all evidence to the contrary.

Silence/Stillness

2010-01-18T17:58:00.006-06:00

"Tu m'as séduit, O Seigneur, et moi,
Je me suis laissé séduire."

[You have seduced me O Lord,
and I am seduced."]

---Into Great Silence (2005) Dir. Philip Gröning

Philip Gröning's documentary Into Great Silence offers the viewer a rare glimpse into the lives of the monks of the Grand Chartreuse monastery in the French Alps. These monks of the Carthusian order take a vow of silence, devoting themselves to prayer and meditation. The film documents their religious rituals but also their daily work, which is an extension of their meditative and spirtual endeavors. To capture what is remarkable about their devotion would have been nearly impossible within the conventions of the typical documentary film. This film offers no historical information on the monastery, no interviews with those who live there, no musical score. Instead, it presents a minimalist portrayal of its subjects and the spaces they occupy. Close-ups on the monk's faces, on everyday objects, on shifting natural light, and on noises and sounds creates an immersive experience for the viewer, for whom familiar experiences are made strikingly unfamiliar, even wondrous.

I am drawn to the notion of seduction, featured within today's quote. If seduction usually has a sexual connotation, here its meaning suggests the powerful draw of the monk's calling and the role that silence plays in catalyzing this kind of passion. One of the most interesting aspects of the film is the insight if offers into the connection between silence and stillness (silence is translated as stillness within the textual portions of the film). We might think of "noise" as the greatest descriptor for modern activity, commerce, sociability--the endless messages, conversations, information, exchanges, and traffic that mark both the temptation and the enervation of our own existence. Sound is linked to motion. Because we are so distracted--so perpetually in motion-- the kind of seduction that the monks experience is not a possibility for us. Their seduction might even make us a bit envious, if it were not so risky and so courageous. The film gives us three hours in which to vicariously experience this kind of stillness. The monks want to be with God. But to be with one's own self--without the protective armor of daily business and noise--might be frightening enough for the modern viewer. Or maybe, on a good day, enlightening enough.

A Play of Light: The Still Life Paintings of Janet Fish

2010-01-11T00:07:00.004-06:00

"When people look at realist paintings, they focus on the objects, which I don't think are the subject at all. I think the object is one of the tools, like the paint and the brush. The real subject is the light, movement, and color, and echoes of the objects in one's mind. All those things are part of what I use to make the painting."

    --Janet Fish, qtd. in the exhibition pamphlet for "The Art of Janet Fish" (October 2, 2009-January 17, 2009, Naples Museum of Art).

Janet Fish is known for her vibrant and colorful paintings which play with light, shape, and texture. Like still-life, many of her works feature glassworks, foodstuffs, cut flowers, and domestic objects--all rendered in jewel-like colors that she suggests are inspired by her island upbringing. Yet as the curators of this exhibit suggest, Fish is not a "realist" proper, but an artist whose work intersects abstract expressionism with realism to create expansive, bright and "juicy surfaces."

  As is well-known, the sensory perception of fragrance is closely linked to memory. A familiar fragrance can prompt a mental journey into one's past. Yet the sensory perception of subtle differences in light similarly draws the mind away from the mundanities of the present and into an alternative dimension. On my first pass through this exhibition--which was sort of like a domestic coral reef---nothing much caught my eye. But on my third pass, as I began to linger over certain paintings, I moved into a more meditative state---developing a keener awareness of the possibilities of the present and a heightened interest in the everyday. The domestic scenery--while exotic--is not unfamiliar.

I was most drawn to one painting, "Cracked Eggs and Milk" (2005) featuring some particularly poignantly rendered cantaloupe-orange glass bowls and raw golden yolks set off in morning light. The preparations of breakfast or brunch (I'm not attuned enough to the subtleties of light to discern the precise hour of the morning that Fish captures but in my mind's eye it is 8 am) appear in freeze-frame---we have no desire to see the ingredients to come together or to watch the meal being consumed. There is an intense feeling of pleasure in the moment-- taking note of it, being in it. It is a very rare experience to linger over anything, to reflect on anything, to be rather than to do--to experience the luxury of time. Fish's art thwarts our desires to get to the end of things. She captures a familiar reality and yet makes it startlingly unfamiliar in its delicate allusion to what we fail to notice and what we take for granted.

Anxiety, Hope: Bruijn's Images

2010-01-04T00:10:00.004-06:00

    "Ansel Adams once said that the principal attribute required of a good photographer is knowing where to stand. But he and Brynn know that, even standing in the perfect place, the photographer must, in a split second, capture that special moment while also noting a multitude of issues, including light, shadow, composition, shutter speed and focus.

     Brynn's photographs are illustrative of her mastery over these complexities. Look, for instance, at her exquisitely eloquent composition Still Waiting. In this image, where the sun is just beginning to push away the night, workers wait in the cold early morning darkness to be selected for that day's field work. Some have already been chosen and are lining up for the bus that will take them to work; those not selected sit huddled while trying to keep warm with coffee or stand with their hoods up and hands jammed into their pockets. The stark dualities of the moment are powerfully captured--the contrast between day and night, work and idleness, inclusion and exclusion, hope and uncertainty. Instead of a dawn ripe with possibilities, Brynn helps us recognize in this metaphorically brilliant image that, for these individuals, each new day begins with the same overwhelming anxiety."

---Michael Culver, Director and Chief Curator, Naples Museum of Art, Exhibition pamphlet for "Images of Hope: Immokalee--Looking Forward, Looking Back, Photography by Brynn Bruijn" on exhibit December 1, 2009--February 7, 2010.

Michael Culver's close reading of this Brynn Bruijn photograph suggests that the technical competence and artistry of the photographer resides in his or her sense of perspective in the physical/geographical as well as the narrative sense of the word. In this exhibition, Bruijn captures the tensions inherent in the lives of the residents of Immokalee, a town of 25,000 whose population "expand[s] to 40,000 during the agricultural season" (Mary George, President and CEO of the Community Foundation of Collier County.) With grossly inadequate housing--with respect to quantity and quality--many of Bruijn's photographs document the physical interiors of impoverishment. Indeed, about half of these families live below the poverty line.

But as Culver acknowledges, Bruijn's perspective also exposes the psychological interiors of Immokalee's citizens, whose struggles, anxieties, and desires are not so easily discerned.  Currently on exhibit at the Naples Museum of Art--a mere 30 miles from Immokalee--the discordant environs of wealthy and luxurious Naples throws Bruijn's subject matter into relief.   Yet her work evokes deeper thinking more so than pity and elides the simpler dichotomies that we might be inclined to ascribe to it. In this sense, Bruijn's work as a photographer also shifts our perspective as viewers, drawing us in, mandating our reflection on where we reside in relationship to the people featured in these images.

The curation of this exhibition supports this end. For example, one placard informs the visitor that 70% of all vegetables consumed between late October and May are produced in southern Florida. We begin to reflect on what we consume, whether it was touched by the photographic subjects--whether they are a part of us--are actually sustaining us.  This is only the beginning of this line of thought, which takes us to an uncomfortable place in which we are prompted to acknowledge the arbitrariness of our own good fortune and (perhaps) the essential insecurity of our own position. Yet, we ultimately turn back in fascination at the subjects themselves whose anxious hope is so painstakingly rendered. "Hope" is not a simplistic term to describe this state, but one that captures what it means to be unsettled---in every sense of the word.

Mother Love

2009-12-28T21:48:00.002-06:00

"At bedtime, instead of my charming boy, ... I found a lifeless corpse--laid out in the white robes of innocence and death. Though I wept and pressed him, he could not look at me. How could I endure it--much less compose myself--but by believing him gone to perfect rest and happiness.--there to wait for his father and mother."

---Diary of Louisa Park, qtd. in Robin Jaffee Frank's Love and Loss: American Portrait and Mourning Miniatures (2000). Frank accredits Louisa Park's diary entries for Dec 14 and 24, 1800 (American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA) and quotes from Nancy Schrom Dye and Daniel Blake Smith, "Mother Love and Infant Death, 1750-1920" Journal of American History 73 (September 1986), 332.

I have selected this quote from Robin Jaffee Frank's superb volume on portrait and mourning miniatures, a book that elegantly traces the history of this artistic and decorative form. This particular quote does not reference the portrait (or the material culture of mourning) that are the subjects of Frank's book, but it does suggests the sentimental underpinnings of the early nineteenth century that located comfort in portrait miniatures, hairwork, and other relics of the dead. What draws me to this quote, however, is the way that it captures the univeral aspect of grief --the seeming impossibility of "enduring" loss. The death of a child disrupts the natural order of things and cannot be fathomed. The acceptance of death that marked an earlier era gives way to the more reassuring promise of reunion between mother and child.

In my title, I tip my hat to the late blogger, Cancer Baby who died from ovarian cancer in May of 2006 at the age of 33. Her entry "(M)otherlove" a poem that documents her own mother's stunned --yet silent reaction--to her question, "What will you do if I die?" comes to mind as I work through Frank's art history work.

Superstition: The Power of Basil

2009-12-12T12:27:00.003-06:00

"The Creole sauntered across to the counter and nipped the herb which still lay there.

          'Mr. Frowenfeld, you know what some very excellent people do with this?
          They rub it on the sill of the door to make the money come into the house.'

Joseph stopped aghast with the drawer half drawn.

          'Not persons of intelligence and-----'

          'All kinds. It is only some of the foolishness which they take from the slaves. Many of your best people consult the voudou horses.' "

This quote is taken from George Washington Cable's The Grandisssimes (1880) a novel set in New Orleans at the time of the Louisiana Purchase. In this scene, Agricola Fusilier instructs the newest apothecary, the northern born Joseph Frowenfeld, in the local practice of voudou. The herb in question is basil or basilic and it has been requested of Frowenfeld by the major female character of the novel, Aurore Nancanou, who does not have enough money to make rent. Frowenfeld, who is the naif for most of this novel, is surprised by the citizenry's superstitious beliefs.

For Cable, superstition is but one outer manifestations of a society that is weak and rotten--economically, politically, and racially. Seemingly exotic--much like the landscape, flora and fauna---Creole superstitions are nevertheless part of a system of beliefs that is irrational and that relocates agency in spirits rather than in human effort or worthiness. I've written about the power of herbs before. And while this is not the most significant passage in Cable's novel, it is interesting to think about the strong hold that superstition has on the imagination--even in contemporary times. The idea that charms can safeguard us, or that supernatural beings can work to our advantage is a persistent one. If Cable's assessment is historically specific in some ways, it also underscores something about human fears about the essential insecurity of life and the way we look to the material world for reassurance of our good fortune.

Honeysuckle Blossoms

2009-12-10T23:01:00.002-06:00

"A few days ago you and your mother came home with flowers...You had honeysuckle, and you showed me how to suck the nectar out of the blossoms. You would bite the little tip off a flower and then hand it to me, and I pretended I didn't know how to go about it, and I would put the whole flower in my mouth, and pretend to chew it and swallow it, or I'd act as if it were a little whistle and try to blow through it, and you'd laugh and laugh and say, ""No! no! no!! And then I pretended I had a bee buzzing around in my mouth, and you said, "No, you don't, there wasn't any bee!" and I grabbed you around the shoulders and blew into your ear and you jumped up as though you thought maybe there was a bee after all, and you laughed, and then you got serious and you said, "I want you to do this." And then you put your hand on my cheek and touched the flower to my lips, so gently and carefully, and said, "Now sip." You said, "You have to take your medicine." So I did, and it tasted exactly like honeysuckle, just the way it did when I was your age and it seemed to grow on every fence post and porch railing in creation."

--Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (2004)

I knew that if I searched long and hard enough, that I would locate a quote devoted to explaining how to extract the "honey" from honeysuckle. I was surprised, however, to locate one that also documents the bittersweetness of advanced parenthood and the recognition of one's own mortality. In this quote, a man in his seventies whose health is failing is reintroduced to the succulence of honeysuckle by his very young son. The poignancy of this scene and the intense feeling of longing that it evokes is dependent on the juxtaposition of "medicine" and nectar, spring blossoms and the late of autumn of life. But it is also clear that the nostalgic practice of honeysuckle sipping--which is both familiar to the speaker and yet also made new through the experience of rediscovering it with his son-- is a secular ritual. In this simple pleasure, we discern a gesture towards historical continuity.

Adultery and Suicide

2009-12-09T09:17:00.002-06:00

"His Wife had said: 'If you don't give her up, I'll throw myself from the roof.' He had not given her up, and his wife had thrown herself from the roof."

--Edith Wharton, "The Day of the Funeral"

Leave it to Wharton to treat two taboo subjects with dry humor in the opening sentences of this short story which reflects on adultery and its aftermath.

Euthanasia

2009-12-07T21:36:00.004-06:00

"La vraie morale se moque de la morale...
We perish because we follow other men's examples...
Socrates used to call the opinions of the many by the name of Lamiae--bugbears to frighten children...."

---Edith Wharton, The Fruit of the Tree (1907)

In Edith Wharton's The Fruit of the Tree a young nurse, Justine, administers an overdose of morphine to her friend Bessy, who has been paralyzed in a riding accident. Justine discusses Bessy's case with her doctors, her clergyman, and her lawyer--all of whom confirm that "human life is sacred" and that she must be kept alive at all costs. Stumbling into the library at Bessy's estate, Justine finds these quotes (among others) carefully pencilled into a flyleaf in a volume of Bacon that belongs to Bessy's husband, John. These little snippets, taken from Pascal, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius, provide her with the strength of conviction that she needs to euthanize her friend. Yet, while Justine never doubts the rightness of her decision, she is made to pay the price for venturing outside the bounds of societal constraints and norms.

One of the book's most interesting twists is its entwinement of euthanasia with feminist politics---that a woman could make a rational (as opposed to emotional) decision to end her friend's life is thought to be the most disturbing aspect of the case. The other characters are willing to let Justine off the hook if only she will confess to having made the decision while distraught over her friend's condition. But because she insists on defending herself by explaining her careful thinking, she is condemned.

These quotes induce goose-bumps and provoke deep contemplation about how we arrive at our sense of what is right and what is wrong. The rules we live by are never so simple and so clear as we might wish for them to be.

Spirochetes

2009-12-02T16:01:00.003-06:00

" 'What happens is that the spirochetes, if they aren't treated right away, change form, so that the treatment can never catch up with the disease. Each time the doctor tries something new, the form is different. The disease goes deeper and deeper into your system. This man has it in his spinal cord, and it's gone into his brain, he has neurological symptoms. Now he's going to doctors who have it themselves, to see how they're treating their own diseases.'

I stare down at my arm, mesmerized with horror.

As she talks, against my will, I am picturing the spirochetes in my own body, spiraling deeper and deeper into my defenseless system, burrowing their way into my spinal fluid, sliding unstoppably into the crevices of my brain. Each word she speaks makes this real, inevitable, incontrovertible.

All my feelings of triumph, of power and victory, are sliding downward, cascading toward ruin. She is destroying everything I have accomplished."

---Roxana Robinson, "The Treatment" in A Perfect Stranger (2005)

In this very tight short story, Roxana Robinson captures the struggle of a middle-aged woman who is most likely afflicted with late-stage Lyme disease. Robinson has tone-perfect dialogue and some very memorable descriptive passages, in particular one that focuses on the apparatus through which the protagonist adminsters her intravenous antibiotic, Rocephin. What is most remarkable, however, is this story's accurate rendering of the mental enervation of chronic illness, and the divisive and humliating boundary between those who enjoy good health and those who struggle with disease. In this passage, a patient who has managed to convince herself that she is recovering from her infection has her healing vision dismantled by a nurse (memorably described as "powerful and clumsy, like a shaggy little bull") who reveals the devastating reality of her disease. Robinson's account of the "other[ness]" of disease is a crucial text for anyone who must treat patients with serious illnesses--Lyme disease or otherwise.

'A Gastronomic Rainbow': Happy Thanksgiving!

2009-11-26T11:41:00.001-06:00

Happy Thanksgiving from The Bee Dance. Today's quote is taken from a Scribner's Monthly essay published in 1871. The essay rues the passing of the traditional Thanksgiving feasts of old even as its exclamatory prose seeks to preserve the excitement of the holiday. I was very much torn over whether to entitle this entry "A Gastronomic Rainbow" or simply "Ineffable Pork and Beans." Could pork and beans ever be so good as to defy description? Apparently so.

"Who that ever tasted can forget the aroma of those dusk-red depths where yet the fragrance of blazing hickory lingered? What chicken-pies emerged thence! What brown bread, what unimaginable piglets in crisp armor of crackling, what ineffable pork and beans! [...] How we longed to eat more pumpkin pie, and more; how, following the advice of our elders ,we stood up and 'jumped three jumps' and then couldn't. How even our favorite little tarts, crowned with ruby jelly, passed us by unscathed, while we sat, replete and sorrowing! [...] Shall we ever again see those marvelous spheres, one for each person, whereon, in many-colored segments, cranberry pie, and apple, mince, Marlborough, peach, pumpkin, and custard, displayed themselves like a gastronomic rainbow? Shall we ever rove with unsated fork through a genuine, old-fashioned Indian pudding, of the land which in those good days bubbled day and night over wood fires, spicy as Arabia, brown as chesnut, flavorous, delicate?

---"Home and Society," Scribner's Monthly: an illustrated magazine for the people, Volume 003, Issue 2 (December 1871), 240-242.

Today, let us celebrate the old rituals and traditions that we have maintained and welcome the new ones that we have infused into this most American of holidays. [Finally, I am thankful for the outstanding Making of America project at Cornell University (and also at Michigan) which enabled me to bring you this quote from the comfort of my couch, and in view of the televised Macy's Thanksgiving Parade.]

Paean to Pies

2009-11-20T16:48:00.003-06:00

Today, I offer you yet another quote from A Modern Instance-- one that is straightforward yet still delightful in its humorously extended reference to savory pies. In an ode to a pastry that sounds suspiciously similiar to its twentieth century cousin, the Hot Pocket, the speaker posits pie as a rival to fish in its power to nourish the brain and feed the imagination.  Only a reference to pecan pie could improve this paean to pies. As the expression goes, The Pies Have It.

     "He turned round, and cut out of a mighty mass of dough in a tin trough a portion, which he threw down on his table and attacked with a rolling pin. 'That means pie, Mr. Hubbard,' he explained, 'and pie means meat pie--or squash pie, at a pinch. Today's pie-baking day. But you needn't be troubled on that account. So's tomorrow, and so was yesterday. Pie twenty-one times a week is the word and don't you forget it....they say old Agassiz recommended fish as the best food for the brain. Well, I don't suppose but what it is. But I don't know but what pie is more stimulating to the fancy. I never saw anything like meat pie to make ye dream.'
     'Yes,' said Bartley, nodding gloomily, 'I've tried it.'
     Kinney laughed. 'Well, I guess folks of sedentary pursuits, like you and me, don't need it; but these fellows that stamp round in the snow all day, they want something to keep their imagination goin'. And I guess pie does it.' "

---William Dean Howells, A Modern Instance (1882)

Don't Chase Boys

2009-11-18T16:53:00.001-06:00

Or so suggests William Dean Howells in this quote taken from his novel of 1882, A Modern Instance. In this scene, a mother and father contemplate their daughter's engagement to a slick journalist. We might think of their advice as the nineteenth century rendition of the more familiar parental refrain. Sound advice? Or perhaps not? Twenty-first century parenting might sound a bit different...

"He's smart enough, "said Mrs. Gaylord, as before.

"M-yes, most too smart," replied her husband, a little more quickly than before. "He's smart enough even if she wasn't, to see from the start that she was crazy to have him, and that isn't the best way to begin life for a married couple, if I'm a judge."

"It would killed her if she hadn't got him. I could see 't was wearin' on her every day, more and more. She used to fairly jump, every knock she'd hear at the door; and I know sometimes, when she was afraid he wasn't coming, she used to go out, in hopes't she sh'd meet him; I don't suppose she allowed to herself that she did it for that--Marcia's proud."

"M-yes," said the Squire, "she's proud. And when a proud girl makes a fool of herself about a fellow, it's a matter of life and death with her. She can't help herself. She lets go everything."

---William Dean Howells, A Modern Instance (1882)

Decomposition, Or, "Maggots Already"

2009-11-15T19:57:00.001-06:00

This blog showcases composition and seeks to foster creative activity through the reading, collecting, exhibiting, and curating of "pollen" as food for thought and the inspiration for future productions.  It is therefore quite odd to be offering a quote that showcases decomposition and yet may still inspire the same sort of reflections.

Today's quote is taken from Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild (which was also made into a film released in the fall of 2007) which documents the life and untimely death of the young Christopher McCandless, who ventured into the Alaskan wilderness in the early summer of 1992 and died three months later.    Krakauer's book offers deeper insights than the film into Chris's own writings. In this scene, Chris describes his futile efforts to preserve a moose that he has killed. The appearance of the maggots indicates his failure and he second-guesses his slaughtering of the moose. In these diary entries he appears as earnest yet youthfully idealistic. The maggots appear as a naturalist convention in this work, underscoring the harshness and struggle that survival in the wilderness entails--and, perhaps, the inevitability of our own decomposition.    The selection begins with Krakauer's words and moves into the diary entries:

"Alaskan hunters know that the easiest way to preserve meat in the bush is to slice it into thin strips and then air-dry it on a makeshift rack. But McCandless, in his naivete, relied on the advice of hunters he'd consulted in South Dakota, who advised him to smoke his meat, not an easy task under the circumstances. 'Butchering extremely difficult,' he worte in the journal on June 10. 'Fly and mosquito hordes. Remove intestines, liver, kidneys, one lung, steaks. Get hindquarters and leg to stream.'

June 11: 'Remove heart and other lung. Two front legs and head. Get rest to stream. Haul near cave. Try to protect with smoker.'

June 12: 'Remove half rib-cage and steaks. Can only work nights. Keep smokers going.'

June 13: 'Get remainder of rib-cage, shoulder and neck to cave. Start smoking.'

June 14: 'Maggots already! Smoking appears ineffective. Don't know, looks like disaster. I now wish I had never shot the moose. One of the greatest tragedies of my life.'    "

---Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild (1996)

Bonbons in Abundance

2009-11-13T19:30:00.003-06:00

Today's quote is rich.

"A few days later, a box arrived for Mrs. Pontellier from New Orleans. It was from her husband. It was filled with friandises, with luscious and toothsome bits--the finest of fruits patés, a rare bottle or two, delicious syrups, and bonbons in abundance.
"Mrs. Pontellier was always very generous with the contents of such a box; she was quite used to receiving them when away from home, The patés, and fruit were brought to the dining-room; the bonbons were passed around. And the ladies, selecting with daity and discriminating fingers and a little greedily, all declared that Mr. Pontellier was the best husband in the world."

---Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899)

Summer Epiphanies

2009-11-11T13:45:00.003-06:00

As promised, I am reprising my focus on artist Joseph Cornell. Today's quotes come once again from the superb volume of Cornell's letters and diary entries edited by Mary Ann Caws. Whereas the last set of quotes focused on dreams about food, these will focus on the experience of summer and its relationship to the artist's inspiration. This season, while represented most commonly by the image of the hammock, also suggests the hum of mental activity, of progress in art. When Cornell writes that he has a "very warm feeling at night" it's clear that he is not referring to the temperature of his room or of the outdoors. As Caws clarifies, the asterisk (*) denotes those days on which Cornell experienced an epiphany. Summer is a season of discovery and wonder.

*On the weather beaten gray picket
fence running along the old red
Barn vibrant blue morning glories
entwined.
---Summer 1945

August 1946 *
during hot days gathered examples of Golden rod grasses on bike--threshed them down to pulverized
essences for OWL boxes--the pungent odor filled the cellar with Indian summer~very warm feeling at night.

7/17/56 Tues. at home
drop of water too deep for sun so-so day in box work~glistening in sun around 3 PM sunny after rain etc. yesterday grasshopper on side of house
bumblebee in the snapdragons

Friday August 29, '58 Labor Day weekend
[...] scent of mint (atomizer) brings the Adirondacks back* with that poetry of memory and surprise

--Joseph Cornell, Joseph Cornell's Theater of the Mind: Selected Diaries, Letters, and Files, edited by Mary Ann Caws (2000)

Potatoes = Buried Treasure

2009-11-08T09:26:00.004-06:00

One good turn deserves another and so today's brief quote will once again showcase Tasha Tudor's Garden, this time in a self-explanatory quote that illustrates the role of the imagination in enlivening daily chores:

" 'I love to dig potatoes. It's quite satisfying, you know, like searching for buried treasure. Although it can be irksome when your spade slices a plump, promising potato in two.' The naughty corgyn, always out for a lark, go running off with potatoes in their mouths and gnaw them ruthlessly to pieces before rushing back to steal more tuberous victims. But there are plenty of potatoes to spare..."

--Tasha Tudor's Garden, Text by Tovah Martin with Photographs by Richard W. Brown

Heirlooms

2009-11-07T09:24:00.007-06:00

Today's quote comes from Tovah Martin and Richard Brown's whimsical book Tasha Tudor's Garden. Text and image come together in this biopic to afford the reader/visitor intimate access to Tasha's world and the inspirations for her art. Her rustic home in southern Vermont was modeled after an 18th century farmhouse and created by her son Seth with hand-tools. Tasha's rootedness in the past is manifested in the roots of her garden and gardening practices as well. It is difficult to determine whether it is most accurate to describe Tasha as "out of sync" with the time period in which she was born or simply highly skilled at hitching historical time to the present. Her life seems to bear few of the "seams" of a reenactment of the past (in which one is always conscious of the closeness of the contemporary world--often jarringly so.) If time in the garden is cyclical, heirloom plants and heirloom practices confirm the linear nature of time by underscoring the importance of repetition in promoting remembrance. Yet the very concept of the heirloom also acknowledges the passage of time. The heirloom garden allows us to experience the excitement of the appearance--and reappeance of the past. Curiously, heirloom plants are relics of the past but also made brand new ...over and over again.

"If Tasha's garden is a fantasy, its vision is rooted in the past... She plants varieties that would have been perfectly comfortable in a cottage garden several generations ago. The oldest roses nearly extinct dianthus cultivars, heirloom narcissus dug from her mother's garden---these are the sorts of plant[s] that find their home with Tasha....we are bound together by a mutual respect for heirloom plants. Tasha lures her friends up to ther garden with descriptions of seldom-seen primroses, peonies, lilies, and cinnamon pinks. And we come to discover those plants and more combined with inspired artistry. We wander among divine daffodils framed in a lacework of crab apples and along forget-me-not paths disappearing into flowery glades. We become transfixed by this place lost in time. Then we tarry by lamplight until late in the evening, listening spellbound to stories of eccentric uncles with incredible green thumbs and chimney campanulas stretching nearly seven feet tall. We come to share the fantasy."

--Tasha Tudor's Garden, Text by Tovah Martin, Photographs by Richard W. Brown (1994)

Horoscope

2009-11-06T15:28:00.005-06:00

The word "horoscope" derives from the French words for "hour" and "season" as well as the Greek word for "observer." To locate destiny in the alignment of celestial bodies is nonsensical and yet enticingly dramatic.

Those who favor this quote will know that it was also chosen by Lucy Maud Montgomery for her book Anne of Green Gables.

"The good stars met in your horoscope,
Made you of spirit and fire and dew--"

--Robert Browning (1812-1889), "Evelyn Hope"

What Not to Wear

2009-11-06T00:35:00.002-06:00

"On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold-thread, appeared the letter A. It was so artistically done, and with so much fertility and gorgeous luxuriance of fancy, that it had all the effect of a last and fitting decoration to the apparel which she wore; and which was of a splendor in accordance with the taste of the age, but greatly beyond what was allowed by the sumptuary regulations of the colony....It had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.
'She hath good skill at her needle, that's certain,' remarked one of her female spectators; 'but did ever a woman, before this brazen hussy, contrive such a way of showing it!' "

----Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850)

Facing It Part IV: Faith / Face

2009-10-28T21:08:00.007-05:00

It was difficult to think of a title for today's installment of this series, "Facing It." And so, at some point in the future, the title may be exchanged for something less dramatic. Below are three quotes from Annie Dillard's "Holy the Firm," an essay/story about a writer's quest to locate meaning in the tragic burning and disfigurement of a seven year old girl. The narrator conveys the extreme suffering of the child as well as her own agonizing quest to find an answer to a philosophical question: "What is God's relationship to the substance and experiences of this world?" If the question seems rather pedestrian, the sort of question on which people typically reflect (or worse, pontificate upon) in the aftermath of tragedy--the narrator's insights prove less so. She offers neither the voice of complete reassurance nor the voice of abjection.

The first quote links very closely to my two earlier entries, here and here, in which the role of the face is clearly a public one:

"How can people think that artists seek a name? A name, like a face, is something you have when you're not alone."

And here is the second:

"You might as well be a nun. You might as well be God's chaste bride, chased by plunderers to the high caves of solitude, to the hearthless rooms empty of voices, and of warm limbs hooking your heart to the world. Look how he loves you! Are you bandaged now, or loose in a sterilized room? Wait till they hand you a mirror, if you can hold one, and know what it means. That skinlessness, that black shroud of flesh in strips on your skull, is your veil. There are two kinds of nun, out of the cloister or in. You can serve or you can sing, and wreck your heart in prayer, working the world's hard work. Forget whistling: you have no lips for that, or for kissing the face of a man or a child. Learn Latin, and it please my Lord, learn the foolish downward look called Custody of the Eyes."

And finally, in a last segment, the narrator imaginatively assumes the sacrificial role for the young girl:

"Julie Norwich; I know. Surgeons will fix your face. This will all be a dream, an anecdote, something to tell your husband one night: I was burned. Or if you're scarred, you're scarred. People love the good not much less than the beautiful, and the happy as well, or even just the living, for the world of it all, and heart's home. You'll dress your own children, sticking their arms through the sleeves. Mornings you'll whistle, full of the pleasure of days, and afternoons this or that, and nights cry love. So live. I'll be the nun for you. I am now."

--Annie Dillard, "Holy the Firm" (1977)

Facing It Part III: Concealment

2009-10-25T20:53:00.002-05:00

Today's quote is taken from Nella Larsen's novel Passing, published in 1929. The book focuses on the relationship between two light-skinned, racially mixed childhood acquaintances, Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry. Reunited after a number of years, Irene, a New Yorker, learns that Clare is passing for white in Chicago and has married a racist white man who does not know of her past or her identity. He jokes that Clare is getting "darker and darker" and refers to her by the pet name of "Nig." Clare lives in fear of being discovered yet keeps taking considerable risks to reunite with the African-American community she left behind. In this scene, Irene describes the "polite insolence" as well as the mystery conveyed through Clare's unusual features:

"[...] she'd always had that pale gold hair, which, unsheared still, was drawn loosely back from a broad brow, partly hidden by the small close hat. Her lips, painted a brilliant geranium-red, were sweet and sensitive and a little obstinate. A tempting mouth. The face across the forehead and cheeks was a trifle too wide, but the ivory skin had a peculiar soft lustre. And the eyes were magnificent! dark, sometimes absolutely black, always luminous, and set in long, black lashes. Arresting eyes, slow and mesmeric, and with, for all their warmth, something withdrawn and secret about them.
Ah! Surely! They were Negro eyes! mysterious and concealing. And set in that ivory face under that bright hair, there was about them something exotic."

--Nella Larsen, Passing (1929)

Facing It Part II: Putting on a New Face

2009-10-18T21:25:00.002-05:00

Today's quote comes from a New York Times article on the first U.S. face transplant that took place in December 2008 at the Cleveland Clinic. The exact date of the 23 hour surgery, the identity of the recipient and the donor, and the cause of the woman's facial injuries are not identified in this article. However, it does offer surgeon Maria Sieminonow's matter-of-fact insight on the value of a face, generally speaking:

"'You need a face to face the world.'"

Sieminonow's commentary seems almost too direct and too reductive when compared to the nuanced and elegant treatment of facial trauma as expressed in Lucy Grealy's account, which I wrote about in my last entry. Nevertheless, her commentary proves interesting in that it suggests a gap between the identity of an individual and his/her face. So significant are the injuries of face transplant patients that a passable face--even one that bears little resemblance to the original face of the patient--is a prerequisite for "facing" others. You need a face. The cadaveric face--a permanent mask of sorts-- is a prop for negotiating the world.

--Lawrence K. Altman, "First U.S. Face Transplant Described," New York Times, December 17, 2008

Facing It Part I: Mirror Image

2009-10-15T23:27:00.007-05:00

In the first quote from this multi-part series on faces, writer Lucy Grealy describes the "habits of self-consciousness" to which she succumbs in the years following her lengthy bout with Ewing's sarcoma of the jaw. Diagnosed at the age of nine, Grealy endures 2 1/2 years of chemotherapy, the removal of a third of her jaw, and dozens of reconstructive surgeries--none of which prove successful. In this scene, Grealy describes her surprise at seeing her own reflection in a mirror following one of her reconstructive surgeries--an image that immediately dismantles her false sense of confidence by confronting her with a reality that does not coincide with her own perceptions. What is perhaps most remarkable about this quote is the way in which Grealy uses the mirror image to suggest exposure as opposed to reflection--the gap between how she imagines herself and how she is seen. The mirror offers only a temporary answer to the question: "What do other people see when they look at me?":

"Spending as much time as I did looking in the mirror, I thought I knew what I looked like. So it came as a shock one afternoon toward the end of that summer when I went shopping with my mother for a new shirt and saw my face in the harsh fluorescent light of the fitting room. Pulling the new shirt on over my head, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in a mirror that was itself being reflected in a mirror opposite, reversing my face as I usually saw it. I stood there motionless, the shirt only halfway on, my skin extra pale from the lighting, and saw how asymmetrical my face was. How had that happened? Walking up to the mirror, reaching up to touch the right side, where the graft had been put in only a year before, I saw clearly that nost of it had disappeared, melted away into nothing. I felt distraught at the sight and even more distraught that it had taken so long to notice. My eyes had been secretly working against me, making up for the asymmetry as it gradually reappeared. This reversed image of myself was the true image, the way other people saw me...That unexpected revelation in the store's fitting room mirror marked a turning point in my life. I began having overwhelming attacks of shame at unpredictable intervals" (185).

--Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face (1994)

Grealy granted Charlie Rose an interview in which she discusses her book.

Hair Part VI: Honor Killing

2009-10-14T09:44:00.002-05:00

I have selected today's quote from a New York Times article from 2004 by Hadil Jawad and Lauren Sandler. As Sandler explains, the tradition of honor killing "gives family members the right to kill a woman who has sexual intercourse (even if it's a case of rape) without her family's permission." In her interview with Ms. Jawad, included in the article in translation, she attempts to capture how this practice affects the family dynamic in surprising ways.

Having read accounts of women who have been disfigured and killed through the practice--many of these accounts quite graphic---this particular quote captured my attention for its directness as well as its understatement of what this practice can entail. As Ms. Jawad recalls:

"When I was a young woman and still living with my family, I once went out to the market and let my hair down my back without tying it up. My brother saw me, and when I came back home, he hit me repeatedly with a hard plastic hose. I nearly died.

My brother was very difficult to live with and would not allow my five sisters or me go out of the house or wear trousers. My father was also strict. My mother was helpless; she could not open her mouth."

The reference to hair appears only in passing, and yet in conjunction with Ms. Jawad's reflections on her mother's muteness, it suggests how we assert ourselves through our bodies as well as through our words. Although the exposure of hair might suggest the importance of modesty, conjoined with muteness and helplessness it also suggests the importance of containment, and the threat of self-expression.

Ms. Jawad later fell in love with a married man with children, and the two eloped, eventually becoming refugees in Pakistan, and finally returning to Baghdad after Saddam Hussein's regime ended. While Ms. Jawad's actions seem to suggest a sense of agency, her testimony reveals her curiously bifurcated feelings about her family upon her return to her homeland:

"I was terrified that someone from my family might see me. Yet at the same time, I was eager to see them. I heard that my sisters are married now, and that my youngest sister married an old man who was married and had a big family. When I walk down the street, I worry that someone from my family will recognize me and kill me. I try not to show it but I am terrified. I have no objection to death, but it seems unfair: my only crime is that I fell in love with someone and wanted to marry him."

--Hadil Jawad and Lauren Sandler, "When Love Is a Crime," New York Times, October 7, 2004

Hair Part V: Big Hair/Bald Head, Or, An Allegory

2009-10-13T09:41:00.006-05:00

Today's quote comes from Charles Chesnutt's short story "The Goophered Grapevine." This story was first published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1887, and was reprinted in Chesnutt's collection The Conjure Woman (1899). In this tale, a plantation owner has the conjure woman, Aunt Peggy, put a "goopher" on his scuppernong vines to prevent them from being eaten by slaves from other plantations in the vicinity. The "goopher" is supposed to cause those who pilfer the grapes to die within twelve months. Unfortunately, one of his own slaves, Henry, eats the scuppernongs. While the overseer takes Henry to Aunt Peggy to remove the goopher, she is only able to partialy remove it. Henry's state of heath begins to follow the life cycle of the grapes--he waxes in the summer and wanes in the winter. His master, seeing an opportunity to capitalize on this new situation, begins to sell him during his waxing period and re-purchase him during his waning months. Gradually, Henry begins to fade away in a story that is an allegory of slavery's misuse and destruction of both land and bodies. This quote describes Henry's new life cycle in terms of the growth of his hair. While initially "bald as a sweet potato" as the story goes, he begins to exhibit hair that resembles the grape vines--unmanageable "grapy hair," the "biggest hair on the plantation":

"So Henry 'n'int his head wid de sap out'n de big grapevime des ha'f way 'twix' de quarters en de big house, en de goopher nebber wuk agin him dat summer. But de beatenes' thing you eber see happen ter Henry. Up ter dat time he wuz ez ball ez a sweeten' 'tater, but des ez soon ez de young leaves begun ter come out on de grapevimes, de ha'r begun ter grow out on Henry's head, en by de middle er de summer he had de bigges' head er ha'r on de plantation. Befo' dat, Henry had tol'able good ha'r 'roun' de aidges, but soon ez de young grapes begun ter come, Henry's ha'r begun to quirl all up in little balls, des like dis yer reg'lar grapy ha'r, en by de time de grapes got tipe his head look des like a bunch er grapes. Combin' it didn' do no good; he wuk at it ha'f de night wid er Jim Crow, en think he git it straighten' out, but in de mawnin' de grapes 'ud be dere des de same. So he gin it up, en tried ter keep de grapes down by havin' his ha'r cut sho't [...]

But de mo's cur'ouses' thing happen' in de fall, when de sap begin ter go down in de grapevimes. Fus', when de grapes 'uz gethered, de knots begun ter straighten out'n Henry's ha'r; en w'en de leaves begin ter fall, Henry's ha'r 'mence ter drap out; en when de vimes 'uz bar', Henry's head wuz baller 'n it wuz in de spring, en he begin ter git ole an stiff in de j'ints ag'in, en paid no mo' 'tention ter de gals dyoin'er de whole winter. En nex' spring, w'en he rub de sap on ag'in, he got young ag'in, en so soopl en libely dat none er de young niggers on de plantation couldn' jump, ner dance, ner hoe ez much cotton ez Henry.

--Charles Chesnutt, "The Goophered Grapevine," In The Conjure Woman, Ed.Richard H. Brodhead

Hair Part IV: High (or Low?) Resolution

2009-10-12T11:23:00.015-05:00

In today's quote taken from Margaret Edson's play W;t, Professor Vivian Bearing reflects on the briefing she receives from her oncologist regarding her upcoming treatment for Stage IV ovarian cancer:

Kelekian: The antineoplastic will          Vivian: Antineoplastic. Anti:
inevitably affect some                           against. Neo: new.
healthy cells, including                          Plastic: To mold. Shap-
those lining the gas-                              ing. Antineoplastic.
trointestinal tract from                           Against new shaping.
the lips to the anus, and
the hair follicles. We                             Hair follicles. My
will of course be reyling                        resolve.
on your resolve to with-
stand some of the more                        "Pernicious" That
pernicious side effects.                          doesn't seem---

Kelekian: Miss Bearing?

Vivian: I beg your pardon?

Kelekian: Do you have any questions so far?

Vivian: Please go on.

--Margaret Edson, Wit: A Play, (1999)

Hair Part III: Assimilation

2009-10-11T09:22:00.003-05:00

Today's quote is taken from Sioux Indian Zitkala-Sa's "American Indian Stories."  This scene describes one of her experiences as a student at a Quaker mission school in Wabash, Indiana--an institution that required assimiliation. In this scene, Zitkala-Sa is hiding under a bed at the mission, and is forceably removed for a haircut:

     Women and girls entered the room. I held my breath and watched them open closet doors and peep behind large trunks. Some one threw up the curtains, and the room was filled with sudden light. What caused them to stoop and look under the bed I do not know. I remember being dragged out, though I resisted by kicking and scratching wildly. In spite of myself, I was carried downstairs and tied fast in a chair.
     I cried aloud, shaking my head all the while until I felt the cold blades of the scissors against my neck, and heard them gnaw off one of my thick braids. Then I lost my spirit. Since the day I was taken from my mother I had suffered extreme indignities. People had stared at me. I had been tossed about in the air like a wooden puppet. And now my long hair was shingled like a coward's! In my anguish I moaned for my mother, but no one came to comfort me. Not a soul reasoned quietly with me, as my own mother used to do; for now I was only one of many little animals driven by a herder.

---Zitkala-Sa ("Red Bird") (b. 1876), American Indian Stories, Legends, and Other Writings, Edited by Cathy N. Davidson and Ada Norris

Hair Part II: Pieces of Me

2009-10-10T12:58:00.003-05:00

Today's quote for this multi-part series on Hair is taken from Helen Sheumaker's fascinating study, Love Entwined: The Curious History of Hairwork in America. This study traces the rise and fall of hairwork (hair jewelry, wreaths, portrait miniatures including locks of hair) as an object of sentiment and devotion as the once hand-made fanciwork became increasingly commercialized:

In the eighteenth century, the sentimental associations of hair were obliquely displayed; by the nineteenth century, hairwork and the sentimentality it conveyed was worn for others to observe. This practice revealed a paradox about sentimentality. While display of one's sentimentality was essential to being regarded as sentimental, that same exhibition could easily be construed as ostentatious, vulgar, and insincere. Fashion was constantly in flux, it was superficial, and it was self-aggrandizing. It opposed the sincerity that women in particular were supposed to possess. Fashion was expressed with goods, and therefore was opposed to the domestic sphere. Thus, those constant fluctuations in styles threatened to undermine the premise of sentimentality itself.
Even as hairwork revealed the dissonance between genuine emotion and frivolous fashionableness, it attempted a remedy. Hair's undeniable relationship to an individual asserted a sincerity of character that transcended the hypocrisy that fahionableness implied. The mid-nineteenth century was the height of the popularity of hairwork perhaps because as fashion was criticized as being particularly hypocritical, hairwork's genuiness was being asserted. On the one hand, hair jewelry was very much a commodity, buttressed as it was by marketing and salesmanship; on the other hand, it was exactly that which could not be completely commodified. Hair jewelry provided a way to forestall the apparent effects of fashion in the market and in the social world" (20-21).

--Helen Sheumaker, Love Entwined: The Curious History of Hairwork in America, (2007)

Hair Part I: Sweet Tensile Strength

2009-10-09T19:10:00.003-05:00

Last week's entries on the boundary between life and death have prompted me to think about material memory, sentiment, and the body. Along these lines, the entries for the next few days will focus on one particular bodily manifestation of sentiment, memory, selfhood, sexuality & health: hair. The first entry is taken from a familiar fairy tale:

"One day, after three years had passed, it happened that a young prince who was hunting in the forest passed close to the tower and saw Rapunzel standing in her window singing and brushing out her hair. She sang so sweetly that the prince fell in love with her at once. But since there was no door to the tower and no stiarway or ladder, he despaired of reaching her. Still, after that day, he went to the forest again and again and made his way to the tower and listened to her songs. One day, as he was standing concealed in the shadowy wood, he saw the wtich come down the path and call, "Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down thy hair." And she, thinking it was the witch, let down her hair, not braided now, but flowing like a golden waterfall, and drew him up."

--"Rapunzel," in The Magic Carpet and Other Tales, Retold by Ellen Douglas with the Illustrations of Walter Anderson (1987)

Boundaries Part VI: Inconceivable

2009-10-08T22:39:00.013-05:00

In this final selection for "Boundaries" I offer you the gift of a poem by Donald Hall from his collection, Without, which documents his wife Jane Kenyon's bout with leukemia and eventual death in 1995 at the age of forty-eight. Today's quote is the third section of "Song for Lucy." It features an object--a tourmaline ring--that underscores the boundary between life and death, the material embodiment of their desperate hope.

     Alone together a moment
on the twenty-second anniversary
     of their wedding,
he clasped her as she stood
     at the sink, pressing
into her backside, rubbing his cheek
     against the stubble
of her skull. He gave her a ring
     of pink tourmaline
with nine small diamonds around it.
     She put it on her finger
and immediately named it Please Don't Die.
     They kissed and Jane
whispered, "Timor mortis conturbat me."

--Donald Hall, Without, (1998)

Boundaries Part V: Dead Bodies

2009-10-05T09:40:00.005-05:00

Today's quote comes from Michael Sappol's study of the rise of anatomy as a medical discipline in the nineteenth century and its relationship to racial, gendered, and class-based identity politics. This study moves fluidly from the dissection table to the funeral parlor, dime museum, and literary works and treatises to trace the complex way in which nineteenth century persons located identity within the body. Here Sappol considers the role of funerary practice in securing the meaning of selfhood:

"If death was a haven in a heartless world, then here the anatomist and the grave robber willfully transgressed. Against the invasion of the body snatchers, the living struggled mightily to protect the honor of their dead, to safeguard the material integrity of their helpless dead selves, to narrate their lives and therefore their deaths. For them selfhood did not terminate with death; rather, death stripped away the duplicitous masks and inessentials of being, leaving an existentially pure residue. Post-mortem photoportraiture, which from the earliest days of photography emerged as one of the most popular genres of the new medium, was intended not so much for spectatorship, but to freeze the self into an iconic last frame--many of the pictures were tucked away as keepsakes, never meant to be displayed, viewed only infrequently or not at all. Nineteenth-century Americans of all classes took this very seriously: how one died fixed symbolically how one lived"(39).
--Michael Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Ninteenth Century America (2002)

Boundaries Part IV: Incarnation

2009-10-03T16:22:00.008-05:00

Today's quotes come Myra Jehlen's essay "F.P." in which she recounts the death of a friend. The first quote captures her encounter with the permanence of death, something she discovers through the unmalleability of her friend's body:

"They said to choose clothes in which they would 'prepare' her. I thought, having had to die, she shouldn't have to undergo being prepared and said I would dress her, not knowing how difficult it is to dress a dead person. To begin with, I couldn't pull out the intravenous tube that still connected her to a morphine drip. The tube had been inserted into a catheter through which she had been undergoing a chemotherapy. When I tried to pull out the tube, blood seeped from the opening of the catheter. So instead I cut the tube and so doing saw that she was dead. I had wanted her to wear a favroite gray cashmere turtleneck, but I couldn't put it on her. She was too heavy, although she weighed less than eighty pounds, and too stiff, so I dressed her in a shift and pants. She looked terrible, yet fully and definitely herself. You're never so wholly incarnate as in death.
When I was dressing my friend, I expected her to help. The utter stillness of her arms and legs filled me with hopelessness."

In the second quote, Jehlen describes her own feeling of being "stuck" in the memory of a last excursion with her friend and "stuck" in the night before she died. But in an interesting twist, she juxtaposes another story of a woman who is "stuck" in the night of her child's birth. As Jehlen muses:

"You get stuck, then, when you meet up with something that makes the limit of your perpetual motion just too obvious.

Stuck, you turn back. My friend didn't appear to me, so I made her appear: one night, I dreamed she had come back to life, or rather that she hadn't died. At first, in my dream, she was as she was in the moments before she died. But, in the dream, as I bent over to see how she was, she grew better and better, until, in the dream, I called out to the doctor to do something, since something could be done."

---Myra Jehlen, "F.P." in Raritan, Spring 2002

Boundaries Part III The Harlem Book of the Dead Part II

2009-10-02T12:14:00.005-05:00

This third installment of quotes focusing on the boundary between life and death (and the second installment of quotes from The Harlem Book of the Dead) features a portion of the interview between Camille Billops and James Van der Zee conducted in his 91st year of life. Van Der Zee not only photographed dead strangers, but also his own mother (who died at seventy-five) and daughter (who died at the age of sixteen). If Van der Zee's responses seem strange to modern ears for their pragmatic viewpoint towards life and death, they also offer a strange comfort in their refusal to make too much of either of these states of being--or perhaps too much of a distinction between either state of being.

The conversation begins with this comment from Van Der Zee:

"Why should a spirited mortal feel proud, when like a swift, fleet meteor or fast-flying cloud, man passes through life to his rest in the grave?" They've asked me, "How do I feel?" I told them that there's nothing to it; you do things the way they ought to be done. I don't see anything to be proud about. It's pretty difficult for a man to feel proud when knowing as he does the short space of time he's here and all paths, even those of our greatest glory, lead but to the grave. So it is very difficult to feel proud when Death says this. You're here today and gone sometimes today."

His description of his feelings about the death of his one-year old son, Emile seems to illustrate a surprising detachment, and yet this word does not capture the whole of his sentiment:

"I think he came when we was living in the Victoria Apartments on Lenox Avenue [in New York City] at that time. He only lived a year, and I didn't get a chance to know too much about him."

Not troubled by his role, he relates a mildly humorous dream that he had about a photographic subject. The humor emanates from his own response to the curious behavior of the subject. But in referencing a dream world Van Der Zee's commentary also draws attention to a space that seems to reside between life and death...the surrealist dream world:

"One time I dreamed I went to make a picture of a dead woman who reached in her chest and took out her heart and threw it over here, then she reached in there and took out something else and threw it over there. I just waited to see if she was going to take out something else...but I wasn't scared or nothing like that in the dream."

And finally, his thoughts on death in general.

Billops: HOW DO YOU SEE DEATH, MR. VAN DER ZEE?

Van Der Zee: So when one more clean shirt lasts me the rest of time. When I pass out on this long journey that I shall ever make and I cease to soothe with soft words and song a heart in which there is an ache, I trust that tears will dim few eyes and those who do weep will soon forget.

Billops (editorial note): (At this point, Mr. Van Der Zee lights up his cigar.)

--Camille Billops, Owen Dodson, & James Van Der Zee, The Harlem Book of the Dead (1978)

Boundaries Part II The Harlem Book of the Dead Part I

2009-10-01T09:41:00.005-05:00

Continuing with the theme of the boundary between life and death, today's group of quotes are taken from Owen Dodson's captions for The Harlem Book of the Dead, an experimental documentary published in 1978. The work as a whole is comprised of commercial funerary images from Harlem of the 1920s and 1930s taken by African-American photographer James Van Der Zee, an interview with Van Der Zee conducted by Camille Billops, and, as mentioned, poems and captions by Owen Dodson. While it is impossible to fully grasp the power of this text without displaying the images, a few brief quotes offer a sense of its strangely pragmatic and yet poignant viewpoint towards death--and life.

Owen Dodson's startling poetic captions illustrate the rhetorical device of prosopopoeia,--revitalizing the dead by allowing them to speak again as in this quote, which accompanies a photograph of a dead man posed by Van Der Zee with the prop of a newspaper:

"I prayed that on the day I died
Nobody else prominent would be dead
The obituary page was supposed to be all about me today.
Florence Mills, the greatest, died on my day
Look-a-here Lord,
I was a faithful servant
Over many a money year."

In others, such as ones featuring parents holding their dead infants, the living address the dead with the hope of reunion:

"You'll always be my baby now, Johnella. Dream sometimes of Papa.
When you marry an angel boy,
The very best,
I'll attend your wedding."

Sometimes the dead speak to each other, as in this caption which accompanies a double funeral (and one of the most resonant of the work):

"We grew so far away from each other
And got lonesome. Please was
Our only vocabulary.
Now and again: Will you be with me please.
A word with a vegetable sound:
Please..."

Tomorrow, excerpts from Camille Billops' interview with Van der Zee...

---Camille Billops, Owen Dodson & James Van Der Zee, with a foreword by Toni Morrison, The Harlem Book of the Dead (1978)

Boundaries Part I: Hibernation

2009-09-30T11:21:00.007-05:00

In this multi-part series, I will feature quotations from works of different eras and genres that share an interest in the blurry boundary between life and death, yet come to radically different conclusions about death's familiarity, permanence, and meaning. The first quote, taken from Anthony Doerr's short story, "The Hunter's Wife" is fairly recent and addresses this subject in the most direct manner. It offers an easy segue into the landscape of these two realms through a discussion of what we might call a death-like state of living....hibernation.

"As he watched, horrified, she turned and placed both hands, spread-fingered, in the thick shag of the bear's chest. Then she lowered her face, as if drinking from the snowy hollow, and pressed her lips to the bear's chest. Her entire head was inside the trees. She felt the soft, silver tips of its fur brush her cheeks. Against her nose one huge rib flexed slightly. She heard the lungs fill and then empty. She heard blood slug through veins. Want to know what he dreams? she asked. Her voice echoed up through the tree and poured from the shorn ends of its hollowed branches. The hunter took his knife from his coat. Summer, her voice echoed. Blackberries. Trout. Dredging his flanks across river pebbles."

--Anthony Doerr, "The Hunter's Wife" in The Shell Collector (2003)

Small in Stature

2009-09-29T09:41:00.006-05:00

Insults for tall people will follow in another quote:

Hermia: "Little again? Nothing but 'low' and 'little'? Why will you suffer her to flout me thus? Let me come to her.

Lysander: Get you gone, you dwarf! You minimus of hindering knotgrass made! You bead, you acorn!

---William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

Eidetic

2009-09-26T10:44:00.004-05:00

"Listen, I will speak of the best of dreams, of what I dreamed at midnight when men and their voices were at rest."

--The Dream of the Rood, late 10th century

Wondrous Layers

2009-09-25T10:13:00.007-05:00

Lawrence Wechsler begins to uncover the many layers of the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Object lessons prove more complicated than we might think:

"[David] was quiet a few moments, and once again the ironylessness seemed momentarily to crack. "You know, certain aspects of this museum you can peel away very easily, but their reality behind, once you peel away those relatively easy layers, is more amazing still than anything those initial layers purport to be. The first layers are just a filter..."
He was quiet another few moments, and just as surely I could sense that the crack was closing up once again, the facade of ironylessness reasserting itself inviolate.
I mentioned the stink ant. "See," he said, "that's an example of the thing about layers. Because at one level, that display works as information, as just this incredibly interesting case study in symbiosis, one of those adaptations so curious and ingenious and wonderful that they almost lead you to question the principle of natural selection itself--could random mutation through geologic time be enough to account for that and so many similar splendors? Nature is more incredible than anything one can imagine.
"But at another level," David continued, "we were drawn to that particular instance because it seemed so metaphorical. That's another one of our mottos here at the museum: 'Ut Translatio Natura.' Nature as Metaphor. I mean, there've been times in my own life when I felt exactly like that ant--impelled, as if possessed, to do things that defy all common sense. That ant is me. I couldn't have summed up my own life better if I'd made him up all by myself."
"But, David," I wanted to say (and didn't) "you did make him up all by yourself!"

--Lawrence Weschler, Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology (1996)

Form

2009-09-23T20:19:00.010-05:00

Edward Said reminds us that form conveys content and in so doing prompts reflection on modern day reading habits. A culture of skimming--indeed, a culture which tends to gut sources simply for simple "facts"--overlooks the importance of the media form itself in conveying the message.

"The striking thing about Palestinian prose and prose fiction is its formal instability: Our literature in a certain very narrow sense is the elusive, resistant reality it tries so often to represent. Most literary critics in Israel and the West focus on what is said in Palestinian writing, who is described, what the plot and contents deliver, their sociological and political meaning. But it is form that should be looked at [...] In Kanafani's Men in the Sun much of the action takes place on the dusty streets of an Iraqi town where three Palestinian men must petition, plead, and bargain with "specialists" to smuggle them across the border into Kuwait. Impelled by exile and dislocation, the Palestinians need to carve a path for themselves in existence, which for them is by no means a given or stable reality. Like the history of the lands they left, their lives seem interrupted just before they could come to maturity and satisfaction; thus each man leaves behind family and responsibilities, to whose exigencies he must answer--unsuccessfully--here in the present. Kanafani's very sentences express instability and fluctuation--the present tense is subject to echoes from the past, verbs of sight give way to verbs of sound or smell, and one sense interweaves with another--in an effort to defend against the harsh present and to protect some particularly cherished framgent of the past. Thus, the precarious actuality of these men in the sun reproduces the precarious status of the writer, each echoing the other.
Our characteristic mode, then, is not a narrative, in which scenes take place seriatim, but rather broken narratives, fragmentary compositions, and self-consciously staged testimonials, in which the narrative voice keeps stumbling over itself, its obligations, and its limitations."

---Edward Said, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (1986)

Cornell Part I: Sweet Dreams

2009-09-22T09:56:00.008-05:00

In Mary Ann Caws' superbly edited volume, the boundaries between Joseph Cornell's dream world and the space of the street begin to blur....Note especially Cornell's passive voice construction in his entry on March 1, 1947 which suggests his receptivity to his environment. This is the first part of a multi-part series which will focus on Cornell and his world....to be continued at a later date.

Feb 8, 1947

dreamed of vaults with all kinds of whipped cream pastries. Rich
day....layer cake~cherry Danish~calm feeling

Mar 1, 1947

~before going into library a pink icinged vanilla cream-filled
rolled cake had been observed~later when stopping by to purchase
some things its disappearance from its plate glass pedestal in
the window brought a real kind of regret of a delicacy that went
beyond the mere regret~lunch in a diner, banana creme pie, doughnut,
and drink

Feb 6, 1950

lunch of pancakes a complete sense of peace (rare) before leaving
for New York

--Joseph Cornell, Joseph Cornell's Theater of the Mind: Selected Diaries, Letters, and Files, edited by Mary Ann Caws (2000)

Material Memory

2009-09-21T20:57:00.004-05:00

In this provocative article, Teresa Barnett defines a type of relic collecting that cannot be captured solely by the Victorian sense of material memory. She uses as her example the schoolteacher and collector Christian Sanderson whose home is now a museum in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania:

[Christian] Sanderson's commemorations were more interesting when they dealt with time itself, when they found a formal structure, that is, which somehow encoded a piece of the lost time they were attempting to preserve. Looked at in this way, his relics, solid objects though they are, can be seen as bits of congealed time. And they are at their most poignant--and intriguing--when, in their reified form, they manage to reenact the vanished time of their making.
To commemorate Woodrow Wilson's death, for instance, Sanderson saved the pages of a counting exercise his schoolchildren were working on as the school bell tolled for the funeral. That exercise may summon memory simply because it was literally "on the spot" at the significant moment, but in a twist that can be seen as a form of wit, it also summons memory through its simple mimetic form: "one, two, three, four, five," like the tolling of the bell itself, as if the children transcribed the knell of mourning onto the coarse paper of their exercise books. Looking at the counting exercise some seventy years later, then, is like summoning up a fragment of 1920s time.

--Teresa Barnett, "Tradition and the Individual Memory: The Case of Christian C. Sanderson" in Acts of Possession: Collecting in America, Edited by Leah Dilworth (2003)

Gone

2009-09-20T09:59:00.008-05:00

In Maile Meloy's short story, bodies and hopes fall away. Missing limbs--dismemberment--signify not only crippling loss but impotence. More quotes to come that feature missing limbs, amputation and bodily damage.

Cort set his water glass down by the sink. "The baby's feet are falling off," he said. "One of them's already gone."
"The tendon isn't growing back and there's nothing there to hold the feet on," he said. "Perfectly good horse except she's not going to have any feet." His voice cracked on the word "feet." He turned and rummaged through his kitchen drawer, beneath unpaid bills and Kite's registration papers, until he found two small keys on a ring that jangled in his hand. I watched him go into the laundry room, unlock the file cabinet there and bring out a pistol with a revolving chamber. The gun dangled awkwardly in his hand [...]
He made a noise that sounded like a sob but couldn't be; I'd never seen him cry. The baby was outside waiting, and Cort's hair against my face smelled like shampoo and hay. He put his arms around me and pulled me closer, and we sat there a long time, not saying anything, so the filly could stay.

---Maile Meloy, "Kite Whistler Aquamarine" in Half in Love (2002)

Mystic Gardening: Two From Jewett

2009-09-19T09:20:00.009-05:00

These wonderfully rich and evocative quotes from Sarah Orne Jewett's masterpiece afford us a view not only of coastal Maine in the nineteenth century, but of alternative medicine during this period. Mrs. Todd's work is understood as an indispensable supplement to that of the town doctor and prompts reflection on our own contemporary commitment to seeking therapies outside of traditional medicine--a sense, perhaps, of the inadequacies of medicine as practiced today. But the pleasure of these passages comes from the sense it gives us of abundance, of a fragrant space filled with plants and people--a fragrance that signifies a human presence.

"Mrs. Todd was an ardent lover of herbs, both wild and tame, and the sea-breezes blew into the low end-window of the house laden with not only sweet-brier and sweet-mary, but balm and sage and borage and mint, wormwood and southernwood. If Mrs. Todd had occasion to step into the far corner of her herb plot, she trod heavily upon thyme, and made its fragrant presence known with all the rest. Being a very large person, her full skirts brushed and bent almost every slender stalk that her feet missed. You could always tell when she was stepping about there, even when you were half awake in the morning, and learned to know, in the course of a few weeks' experience, in exactly which corner of the garden she might be."

"At one side of this herb plot were other growths of a rustic pharmacopoeia, great treasures and rarites among the commoner herbs. There were some strange and pungent odors that roused a dim sense and remembrance of something in the forgotten past. Some of these might once have belonged to sacred and mystic rites, and have had some occult knowledge handed with them down the centuries; but now they pertained only to humble compounds brewed at intervals with molasses or vinegar or spriits in a small cauldron on Mrs. Todd's kitchen stove. They were dispensed to suffering neighbors, who usually came at night as if by stealth, bringing their own ancient-looking vials to be filled."

---Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896)

Managing

2009-09-18T08:42:00.005-05:00

Joan Didion offers some insight into the elite class and its illusion of control:

One thing I noticed during the course of those weeks at UCLA was that many people I knew, whether in New York or California or in other places, shared a habit of mind usually credited to the very successful. They believed absolutely in the power of the telephone numbers they had at their fingertips, the right doctor, the major donor, the person who could facilitate a favor at State or Justice. The management skills of these people were in fact prodigious. The power of their telephone numbers was in fact unmatched. I had myself for most of my life shared the same core belief in my ability to control events. If my mother was suddenly hospitalized in Tunis I could arrange for the American consul to bring her English-language newspapers and get her onto an Air France flight to meet my brother in Paris. If Quintana was suddenly stranded in the Nice airport I could arrange with someone at British Airways to get her onto a BA flight to meet her cousin in London. Yet I had always at some level apprehended, because I was born fearful, that some events in life would remain beyond my ability to control or manage them. Some events would just happen. This was one of those events.

---Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (2005)

The Difference Between Jealousy and Envy

2009-09-17T09:43:00.008-05:00

In this quote, taken from his autobiographical work, A Small Boy and Others, James helps to explain the difference between two words that we often assume to be synonymous. James identifies his own state of suffering to be one of envy...the slightly less vile version of these two green-eyed evils.

...if jealousy bears, as I think, on what one sees one's own companions able to do--as against one's own falling short---envy, as I knew it at least, was simply of what they were, or in other words of a certain sort of richer consciousness supposed, doubtless often too freely supposed, in them. They were so other--that was what I felt; and to be other, other almost anyhow, seemed as good as the probable taste of the bright compound wistfully watched in the confectioner's window; unattainable, impossible, of course, but as to which just this impossibility and that privation kept those active proceedings in which jealousy seeks relief quite out of the question....It wasn't that I wished to change with every one, with any one at a venture, but that I saw "gifts" everywhere but as mine and that I scarce know whether to call the effect of this miserable or monstrous. It was the effect at least of self-abandonment--I mean to visions.

---Henry James, A Small Boy and Others (1913)

Meant to Be

2009-09-16T09:35:00.002-05:00

It was not, Britomart, thy wandring eye
Glauncing unwares in charmed looking glass,
But the straight course of heavenly destiny,
Led with eternall providence, that has
Guided thy glaunce, to bring his will to pas:
Ne is thy fate, ne is thy fortune ill,
To love the prowest knight, that ever was
Therefore submit thy wayes unto his will,
And do by all dew means thy destiny fulfill.

---Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queen (1590)

Longing

2009-09-15T09:41:00.008-05:00

Take note of Edith Wharton's use of punctuation marks and italics in this quote which captures the sharpness of intense longing and reunion:

"Do you know-- I hardly remembered you?"

"Hardly remembered me?"

"I mean: how shall I explain? I--it's always so. Each time you happen to me all over again.

--Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (1920)

Grief

2009-09-14T08:28:00.010-05:00

The Honeybee is fascinated by stories that make reference to sign language. Perhaps this is because sign language is at once very expressive and yet very limited in its pared-down status as an "informational language" that eschews details and in some sense, defies nuance. But sign language as performance conveys a deeper message than a simple translation will allow. Perhaps we might consider it as a form of dance. Amy Hempel's story makes especially poignant use of sign language in this story, in which the simplicity of this performative language conveys the experience of grief in an understated way:

I think of the chimp, the one with the talking hands.
In the course of the experiment, that chimp had a baby. Imagine how her trainers must have thrilled when the mother, without prompting, began to sign to her newborn.
Baby, drink milk.
Baby, play ball.
And when the baby died, the mother stood over the body, her wrinkled hands moving with animal grace, forming again and again the words: Baby, come hug, Baby come hug, fluent now in the language of grief.

---Amy Hempel, "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried," The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel, 2007.