Little Packages

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

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

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

"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

"....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

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

"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

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

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...

"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

"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

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

"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

"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

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

"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

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

   "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

"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

"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

 "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

"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

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!"

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

     "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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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"

"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

     "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

"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

"'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

"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

"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

"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

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

"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

[...] "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

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

"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

"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

"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

 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

"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

     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

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

"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.