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.