Be watching for new entries, soon!
March 21, 2014
Where Death Came for the Archbishop
If you have been to Santa Fe, New Mexico lately, the incredible expense of the things in the shops near the Plaza may possibly have put you off as it did me. It has become the playground of the filthy rich, who seemingly have nothing better to do with their money than to clothe themselves from head to toe in haute couture, eye-popping jewelry and (of course) Lucchese boots and fill their palatial homes with gorgeous sofas upholstered in rare Chinese robes. Further from the Plaza, we find affordable baskets, designed by local folk but made in India.
But only another half-block of walking brings you to real places: a real house, the oldest in North America, part of a pueblo established long before Columbus. Across the street from that house is the oldest surviving church in North America, where the stuff you buy (if you must buy stuff) goes to fund a bell-tower strong enough to hang a massive bell, cast four hundred years ago in Spain. They say that the sweet, true tone of the bell (which you can ring for yourself) can be traced to the silver and gold jewelry and plate that was put into the metal at the time of casting, offerings of Spanish villagers who threw their prayers in along with them. It is a fine use for silver and gold jewelry and plate, don’t you agree?
If you have read Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, you already know that bell: it is the one striking the Angelus when Bishop Latour returns from Durango, the bell with a sound of the east to it. And if you read the book as you visit Santa Fe, suddenly the whole landscape of the region springs to life in your imagination, or the book comes to life before your eyes. Because the reason for all that expensive stuff, of course, is that Santa Fe is full of art. Georgia O’Keeffe worked not far from here, in the gorgeous hills of Abiquiu and Ghost Ranch, not the first artist to discover the area and by no means – all those studios on Canyon Road! – the last. Finery has been made for thousands of years, for that matter: the mountain of turquoise near Madrid, NM that fueled continental trade for feathers from Central America and seashells from the Gulf has been whittled down to mere tailings, but still inspires local artists to make what they can with what they have. The Santa Fe trail took stuff back and forth for much longer than just pioneer times.
Along that trail, at “the other Las Vegas,” we explored a town where the church shrank into the background, where the lawless gringos had their way for a decade or so on a street lined with dives with names like The Toe Jam Saloon. Their Plaza once held a handy platform used for lynching drunken cowboys or anyone else whom the people of Las Vegas, NM were too impatient to bring to trial. But some others of those cowboys became Rough Riders, and one of them saved the life of Teddy Roosevelt, as he rushed up Kettle Hill and then San Juan Hill, that great lover of national parks and the great outdoors… Today the Plaza is graced with a bandstand and a stand of trees, a great old hotel, and a cool café with live music, where folks make plans to go for a soak in the local hot-springs.
But better than any and all hot-springs, art, six-guns or stuff is an hour in the company of a young father from the Santa Clara (not its real name) Pueblo named Elijah. His other name translates to White Eagle Tail, and he is the best possible guide to the Puya Cliff Dwellings, not far from Black Mesa, and just across the valley of the Rio Grande from Santa Fe. His gentle, unironic way of speaking, his fond references to his elders and his pride in the ancestors whose ingenuity formed these dwellings in these cliffs and protected them from raiders since time immemorial, all were worth the long wait in wind and snow to hear. Ask him about arrowheads, and he will tell you exactly how each arrow was made and why, therefore, each one was shot with such care. Each stripe on those sherds of pottery has a story of dye-making plants and firing, and the whole landscape around furnishes both food and stories.
It is a harsh, beautiful part of the earth, which the long-suffering meek have nevertheless inherited.
February 7, 2014
Getting Real in Paris
People are always fussing about Paris, about going there, and then hating other people for going there, for the very good reason that it is at the very heart of the core of the center of the culture of the West, with all that that means. Because people also go there and are bitterly disappointed: tourists from Japan experience this so frequently that it is a recognized category of nervous breakdown, the opposite of Stendhal’s Syndrome. Paris has a large measure of humanity, both literal and figurative, and we all know what humanity is capable of. Breathtaking vistas and grinding squalor abide right across town from one another. Even its recent history has been marked by bursts of mayhem on a large scale, while providing endless series of small episodes giving delight. One weekend spent well there can nourish a starved soul over long stretches of quotidian ugliness and thoughtlessness, but it is what happens on the weekdays that really make you think.
There was the weekend we arrived, when the last hurrah of Christmas was going up from the Champs-Elysees, between Place de la Concorde and the Rond-Point: chalets full of choucroute and mulled wine or crêpes or gifts of all sorts, roller-coasters, ever-changing lights up everywhere, from here to the Arc de Triomphe. By the next weekend, most of that was gone, but Friday night there was a Vivaldi opera (who knew he wrote so many, gathering dust in a dark library until now?), and on a Saturday compounded of alternate sun and mist, a stroll along the Iles des Cygnes and through a neighborhood marketplace, full of the fresh and fragrant makings for many a Sunday-afternoon family feast, a visit to the first thing built in the International Style – just a simple house, as it happened – surrounded by other houses nearly as extraordinary, in their various ways, and un-famous streets lined with liveable shops. Then a dash by Metro to the gritty Marché aux Puces to search for some little ceramic favors baked into galettes de rois. In the failing light we found our missing kings, shepherd and sheep at last, while the keepers of the few shops still open chatted together in the open air, arms crossed against the cold.
On the next day, dull, cold, and dark, we found a genteel park where everyone not cooking that Sunday feast was sent to get an appetite and haul the family sapin to a monumental heap of Christmas Trees Past. Scouts were trying out wilderness maneuvers among the artificial ruins, or tracking down clues to a scavenger hunt, and were runners circling, circling, circling the perimeter. Next door a private palais housed an enormous bronze Buddha and figures of people and animals, pointed out to eager children by fond parents. Down the street, we sipped thé Marco Polo in a corner café, watching the bundled-up families skip and stroller by with their spent arbres de Noël, the steam-punk cupola of Saint-Augustin church looming behind them in the beige sky: heart-warming and memorable, memorable, all memorable.
But under the ground, in the vast and grimy transportation nexus, on a pedestrian weekday, came the real lesson in humanity. Every morning we descended into the Metro to catch the 1 line, that runs like an arrow from La Defense to the Gare de Lyon and beyond. Every morning we changed at Châtelet - Les Halles for the suburban RER-B line, taking us out to Orsay, and Université-Paris-Sud. There is a long, long connection under the ground between the two points, linked by a sloping, moving pedestrian walkway and then a broad concourse edged in shops and interrupted by massive cylindrical pylons. Suddenly we noticed that while just the usual number of people was going our direction, the walkway coming towards us was filled to capacity and beyond, filling even the unsavory, un-automated walkway and stairs beside it.
As we neared the end of our ramp we could see a wall of humanity, waiting to go the other direction, a wall into we would debouch at any moment. There were mercifully many fewer of us than of them but all the same we were one lane of traffic, sidling along the wall and into the little shops to squeeze past an oncoming flood twenty abreast or more: all silent, all moving grimly where all needed to go. It was a long, long moment before we were in the clear and rushing for the “B” train, and by then we had deciphered the announcement on the intercom:
“Due to a fatal accident, the “A” line has been closed between Nation and L’Etoile.” Someone had chosen that morning to throw themselves in front of a train, and the world’s largest funeral procession was moving in solemn, silent order to take the 1 line to work.
February 1, 2014
The Last Curse in the Box
You know the bitter little Greek story: Pandora opens the box she shouldn’t (of course it is a woman; Greek writers didn’t care much for women, and Greek women couldn’t write about themselves, mostly, not being of enough value to bother educating) and all the woes that afflict human kind escape to torment folk, far and wide, but there is one curse left when she quickly shuts it again: Hope. Ouch!
Yet hope is the anchor, right? The thing that keeps us going, and trying, and working? A good thing? Faith, Love and Hope are triad of belief. Nothing that takes a long time to accomplish would happen without it – that is the simple truth.
One of the literary agents in one of my useless writer’s guides says, “Never give up!” But why do they say this, when they refuse to read any fiction that is not like all fiction already published, that is not another story of another son separated at birth from his father, or someone discovering how to make curry and love at the same time, or discovering themselves through travel? Better yet, there is a funeral, and the family all meets at the funeral, and we discover… Or someone studies renaissance Florence and so creates a very unpleasant character to pavane through the streets of that carefully-constructed video-game town and do things that are not very important or even ethical…
Non-fiction is much easier to sell, but why? Surely the world of imagination should be at least as broad as reality. Truth surely is stranger than fiction, but fiction tries to keep up, doesn’t it? Why are the gatekeepers wailing that there are no blockbusters anymore when it is the unusual stories that catch the jaundiced public eye, that are the refreshing change from all the usual let’s-all-write-for-one-another literary conceits? Sorry, that was a self-answering question.
People are afraid to take chances, people figure nothing succeeds like success. It’s fear of the Other, in its many shapes and forms. Fear of looking stupid. Ha! How stupid is that? Yet the Public knows a good story, a witty story, a true story, a kind story when it reads it, and then buys it over and over again.
Hope is painful, hope is maddening, hope is like a weed: it just keeps springing up after being mown down. Like a weed, we really have to root it out to kill it, and we don’t really want to do that, do we? What is a weed, really, but a plant growing where it’s not wanted, so let’s transplant it, say Pandora was the savior of mankind, and stop being so darned smart.
It is the first day of spring, Old Style; the cardinals are caroling from the trees and there is the smell of buds in the air. *Sigh* Let’s all be filled with hope, and the energy to make something fine come of it!
May 14, 2013
Back at the Desk
A month or two has gone by since I revealed myself to be a mambu. It is time to take stock of my tank-mates, once again.
Tuttle Publishing’s faint show of interest in my book on the Keicho Expedition – a book proposal I had sent to them ten months earlier with not a peep of reply in the meantime – in the first week of March sent me scurrying to produce something on this project. I left off work on my promising Big Novel (on which I had two chapters done), typed up and edited two lengthy translations I had made for the Keicho book nearly four years ago, and the began upon the text itself, sending all I did, as I finished it, to Tuttle. A truly nasty virus in March and weeks of substitute-teaching in April slowed me down, but I have made steady progress, and now, back at my California desk for two months of good, hard work, I am ready to finish it off.
Ironic, then, isn’t it, that when I pushed Tuttle for a decision today, they told me they were not interested after all, especially when all I brought with me to work on from TX was material for this one book?
Yet I have meant to write this book since I first learned of the expedition while living in Sendai in 2006, and swore in the spring of 2010 to bring the story to a greater audience, just before setting it aside to be Head of School at Saint Michael’s. I have worked for nearly a year with my friend Seiko Sato to have a major sourcebook about the expedition – Distant Voyage to Rome -- translated into English, and she has submitted a grant to Suntory Corporation with the help of Sendai academics to see it done. She has bravely rented a hall in Sendai to inform the public about the proposal, on this July 19th. Distant Voyage’s author, in frail health and unable to make the trip to Sendai from Tokyo, will be sending her a powerpoint presentation on his book. I will also be sending her one on mine, so I had better be sure she has something to talk about.
It is time it was written, whoever does or does not publish it. The Big Novel will have to continue to wait.
February 7, 2013
Mambu and the Tuna
The world needs more fables! There are so many goofy things happening in the world today that a simple fable could have prevented, if only someone had read one or told them to that person as a child or if they had read or sought them out themselves! On our long drive back home, Robin and I read the biography A. Lincoln aloud to each other to keep awake, and learned that the self-taught Lincoln memorized (among many other things) all of Aesop’s Fables, in which are crystallized (as those of you who have read them will know) most of the social and political truths of humankind. Arnold Lobel, the great writer of children’s books (Frog and Toad, and Mouse Tails to name but two) has mastered the art of the modern fable, as in his masterpiece, Fables, from which the great fables of “The Kangaroo’s Parents” and “The Crab and the Lobster” derive. Perhaps that is what I should be doing, rather than trying to publish long novels, as the publishing world seems utterly uninterested in long novels. The world needs short, pithy things like the poems of Billy Collins or Tomas Transtromer, my two current favorites. So here I will offer you the fable of the Mambu and the Tuna, which perfectly encapsulates my recent experience.
I am a rather unusual person. Yes, yes, I know: everyone thinks she or he is unusual, but really, I rarely find another human being who has studied at the Intercollegiate Center of Classical Studies in Rome, missed being shot by terrorists in Beirut before the age of four, been an exchange student to Japan, is trying to make a living as a writer and can’t even get someone to consider her work, has been spat on by counter-racists and is a classicist/geographer who thinks donkeys are really cool. I am sure they are out there somewhere, mind you – kind of like the mambu.
“Mambu” is the tidy Japanese term for the Ocean Sunfish, the most God-awful big fish you have ever seen. Ah! You recognize it! (And there is a photo with this blog, from a Monterey Aquarium postcard). The Ocean Sunfish has many names and nick-names: “All-Head” being one of them, in German, and “Millwheel” being another, in Latin (mola). They can get up to a metric ton in weight, but have no real structure behind their gills except for a sort of ruffle-and-flourish of cartilage, and their pair of fins stick straight up and down, and yet must row them successfully in all directions. They are the sole members of their own genus (Mola mola) – and family, too, as far as I’ve learned – and so it is hard to make up rules about them or any sorts of generalization. They are tasty all over, apparently, so parasites have colonized them extensively, requiring much grooming by other fish glad of a parasite meal, and they like to bask flat on the top of the ocean for birds to help them out, likewise, giving them their name…but they also look rather like a sunken light-source, being almost round.
We became intrigued with these creatures after Robin brought home another postcard, from a seafood restaurant near Stanford called (inventively) The Fish Market, which showed a photograph from the early 1900’s of a family of fishermen, posing beside an ENORMOUS Sunfish they had (probably accidentally) caught. The thing must have been ten feet long/wide! So we commenced on some wiki-research, and learned the above and more. Naturally, when the family wanted to visit the Monterey Aquarium in December, and we learned that they are one of the very few aquaria to own such a creature, we made a bee-line for it, as soon as we paid our zillion-dollar entry fee.
“Sorry” – we were told by the helpful Information lady, when we asked “Where is the Ocean Sunfish?” – “the Sunfish has been removed from the Open Sea tank, for re-training.” “Retraining???” “Yes, it is much slower than the other fish, so we train each fish to come to the top of the tank to be fed with a special signal, so that the others won’t crowd it out, and when it went up to be fed recently, two Yellowfin Tunas crashed into it, and it was so upset that it went to the bottom of the tank and refused to come up again, so we put it in its own tank for awhile, and will train it to respond to a new signal – it won’t come to the other signal any more.” Who knew? I mean WHO KNEW that funny-looking slow clunker-fish could have their feelings hurt by the guys driving the Maseratis? Who knew that a fish could die of embarrassment?
Right away, I knew that fish was for me! I have so often embarrassed myself with my impulsive, unusual, bizarre notions, not suited to the world of tunas, that I am subject to fits of bottom-sitting. Just this past week, faced with another week of not knowing whether the editor who promised back in August to take a look at my first-born novel “sometime in September, at the earliest,” will accept it and thus validate efforts of long years and what I hope will someday be “what I do,” should I live long enough and stop volunteering to do helpful things for everyone else, as well as “what I have done,” namely the second novel in the series and three follow-up novellas, not to mention the first two finished chapters of the Big Historical Novel (at last)… I went to the bottom of my tank and just got gloomy.
Maybe I should just write another novel about what life was like in high school or a screenplay for a blockbuster movie where a really buff guy runs around and escapes from/kills a bunch of other buff guys in many new and unpleasant ways… maybe, in other words, I should transform myself into a tuna!
I have just designed myself an unemployed-writer “business” card that I like very much, using a beautiful pair of kanji (Japanese-style Chinese characters) meaning “riverbank” and the Latin word Riparia meaning “things to do with riverbanks,” as I do love places with rivers running through them, and like to sit on the bank and consider the passing parade, as it were, but was tempted this week to change it to the image of a Mambu. If the kanji lettering for mambu (the Japanese only use their katakana to write it, in a friendly, familiar but not graphically satisfying way, and the Chinese characters expressing Ocean Sunfish are many and fiendishly difficult) had been uncomplicated or attractive, I would have used them. Ah, but nothing about the mambu is uncomplicated or attractive, so it doesn’t translate well into graphic design… Okay, I will come back up to the top of the tank if someone promises to keep those tunas off my back!
January 6, 2013
Something for Sam
My father-in-law Sam Lucchese died on Christmas Eve. Here is a little about him, taken from the SF Chronicle obituary and the memorial biography I wrote:
Salvador Francis (“Sam”) Lucchese, born in Vallejo, CA on September 5, 1924, died at home in Oakland on December 24, 2012. Sam served with the 33rd Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron in WWII, worked for 40 years with the California Department of Transportation, and was a long-time member of First Congregational Church Berkeley (FCCB). He is survived by his wife Natalie, his children David (“Skip”), Gina, and Robert, his niece Rosalinda, his grandchildren Jon, Ben, Tia, Ian, George, Peter, Sevda, and Ali, and his great-granddaughter Maddie. He is preceded in death by his parents Giuseppe-Carlo and Rosa, his sister Mary, his brothers Louis and Michael, his son Jon, and his nephew Giordano. A memorial service will be held in his honor at 2:00 p.m. on Sunday, January 6, 2013 at First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way, Berkeley, followed by a reception at the church. Friends are invited to make a donation to FCCB in lieu of flowers.
SALVADOR FRANCIS (“SAM”) LUCCHESE (September 5, 1924 to December 24, 2012) Though church members may remember Sam for his tireless work at the Thrift Shop, often fixing appliances which others had discarded as hopeless with characteristic skill and determination, few knew the depth, length and breadth of his commitment to the church. Sam joined FCCB after mature reflection and as a personal decision, surprising even his wife, already a church member, by appearing on the list of New Members one Sunday many years ago. Sam and Natalie raised their children in the church, and he could be seen nearly every week in their usual spot in the pews. Just as he generously supported the education of his children and grandchildren, Sam also gave faithfully to support the church’s many needs and missions and particularly treasured the music programs. Throughout his eighty-eight years, Sam was said to have “luck,” but those who knew him best put down his uncanny successes and survivals to the possession of a keen eye, determination, boundless self-confidence and a strong faith in God. The youngest child and only surviving son of Calabrian immigrants, Sam grew up speaking Italian in the home, but not only mastered the difficult language of engineering but was also prized by co-workers and supervisors for his 40 years of excellent work at the California Department of Transportation. Drafted into the army in 1943 at the age of 19, by April of 1945, Sam was one of a group of advance scouts with “C” Troop of the 33rd Cavalry Reconaissance Squadron who assisted the 20th Armored Division during their liberation of the notorious death-camp of Dachau. He would never willingly speak to his family of this terrible experience, which gave him night-terrors for the next ten years of his life. Sam met the love of his life on a double-date to a Cal football game with boyhood friend Paul “Tink” Kilkenny, whose girlfriend Eunice brought along her friend Natalie, and they were married November 17, 1951. The couple made a life for their growing family in a little house in Berkeley on The Alameda. The arrival of Robert necessitated a move in 1956 to the house on Arlington Avenue in Berkeley which had belonged to Sam’s in-laws and which is still in the family. Sam loved being with his grandchildren, going to their performances, supporting their education. He was expert at family tent and trailer camping, and also enjoyed trips to Europe and Japan both independently and with Elder Hostel. He and Natalie discovered a mutual love of opera, and they attended many seasons at War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco. Sam was also fond of instrumental music, especially that of Bach. As he neared retirement from the DOT, Sam launched on the design and building of an expansion of the house which not only provided space for hosting his children and grandchildren, friends and colleagues, but also included a downstairs apartment in which many friends and family members have lived down the years. In August of 2008, Sam and Natalie chose to move to Lake Park Retirement Community, moving into an apartment with a fine view of Lake Merritt. Here Sam passed away on the night of Christmas Eve. Sam’s health had been poor for some time, and he had been working hard to help his niece after the death of her brother. He died in his arms of his wife and his daughter, having recently seen every member of his family and having kissed most of them good-bye. He will be sorely missed.
December 14, 2012
Everyday Mercies
Apologies to readers of the Aggieland Star-Ledger who had difficulties finding this blog. Your editor made the foolish mistake of typing an “@” where she should have typed a “.” Congratulations on finding it, anyway!
A couple of days back, I was thinking more along the lines of an essay called “Everyday Tragedy,” but then mercy struck, and I don’t mean the bright and beautiful McGee daughter. My mother always used to say, “be grateful for small favors,” though she generally changed it to “flavors” by way of irony. The “small favor” or mercy, if you will that changed the course of the week – and maybe my life – happened on Wednesday, on the way back from the airport. But more on that in a moment.
Living in this beautiful, gritty megalopolis, we are aware that tragedies are certainly happening daily. We watch KRON-4, our favorite purveyor of weather and news and advertising every morning for an update. There is the same wise-cracking, sports-loving anchorwoman, Daria, who was there when I watched regularly in 2001-2, and George the traffic-guy, and Marc the co-anchor and former weatherman. (Actually they all seem to be former weather-folk: James, the other local news-guy really lit up when he did the weather for Erica this morning, and Marc confessed to majoring in meteorology…)
Anyway, we get our daily dose of burglary, murder and traffic mayhem from unexpected and expected spots, all over the Bay, and then our parents will frighten us with health setbacks, and I think – well, here we go again! We will drive home to Texas in January only to find that one parent or another is deathly ill and one of us must fly back again… My father, for example, has become vaguer than usual this week, and we wonder how much longer he will hang on. But Wednesday changed all that sort of thinking. Wednesday, we escaped being on the KRON-4 News by inches. Wednesday, we looked up just in time and one of us yelled just in time and we did NOT collide with the back of that stopped truck, in the lande directly ahead of us.
It was a gorgeous, clear afternoon with unusually interesting clouds and a double rainbow, and we were pointing out the sights to two scientific visitors from France – had just waved towards the Campanile, as a matter of fact – when that particular Highway 24 exit lane decided to put on its brakes. Another lane was open and we veered uneventfully into it, but not before all the other possible outcomes had raced before our eyes: ranging in seriousness from inconvenienced visitors to expensive car-repairs, hospitalization, and death. But nothing, nothing happened; we didn’t even have to skid to a scary halt; the folks in the backseat seemed unaware of the danger, probably thought we were over-reacting.
But all day it echoed around our minds, along with deep gratitude. How sweet is life without inconvenienced visitors, expensive car-repairs, (another) hospitalization and (more) death! Fathers rally yet again – yes, we know it will not be forever, but for now they do – and considering the size of this Megalopolis, there is a remarkable degree of mercy happening daily. Most houses don’t burn down, most people don’t murder one another or embezzle the government, and most cars don’t crash. It’s anything but a small favor; it’s a mercy!
December 7, 2012
“An Insufferable Prig”
A month of my hospital-, friend visiting-, spouse birthday-, nephew wedding- and Thanksgiving-doings, the manufacture of home-made gifts of the literary variety as well as the writings and mailings of Christmas newsletters and a brief excursion to Cambridge, MA have eaten November. Chapter Two remains unfinished, but I have submitted my three novellas to Kindle for their consideration, in an offhand sort of way. The incredible rains of last week are gone, the limbs are cleared out and the sun is very much out in Berkeley, CA. There has been an earthquake today in Japan, but with “only” a one-meter tsunami. Is that appropriate for a “date that will live in infamy?” Yesterday was Saint Nicholas’ Day, and children in the Netherlands looked in their shoes to see what Sinte Claas brought them. I have been out on Santa’s behalf, scouring odd corners of the town for stocking stuffers appealing to 20-somethings.
But the “brief excursion to Cambridge, MA” has probably left the deepest impression of all… except that I am naturally hoping that the “off-hand mailing” will really amount to something. Really being someplace makes all the difference, doesn’t it? Really sleeping in the same building where Robert Frost spent the last twenty years of his life, really hearing gorgeous music on the spot where the original Congregational church stood (and the current one is not so young, either), really, really reading a collection of Longfellow poetry a few doors away from where he lived and wrote it, really moseying past where Joan Baez and Bob Dylan got their start in folk-singing or where Washington first mustered and trained the Continental army, really knowing that it was here that people decided both that education must be required of every citizen and that the Church must get out of that education, at least at Harvard… even just looking up and seeing the little window at Harvard square reading DEWEY, CHEATHAM & HOWE, marking the office where “Car Talk” was taped, all those times… all this confirms the notion that people who make a start at something really matter, that each person really matters, and that believing that really matters. It also matters that we examine what we do, and why we do it.
Something in the severe self-examination in the literary air of our little top-floor room must have set my spiritual antennae waving, for the very night we arrived, I had the strongest sense of being SUCH a prig! Yes, the phrase insufferable prig leapt to mind as Robin complained mildly that I had been nagging him ceaselessly for the last few days and if possible moreso during the weary, hungry hours after we arrived and began foraging for dinner at 9:30 p.m. or so. All at once, I saw myself in the stark, Puritan light of Cambridge, and it wasn't pretty: a know-it-all, pedantic, self-righteous schoolmarm, thinking she is somebody, pretending to write legible prose, intending to dust off and brush up her poetry: a dallier, a dilettante, a sponge and yes, an insufferable prig, always telling people what to do and how to do it, judging, correcting… how could anyone stand to be near me?
Increasingly on edge as to what the publisher will say about my novel waiting patiently on his desk to be re-read, increasingly self-critical for both my wild hopes and my despair, puffed-up at the least sign of praise for stories I love, spending whole days focussed on my own creative process, a deeply selfish enterprise, I had become a jangling ganglion of self-love and self-loathing, lashing out at my own best-beloved as if to blame him for an imperfect world. What rot!
Yet, having realized all that, I also realized that I was becoming hyper-sensitive to things “not done right” for the first time in a very long time, and that, with considerable dialing-back of sensitivity levels – and stiff resolution not to say whatever comes into my head, whenever it comes there – I saw that after months of numbness, of stumping dully along like some saddle-sore mule, I might just be growing younger again, and might have recovered a long-missing bounce-in-the-step. Nerve-endings seemed to be working again, certainly, if perhaps unfortunately for everyone around me! All the same, the stinging correction was liberating as well as painful, like a snake peeling off an old skin and sliding forth quite new and clean. Quite empty, I roamed the streets, took the subway to the art museum, wandered at will through the art and lost myself in familiar and unfamiliar poetry and delighted to learn all I could: all the above for starters.
November 6, 2012
A Convenient Emergency
Assuming that God is good and Obama (and not the forces of greed and idiocy) will win this election, I set those worries aside to log in a momentous week. For it was not just the week that Robin flew back here from the east coast two days after Sandy had skimmed his conference center, not just the week of the big Giants victory parade in SF and not just the week of Halloween and my brother’s 60th birthday, it was the week that the ol’ gallbladder decided to give up the ghost at last.
What an unispiring little organ is the gallbladder: hearts, livers and lungs have all the romance! It is, however, the center of what P. G. Wodehouse calls “dyspepsia,” which he describes in the opening pages of “The Smile That Wins,” in Mulliner Nights as creating in the sufferer “all the emotions of one who has carelessly swallowed a family of scorpions.” The scorpions have flared up from time to time in the past, but especially recently, perhaps been collecting venom from all the stress.
A surgeon back said last spring that the dratted thing should come out, and soon, “before it becomes inflamed and you have to have emergency surgery,” but really, is there ever a good time to spend $1000 on that lovely first deductible? And who chooses to go in and try their hand at getting a nice, simple surgery with no regrettable side-effects? So when? The wonderful nurse at the old home clinic had told me “you’ll know when it’s time to take it out” and by 10:00 p.m. Thursday night, I knew h-hour (or more like w-weekend) had arrived.
Let us skip over the couple of hours of agony in the emergency waiting room at Alta Bates, shall we? And not mention the crazies who like to congregate in such places at that time of night? Let’s say nothing of the unfortunate presence of two young healthy boys (no doubt waiting patiently for Mom, inside Emergency) munching on their dinners just opposite, where they could best admire the writhing and moaning of not just me but also another lady who had just arrived, doubled over at the waist! Let us not dwell on the hours in the little examining room, or the hour in Ultra-sound, in which the (mercifully sedated) scorpions were subjected to much pressure. Instead, let us hurry on to the long-awaited moment when, at about 4:00 p.m. Friday, the nice anaesthesiologist arrived in Pre-Op, told me what was going to happen, then injected a little something into my I.V. and then…
All at once I was waking up in Recovery at about 5:30 p.m. Friday, the words of the surgeon echoing in my ears, “It was really, really bad!” – the gallbladder, not the surgery, which went “by the book” – and the recovery nurses were bustling around, saying how awake I was. (“Ha! If you only knew!” I was thinking.) A snoozy night and day with cheery visits followed and, having already spent my deductible in the Emergency Room, the surgeon suggested I stay Saturday night, too, because once the morphine wore off I would feel as if I “had been hit by a truck” and if I were at home I might think of coming back to the hospital that night, anyway. She was quite right, of course!
Has anyone else noticed how smart your average surgeon is? Or how considerate, hard-working and generally terrific? This fine lady, once she discovered I was from College Station, TX, hurried to assure me that she had trained with TAMU’s Dr. Red Duke, himself, as well as at Houston’s bouquet of great hospitals, just in case I had no faith in California physicians, I suppose. And she took the time between surgeries on Sunday to intervene with an obstructive pharmacist, so that I would be pain-free overnight. Let ’em have their huge fees, I say!
To sum up: it was awful, but necessary, and things are now improving rapidly, but the curious thing is that there seems not to have been a better moment in recent history for such a temporary disaster than right now. The spouse was in town and is not tied down by teaching duties. I am no longer Head of School, with all eyes anxiously fixed upon me for strength and solace. We have sweet neighbors here, good friends all over, and handy family members willing to visit and help.
It couldn’t have been better timed if we HAD chosen the moment. Thank God for serendipity…and everything else!
October 28, 2012
Bittersweet
When Robin and I went to the SF Symphony a few weeks back, the lights that glowed on the Beaux-Arts dome and columns of City Hall were a peculiar copper-orange color: Giants Orange. Orange is not a color we wear a lot in College Station, particularly not Burnt Orange, but this other orange used to be my mother’s favorite: something my mother, Marie Iverson Mitchell, called bittersweet.
It has been a bittersweet week: this used to be Mom’s favorite time of year, and her birthday was the 26th. She has missed it now for the third year running. People have told me they have been visited, somehow, by their beloved dead, but until recently I had felt nothing beyond a lingering horror. Subtly, recently, I seem to feel companionable presence beside me as I drive again around her favorite places.
The semester I spent teaching in Italy, in the fall of 2005, I was already worried about Mom’s health, and at this very time of year I went for a long walk up the Val di Chio, on All Saints’ Day. The leaves in the vineyards were going a bright yellow, and the persimmon trees were losing their dark red, heart-shaped leaves, exposing the orange fruit hanging heavy on the slender boughs, and I thought of my red-haired mother, always a little delicate yet forging on regardless to one adventure after another as we travelled the world. Persimmons ripen on the bough from inedible sourness and hardness to unbelievable softness and sweetness, something she had often remarked. The bitter memories of 2010 are softening and sweetening, too.
The winter before she had the stroke that left her speechless and immobile, I took Mom on a drive to Point Reyes Peninsula, just as a treat. Dad had trouble walking, she no longer felt safe driving, and she didn’t often get out. We went at an easy pace, looking and talking about everything we saw, going out and coming back. We sat in the sunshine outside a cafe at Point Reyes Station, and later ate lunch together at the diner, taking our time and getting the pie. She was so grateful to get out and about, to just be buddies, and it was the last time we ever did.
I adored my mother, but we didn’t do many things together like that, just she and I. My daughter Tia, though, has outlived my most irritating years still willing to do things with her Ma, still talk on the phone, still “hang out.” When I was out here on my own, teaching at Sacred Heart, and again during my father’s long illness, we spent a lot of time together. But last Thursday night – you might call it Mom Birthday Eve – has to be one of the most memorable of Tia Times.
I had just straggled home late from the SF airport through a massive traffic jam what with the World Series game, right there by the Bay Bridge, and had one ear entirely deaf with a cold-plus-cabin-air-pressure, but had every intention of collecting the dog from Tia’s apartment and dashing off to church choir practice at FCCB, with dinner at some later time. Tia disabused me of this foolish notion, however, insisting we go out to dinner. How could I say “no” to the person who had dog-sat Oscar and who had been busy teaching all day?
So, though I ached a bit to be deserting my fellow Altos for this sweet chance for some family time, we adjourned to an unlikely enough place for it: the Hotsy-Totsy Club (“tipsy since 1939”), a black box of a bar with good neighborhood ambiance and a taco wagon, and not usually a sports bar, but a notable exception was made that night. We got our three tacos each (Pastor, Pollo, and Asada for me) and our drink of choice (dirty Martinis made with two gorgeous olives and local gin flavored with the herbs of Mt. Tamalpais) and made these last through the seventh inning of the second game of the series, watching the Bunt of the Century roll fair. Giants Orange, and sweet, very sweet because spent with my Tia-pot.
Today I wore the salmon coral necklace my mother’s Aunt Til -- one of my favorite people, a business woman and a world-traveler – gave me a million years ago, a child-sized necklace brought back from Naples and originally strung on wire, which I restrung on silk and expanded with matching beads from Pompei, so that it is long enough now to throw on anytime one is ready for action. And now whenever I wear it I will think not only of adventurous Iversons past but of this present grand-daughter of Iversons, my daughter Tia, who made me part of an evening I will never forget. Thanks, Miss Peeps, and we raise our Martini glasses to you, Mom!
October 1, 2012
Into the Thesaurus
After a weekend back in Texas for Thomas Cowden’s wonderful Michaelmas wedding, a delicious frontal system of rain that has finally put a green blush on the sad lawns here and made a clear, cool autumn day as only Texas can do them, tomorrow it is time to return to that strange new world of 2012 Berkeley, CA. At the wedding, I was heartened to learn that I have at least one loyal blog-follower, so for you, dear reader(s?), I will share another really fine weekend, from the Bay Area.
As all you students of Greek out there know, a qhsauroV is either a treasure-house or the treasure itself, so it is not just words that are the subject here. And as (all of) you reader(s) of the last blog will recall, the San Francisco Bay Area is very much like Ali Baba’s treasure house. Our weekend adventures of September 22-23 (the equinox and beginning of fall) were proof of this notion.
It certainly is fall there, by the way, all those from “four seasons” states who sneer at Mediterranean climates notwithstanding: huge sycamore leaves are careening to the pavement and gathering along the sidewalks in rustling, untidy heaps, and the liquidamber trees along Piedmont St. are flaming red at the top or a mingled red and green. The Tule fog is slipping into the Bay from the Valley some mornings, and nights are getting colder (even than summer).
But the 22nd was gorgeous: a perfect day to go to the City and see some art at the Palace of the Legion of Honor. We dawdled around the apartment Saturday morning, apparently so as to be in the throng on the Bay Bridge at 11:00, the rush-hour of the weekend, as everyone goes to San Francisco for some fun. After weeks of walking freely all over Berkeley, the traffic was an unpleasant shock, but the treasure was worth the wait.
We headed for Irving Street, which parallels Golden Gate Park, and a certain stretch of which – near where Tia takes her voice lessons – we know pretty well. We were looking for lunch, and figured we would go with a familiar neighborhood. But since Golden Gate Park extends across half the city, the part of Irving-near-the-Park in which we happened to land was blocks away from there and a whole new world to us. Rather than grab the smartphone and look up “Pluto” or another familiar Irving Street restaurant, however, we took our chances where we were and struck gold, like many another Californian before us.
There, among many exotic names, was Brothers Seafood Restaurant: clean, trim and full of happy (and appropriately Chinese) customers eating what seemed to be the largest portions of dim-sum we had ever seen. We sat and duly waited for a table, watching the doomed fish, crabs and lobsters move moodily about their bubbling aquaria, spying on what everyone else was eating and puzzling over the menu. Once we were duly seated, we did our best (with the help of a photographic chart) to select 5-6 balanced dishes, and did not go too far wrong: after all, how bad is it to order two desserts, especially when one is taro buns, covered with streusel and the other is fried mochi filled with sweet bean paste and covered with sesame seeds? And truly, the buns and meat-dumplings and heaps of beautiful cooked greens were tremendously generous – I mean, was I wearing my reading glasses or were they really that big? – for $2 or $3 or $4.50 for a group of three (or a heap of veggies)… Anyhow, you get my point: buried treasure!
The show at the Legion of Honor which followed this feast was a more expected treat: Man Ray and Lee Miller, purported to be a surrealist show but really an hommage to the long friendship of these two American artists. It began in a red-hot love relationship in 1930’s Paris, but when she left him to work in New York (and went on to be a renowned war photographer), he continued to obsess over her, and not surprisingly: she was not just an artist and intellectual but also a fashion model and about as beautiful as they come. He saw her lips everywhere and made whole series of longitudinal collages and paintings to mimic them. As for her eyes, he kept a photo of one of them in his wallet at all times, and attached them to the business ends of numerous metronomes, always meaning to destroy them but never bringing himself to do it. The catalogue is not the sort of thing to leave lying around the Teacher’s Workroom at Saint Michael’s, but it was a fascinating show. Perhaps best were the whimsical creations he made for her after the war, when the horrors she had seen threw her into deep depressions and he tried (usually successfully) to cheer her up with offerings of art. The show, and the views of the Golden Gate Bridge and the City from the lofty perch of the Legion of Honor on an unusually sunny day were both worth the long, slow commute back to Berkeley.
That night we watched the dear old 1950’s film, “The Mudlark,” which is only available in a very odd reprint from “public domain” somewhere (unless you know a really good local rental place), but still worth buying if you are as big a fan of children and sentiment as I am, AND would love to see Alec Guiness completely own the part of Disraeli and a pudgied-up Irene Dunne conquer the role of Queen Victoria, AND see the fabulously Victorian (big surprise) home décor of Windsor Castle. This made for interesting conversations for the next few days, and much sentimental satisfaction!
At the risk of creating a bloggone (imaginary Italian for “a really big blog,” –one being the suffix added to objects of great size), I must say something about Sunday the 23rd. After finally “nailing” the anthem “Precious Lord” (Thomas Dorsey version) for the 10:30 service at First Congregational Church Berkeley (so much so that the dratted Alto part was stuck in my head all week), we had a nice lunch with my father at the pleasant and tasty Villa Chinese restaurant in San Pablo, across the street from his assisted living apartment, then – after a suitable period of sheer laziness back at home – began our exploration of the Hill Paths of Berkeley.
Armed with the indispensible “Trails of Berkeley” map like any good tourists, we began at Codornices Park (the 5th station, as it were, to use Mt. Fuji terms, being halfway up the 1000-ft. Berkeley Hills) and struck off on the first precipitous path, with stairs so long and steep we couldn’t see their top, climbing out of a redwood-shaded hollow where someone was holding a meditative jazz jam-session.
The streets of East Berkeley wind and twist prodigiously across the face of this steep hill-face, and are thus difficult for pedestrians to navigate without much backtracking. The solution presented by the long-dead fathers of Berkeley development was to provide paved paths with many ranks of steps, scaling the sheer drops between the streets. They are generally named for the streets they continue or connect, but occasionally after heroes (e.g, “Billy Jean Steps”) or local patrons. The quaky nature of the Hayward Fault which runs under these hills has made many of the original steps writhe, crumble and extrude in strange ways, and some paths are no longer passable. Many more have been recently re-built by fans of the paths, in stout squared timbers of some iron-like wood, and spiral and wander acr0ss the face of the hill.
The aerobic exercise, going up, was terrific, and the stress on tender knee-joints, coming down, was sometimes painful, but the overall effect was exhilarating, especially as we rose higher and higher and the views on that gorgeous afternoon (the fog just stealing in at last through the Gate, and heading straight for Berkeley, as usual) that gradually opened up as we rose, tremendous. Sometimes the signs for the paths were nearly obscured by trees, and twice they required us to go up a private driveway for a few yards, but Robin was a perfect navigator, and we persevered. We passed a house with a “Nobel Prize Winner Parking Only” parking spot, and many, many more houses that were interesting and unique, with variegated and lush gardens, as anything seems to be able to grow there with a little drip irrigation.
At the very top we could see over into the valley beyond, as well, and off as far as Mt. Diablo, while in the opposite direction Mt. Tamalpais rose clearly above her quilt of fog. The houses up there were vertiginous in the extreme, often just pasted on the side of a cliff, with “Lots for Sale” that were nearly entirely vertical. Up there we came across a fountain at the head of a small subdivision were we could water the pooch (Oski was a trouper from bottom to top and back again) and reflect that at a dance in a house on that street, we had first met, thirty-eight years ago.
Many more paths await, more memories, and more treasures. Ciao for now!
September 18, 2012
“Open Sesame!”
On Adeline Street at Harmon, just on the southern edge of Berkeley, there is a cave of wonders called People’s Bazaar; their website beckons the shopper in with the words Open Sesame! For years as a student, and later, on Christmas visits to town, I would stare at those windows full of oddments and wonder what in the world was inside. Finally, two Christmases ago, Robin and I first took the plunge and went in, and last weekend we did again, both times finding all we were looking for, and more besides. It is one of those rare places when reality beggars imagination.
Narrow lanes are made by rows of antique furniture topped and flanked by lamps and filled to bursting with crystal, silver, china, pottery on which are heaps of opera glasses or vintage cameras... The lanes are lined with framed pictures, several layers deep: paintings of all sorts, embroidery… and more are on the high walls above, along with faded tinted photographs of instant ancestors under curved glass. Looking up, you notice suddenly that from all points of the ceiling hang chandeliers, looking down you find a pile of boxes -- cigar boxes, music boxes – and there by the cash register are pegs filled with brass keys of every description. There are masks and figurines, fabulous pieces of brilliant-cut glass, silverware and jewelry, all tucked away among other things like an I-Spy puzzle: hundreds of things with thousands of stories to tell.
Two people are in charge of this treasure trove, Rabia and Sam, as interesting and mysterious as their cave: she stooped over and beturbaned, sharp and witty, testing her customers for worthiness to carry away her prizes; he quiet, deft and handy, gently extracting delicate, precious things from a press of other delicate, precious things, making everything shine and everything work that can. If you know what to look for and know how to ask, you will find whatever strange thing your heart desires.
I am sitting at a window that looks out over the San Francisco Bay and lets in the roar of Highway 24 traffic as it races up the slope towards the tunnel that will take it beyond the coastal range into the less-hurried world of Orinda and Walnut Creek. Out there are the huge Trojan-Horse cranes of the Port of Oakland, the sweep of the Bay Bridge, the blue-green Bay itself and its necklace of cities, San Francisco queen among them. All day here, things are building, moving, being invented, and at night it is a sparking fairyland of lights: an Ali Baba cave of wonders. We have said our Open Sesame: let the magic commence!
August 24, 2012
A Sacred Road
Part of being unemployed is being able to tag along with the spouse when he goes places, wherever those places are, since two can live almost as cheaply as one. That meant that Japan wasn’t the only place I tagged along to this summer, but also Wyoming and Kansas, a week in either place. You might argue that these are hardly as exotic as Japan and so hardly worth bothering with… or are you too sensible to argue such nonsense?
To me, they are still new places, and every new place is fraught with learnings, no matter how mundane they appear on the surface: yes, you see many of the same chain restaurants, on the periphery of the towns, as you see anywhere in the States, but then there are the local businesses with their myriad new names, and even the local chains, ubiquitous to the natives but puzzling to the outsider. We can see the same patterns played out in different ways. And the landscapes – oh, this will be a long blog, pondered over the last month and more, hence its lateness in coming…
After long miles of occasional habitations and hamlets – all guarded by long ranks of snow-fence that argue for ferocious winter winds -- Casper looms up out of the prairie like Athena from Zeus’ head, fully-armed: a perfect model of a small American city. Seen from the mountain that rises behind it, it can all be seen at a glance: the tiny, still-living downtown, clustered around the railroad station and boasting large civic buildings; the array of numbered streets acting as latitudes of wealth, progressing through bands of businesses, churches, and schools from downtown up the slope to the college; the mirror-image array of lettered streets progressing into the low-income floodplain of the gorgeous North Platte River with its trailers and simple, respectable houses. A miniature trailer, just yards from the river-bend is for sale… Surrounding the part of the town mostly built at the beginning of the last century is a classic periphery of suburban and indeed edge-city development, yet it is still healthy in its expansion: no dead areas, yet.
Casper is not an ironic place; it is in earnest. The man at the indie bookstore will speak passionately about the lousy drivers and at length about where to find bike-trails; the young city librarian explains to interested new users of all ages the many services their library can provide; the guy at the bike-shop will build you a new bike in a day if you’d like to rent a different model; the staff at the hotel chaff familiarly with the oil-workers far from home, and put out board games when kids are on the guest roster, and popcorn and veggies, every afternoon at 4:00. The boy in the college production of “Gypsy” speaks frankly about falling in love with dancing and with theater, and his certainty of landing a theater job in the big leagues. I am reminded that this is the West. Here “seldom is heard a discouraging word.”
But I am also being consciously blind to its history: to the tragedy of the Great Indian War and Fort Caspar (sic)’s role in that, to the lynchings and shootings of the range wars, to the business of turning wild horses into whatever products might be saleable, after the oil bust of the Great Depression…
Manhattan, KS is so much more a mid-western place, a callous and sophomoric place, a college town as ever was, with its bar-saturated Aggieville and its big professorial houses arranged neatly around its Central Park. But there is cosmopolis here, too, in modest doses: a great café, a great bookstore, a pretty campus full of trees. And it is surrounded by Kansas. Let’s talk about landscapes, and leave urban things behind. Let’s talk about the harp-shaped hills of the Kansas prairies, and the rich, beautiful river-valleys filled with soybeans and tall trees, and let’s consider trails, for example the trails leading west from Council Grove.
The thin topsoil of Wyoming scars easily, and marks of the wagon-wheels of the pre-railroad emigrants are still clearly to be seen at the base of the mountains, skirting the river-valleys. We wonder how they could be just two wheels wide, why everyone seems to have travelled in single-file along this one trail, for though it may branch into different trails, each trail is a single trail. We discover that there is a very good reason for this: if a wagon strayed from that trail, it was breaking a treaty. In the slim space of time after peace councils with local tribes like those made at Council Grove and Council Bluffs, and before the treaties were broken – often escalated when whites took revenge disproportionately to an attack and on the wrong tribe – these trails were considered by at least some of the tribes through whose territories they went to be sacred, to be “base,” so that as long as the emigrants – as many as 1000 wagons a day, in high season for a brief stretch of years -- kept moving towards California or Oregon or Utah and did not stop to settle along the way, they were safe from attack. But then came the massacres, and the railroad, and the killing of the buffalo and all-out war, and it was clear that nothing was sacred.
The landscapes between Caspar and Denver these trails traverse – or just between Caspar and Steamboat Springs, for starters – are just astounding. I had thought that Arizona had the greatest variety of scenery with its ever-changing horizons of mountains and plains, but Wyoming! Mountains the likes of which are no-where else, with formations like multi-colored gelato, and mountains diving into a vast reservoir with such stark stratigraphy that it seems they were invented by illustrators of outer-space fantasies... Between Wyoming and Colorado is a mysterious inland basin, falling between two curves of the Continental Divide, a landscape from which no river escapes, on the high center of the landmass. It has a feeling of timelessness along with its centrality, like being a pole from which all directions are out. Descending into the real, lush river-valleys of Colorado is like exhaling after holding a long breath.
And the sublimity of the road between Steamboat Springs and Estes Park, taking the Trail Ridge Road, and again between Estes Park and Loveland, taking Hwy 34 along the Big Thompson River – this has been described over and over and here I can only say that, taken on a day of mixed rain and sunshine, the Trail Ridge, at 11,000 feet, is beyond sublime, and tips into the realm of stupendous, with grey masses of rain falling into deep, deep valleys filled with pines (many of them – as all across Colorado – dead), making slick and terrifying a road innocent of guard-rails and just plastered in places alongside the ancient highland Ute trail that gives it its name.
We came to rest for a night at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, lingering into a sunny, timeless morning, looking out over the lake surrounded by mountains, from under a pine branch full of chickadees. And there we will leave us, as in a sense we are there, still.
July 31, 2012 – Dnot posted
Casper, Wyoming: it could be the quintessential American town.
Small things still matter here.
In the Casper Public Library, a young, earnest librarian is introducing a mixed bag of first-time patrons to its many exciting services, giving them a brief tour of their library. “It is your library,” she reminds them. “Tell us what you need: we can get it for you!”
The man who works in the (excellent) bookshop, when asked about bike rentals and where to ride, complains passionately about Casper drivers, and describes in great and accurate detail where the best bike trails are in town. The man who rents the bikes offers to build one fresh for you, if you would like to ride a different model.
The staff at the Super 8 Motel are proud to provide popcorn, cheese-and-crackers and veggies, every afternoon at 4:00, even when other branches do not, and they set out boardgames invitingly on tables on the mornings when children are about. They comfort homesick construction workers with friendly chaff, and see them off home with kind words.
The young man you just saw on Casper College stage, singing and dancing, tells you without hesitation how he fell in love with dance while at school, and how he is certain to join the corps of a major troupe. Another young man, met under a spreading apple tree on a 15,000 acre ranch, tells you he will be joining the rodeo circuit, after less than a year riding saddle-broncs.
And even inanimate objects have a certain confident integrity: in the reconstructed barracks of old Fort Caspar (sic), new tin mugs gleam on tables, period inkwells stand ready and real Civil War sabers hang over the backs of chairs, just as if their massacred owners will step into the room at any moment, to drink from them, pen orders, or buckle them on.
The small downtown still lives, but there is also successful suburbia and spanky-new, chain-business sprawl. There is a “wrong side of the tracks,” with trailer houses classically located in the flood plain, and there are also respectable little houses, gracious and gleamingly conscious of their beveled glass front-door insets, lining the well-ordered, tree-lined streets of the upper slopes. Mansions hide in tree-lined arroyos.
The air is fresh, with the tang of sage and pine; a mountain looms over it, and a river runs very much through it: the sinuous, lively North Platte, guidepost of emigrants. There is a bike-trial along it, and who wouldn’t want that little trailer, six feet from the water’s edge? From the mountain, the workings of the place are displayed, as is its surround of howling chaos.
July 31, 2012 – C
Stepping Onto the Boat
It is June, and we are on the ferryboat from Shiogama to Matsushima, surging across what has been described as the most beautiful place in Japan, a land of beautiful places: Matsushima Bay, “Pine-Island” Bay, a shallow inlet of the deep Pacific, on the long, smooth curve of Sendai Bay. We have walked to Shiogama from Taga-jo, where the iris beds are once again riotous with bloom. It is a gorgeous summer afternoon: clear, cool and sunny, with a gentle breeze. The water sparkles, and all the perfect islands gleam.
Happy vacationers feed shrimp-chips to the seagulls as they always have, and the seagulls never nip a finger or otherwise fail to delight.
Yet if you know where to look, you will see the heaps of wreckage in Shiogama harbor, gathered from all the vanished communities of Tohoku, waiting to be loaded up and shipped to Kyushu, where sympathetic folk have donated landfill space to accept it. You will also notice a few shattered pleasure boats, still littering a small section of shore, and the seaside promenade you passed on the way to the ship is still undermined and unsafe for walking, its stone markers tilted at crazy angles, and, mysteriously, the three tall smokestacks of the power plant are nowhere to be seen.
As the shore slips away, I wonder: how to express the sameness-yet-radical-difference of Tohoku, just over a year after the March 11, 2011 earthquake/tsunami? The novelty of the disaster is long over, the voyeurs have gone home, yet the comfort and normalcy of March 10, 2011 is still irrevocably lost.
Sorrow hangs in the bright air of Tohoku like the tones of a temple-bell, and like the repeated tolling of a bell it is renewed around each corner when a stretch of grass-grown field comes into view, with a shattered house in the center of it, or when we catch sight of an impossible stack of automobiles, rapidly to become rusted and dated, their masters lost to the sea.
People are still struggling to know how best to move forward: should they tear down that damaged house or rebuild it? Should they put down roots in a new place or return to a changed old place? Should they keep on with a family business when the family is nearly all gone, or to start over with an entirely new venture? When familiar landscapes are gone, along with the comforting routines that filled them, who can say what is right?
Tragedy changes us, and people suffer tragedies everyday, on a small scale: a lost parent here, a sick child there; a fire destroys a house; a business goes bankrupt. Friends and faith can help us absorb the shock; we adjust our lives in small increments, each day. But when so many lose so much over such a short period, who is to comfort them, and how are they to adjust?
It seems to me that we board a ship each morning, but when we return to the same port at night, the place has subtly changed, as have we. Since we left port, there have been numerous small tragedies, but then again, people have fallen in love, people have married, children have been conceived, children born; ideas have been hatched, projects completed, boats launched. Things are not just always dying, they are always growing, too, if perhaps in an unfamiliar, unexpected form.
And when they do become familiar – if we let them become familiar – perhaps our grief will finally fade.
July 31, 2012 -- B
Five Minutes and Thirty Feet Later
In 2010, the last time I posted regularly on this blog, I wrote of leaving Sendai that April: of my fondness for it and of its beauty and character. Less than a year after stepping onto the flight at Natori Airport which took us away from Sendai, a wave from the sea washed away the village of Natori, and over the landing strip of the airport, changing everything.
This summer we returned to Japan. Natori airport seems as usual, but in that short stretch between the airport and the sea there is just one abandoned house. The same emptiness stretches miles and miles, northward and southward of there, to a distance of about five miles inland, depending on the shape of the coast.
I was reminded at lunch today that the seafloor under the coast of northeastern Japan fell by ten meters on March 11 of 2011, the day of the tsunami that killed 10,000 people and has left untold hectares of land a wasteland. My friend Miki says that the temblor, a nine-plus on the Richter scale, lasted for five minutes.
Ever lived through a 15-second earthquake? Seemed way too long, didn’t it?
These are both facts to boggle the mind: imagining an area the size of Texas suddenly falling thirty feet over a period of just five minutes. The volume of displaced water, splashing back from such a vast, sudden movement, was correspondingly enormous, of course, and all of you have seen some sort of footage of the result.
Surviving friends tell us they were on the coast, but needed to run inland to the gas station, or that they were far from their coastal home, safely stuck in freeway traffic, or that they were at the Institute office, foolishly clinging to computer terminals as the computers themselves slammed to the floor, glass from the windows raining all around. People walked forty minutes across town to their houses, gathered up belongings, took a four-hour bus-ride to a city on the west coast, and thence a train to Tokyo. People called their husbands, moments after the shock, and got through, only to lose contact twenty minutes later, as the tsunami took out the telephone towers.
For a month or more afterwards there was electricity but no natural gas, meaning no hot-water heaters in chilly March, so no bathing for the world’s cleanest people. Businesses stopped requiring workers to wear their good black suits; people wore hats a lot, and flu-masks; “it was like just after the War,” people said. These are also the world’s most self-reliant people, who scorn assistance and would rather starve than admit to their neighbors they lost their job, now needing help.
These are people who carefully plan what to do in case of disaster, and just where in the neighborhood to meet…only to have those meeting places washed way, and themselves along with them; people who built seawalls of reasonable size, only to have the walls themselves sink and the wave itself rise unimaginably high to overwhelm them.
What will we see, when we go back? we wondered, wanting to see and know, but not wanting to look or ask. Would the places we were fond of still exist? What would be different? In Shiogama and Matsushima, though there were subtle changes, nearly every place we knew had cleaned up and kept on going, but then again, on shallow Matsushima Bay, they had only had chest-high water. Only chest-high! A year later, the worst-hit were still shuttered. But Ishinomaki, right on the Pacific Ocean, was a different story, one for later pondering in this blog.
July 31, 2012 - A
Picking Up the Threads
All us Lord of the Rings fans will recall Frodo, wandering through the halls of Bag End after his terrible adventure, wondering how to take up his life where he had left it, just over a year before. I am surprised to find how much my post-Head of School time resembles that wandering and wondering. It is more than a month since I was officially done with my job there and yet I am still shilly-shallying, napping, thinking about getting back to writing, and not actually doing it.
For two years I have been working at full stretch, keeping despair and sloth to one side, slogging along one day at a time. Perhaps not at full stretch, really, since I preserved my energies for each coming week by licking my wounds on the weekends, losing myself in novel revisions, and doing anything but school-work – if possible – unless it was artwork or other creative stuff.
Instead of blogging ponderings about places and their meaning, I wrote a weekly essay for the school newsletter reflecting on the importance of good education, good faith, hard work, common goals, and the like, and kept the rest very private. Facebook proved a false friend for sharing worries about my work, and I shut down all communication unless in my official capacity on the official school site.
Now, God willing, that the academic glory of Saint Michael’s has been restored and, reduced to a much trimmer form, has not only weathered the worst of its financial storms but should also weather the years to come, and now that it has been handed off to capable and fresher leadership, perhaps now, after a month’s dozing and traveling and reflecting and scribbling, I can open the dusty binders of research, still stacked on my desk, gather up the sheafs of notes and photographs and poetical squibs, reconnect with whatever it was they were trying to say and pump fresh ink into them, and start again to produce something spatial.
July 26, 2010
Tasting Summer
What is the taste of summer? Is it toast with crabapple jelly, put down by the folks at Smoland Prairie Inn during a year when there were crabapples, when the buds hadn’t been destroyed by hail? Or cheese-curds, squeaky-fresh from the Burnett County Creamery, eaten in a bottomed-out canoe on the shallow St. Croix River? Or peaches, picked yourself, one by careful, is it ripe? one, on a breezy slope in the hill country south of Fredericksburg, as Chinese tourists among the next row of trees look in vain for phone bars? Is it ribs from Arthur Bryant’s place in Kansas City, a place alive with hospitality amid the bleak urban wreck of a neighborhood? Or sweet corn at a brother-in law’s birthday party, while grandma suffers a worrying nosebleed?
It has been all those, for me, tasted in time snatched from two months of frantic “hiring and firing,” of planning for the best but fearing the worst, of going on faith and still going on faith, and still going, and going, and going. Two months of sometimes falling off the steep learning curve of learning to run a school, or rather of applying skills from thirty years of teaching, being on committees, facing down thieves and flat tires on the dark byways of Italy, applying for university monies, accepting the kindness of strangers, working at a newspaper, acting as a stage manager, dreaming up and carrying out trips to far away places, teaching Sunday School, singing in choir, raising children, sitting at the bedsides of ill or dying parents and trying – sometimes in vain – to keep the peace among friends, colleagues, myself and my in-laws… to running a school. And here I am, washed up from that sea of worry on a beach of self-indulgence, and of a different, a family sort of worry.
Just now I tasted summer as it is lived here in the San Francisco Bay area: in the chilly summer fog of the Bay’s industrial rim. While my daughter did her hourlong run around the back streets of El Cerrito, I walked briskly along the trail which leads from the Dog Run to Marina Bay, replicating somewhat my power-walks at Thomas Park, back home in College Station: a bittersweet walk. Yes, it tasted of memories of walking there with my mother, and wishing I had been here to walk with her there more, that perhaps she would be walking there still, had I been able to live near her, to take her out walking as she needed to, after her friend moved away, my father being lame and unwilling to put himself through the painful effort of walking with her, or get a power wheelchair to bring it about. That’s the bitter taste, along with viewing the grim, gritty underpinning to the marshlands along the walkway, lined up in rigidly-straight heaps and laved by straight canals: the silty topsoil covers concrete bones of extinct giants, waste from the liberty-shipyards of the ‘40’s, themselves spawning the urban blight of labor lured here from the South and left to rot after the War, as rot they did.
But over the bones of the waste is growing a comely cover of native grasses and reeds, succulents, wildflowers , all running with muddy rivulets shaped however they like and walked over by marsh-birds and creeping furry critters, a landscape nearing the pristine, in which only the occasional abandoned tire or blown-off bustina mars the nearly human-free scene. The chilly, freshening breeze blows sweet across the wild fennel growing on the margins of the waste, on the edge of the asphalt path; the dilly leaves of the fennel crush sweetly between the fingers, the yellow umbels suddenly shout that they would taste lovely, lightly fried in batter like Roman artichokes, and I laugh at the other, the healing, rich, inward taste of summer: the making of a wholesome dish from the bitter jetsam of memory.
May 11, 2010
Leaving Sendai
How can you tell if a place has become home? Is it when you know how to sort your trash and when to put it out at the kerb? Is it when you know which shop sells rice, and which has the best oranges, and where to find your favorite brand of sake? When you look forward to the next episode of Nani Kore (“What is that?” a show which goes all over Japan finding obscure monuments like a tree growing from a roof or the longest, steepest temple stairs anywhere or boats with sad faces)? or start betting which dish at CoCo Curry is the number one favorite before the hapless guys (who have to eat whichever choice they make) guess what it is? Or is it when you check every day on the progress of leaves and flowers, opening out along the river, and keep forgetting crumbs for the birds? Is it when you are headed for the subway station but stop to cheer for the wheelchair marathon, and someone hands you a flag to wave, like everyone else? Or when you go out with the local ladies to see the seasonal blooming of misu-basho and share a lunch of okonomiyaki the way they make it back home in Kansai before hanging out at a temple (all equally clueless as to what to do) and sharing family stories on the way home, stories that could happen anywhere?
Maybe it has something to do with going local. With the help of our brave secretary, we have gone to local concerts, talked with a local history expert, and even joined local folks when they went off to Hirosaki, a 6-hour drive round-trip (ten, if you count the traffic jam downtown), to see the 5000 sakura (cherry trees) in bloom there along with pilgrims from all over Japan and the local American air force base, and to buy the local apples. Two weekends back, we went to the big city-wide Flea Market in Dainohara Park, where zillions of small family groups spread out a blanket on the grass with their old clothes, old toys and some real old treasures, and found souvenirs to something we did four years back (the chaggu-chaggu-umakko horse festival in Morioka) as well as a useful teapot (ours had a crack) and a happi-coat.
Maybe it has to do with making pilgrimages to places we loved before, not because they are famous or anything, but just because we went there so often, or something particularly touching happened there. It was near the Seiyu grocery store in our old neighborhood that we watched the Seiyu checker in his clean green apron gently take the elderly gentleman by the arm and escort him across the street and off home. One beautiful Saturday, we stopped by there and bought sandwiches, tea, and a couple of fresh cream-pan and picnicked in the cemetery on the ridge near Kitayama Station, admiring the roofline of the nearby temple, the dramatic clouds, the just-opening sakura and the song of the uguisu in the branch above our heads, then walking the tiny neighborhood back-trails down to the train station at Kita-Sendai. We went to Shiogama a weekend back not to see the amazing shrine or eat the incredible sushi, as we did last time, but to eat lunch at the boat terminal, admire improvements to downtown, revisit the little stationery shop and the grocery, recalling the long cold day’s evening we spent four years ago, wandering the downtown, waiting for a procession to return to the shrine. On another gorgeous day, we went to Matsushima not to see the famous temple, but certainly for the stunning views and also for lunch and to do some sketching, and to revisit our favorite shop that not only sells most of the many fabulous tops to be found in Tohoku but also spins them for you, to demonstrate how they work. That we got to hear a street calliope and see a reallyfat Corgi was just icing on the cake!
Last night, before going home to pack, we stopped by the busy corner where the 7-11 is, and the Kent Cookie shop, and while I waited for Robin to get cash and sake and crackers to take home, I watched the flu-masked housewives race by on their bicycles, aprons flying, the uniformed teenagers out after manga and snacks, the bus wheel by on its way to the bridge, and thought this is home; I’m really going to miss this! We had just walked down the street from the university, where I had said good-bye to a new friend who shares a love for fantasy, Dr. Doolittle, and things that are “mysterious.” She and I plan to work together on a book about Masamune Date, this great city’s great founder, and that way maybe I can give a little something back to the city I have come to love.
April 14, 2010
Waking Up in Sendai
The day starts very early, here in Sendai, because there is something distinctly off-kilter about our time-zone, here. The sky begins to get light at about 4:45 AM and the local temple on the bluff above our apartment rings its big bell at 5:00 AM. Having become used to the good, hard tatami-style mattress of our bed (and being wise to the good, hard pillows, I brought my own squishy old feather pillow from home), and the comforters that don’t tuck in and are a bit short for large gaijin like us, so that we wear good, warm socks, I am sleeping better, but still, when the temple bell goes, it is pretty much time to get up. Or one can at least start pondering life in general, doze a bit, and then get up at 6:00ish. The other thing that keeps one from sleeping well here is all the interesting new things one learns – this was a much worse problem, the last time we were here…
After maybe going for a run along the river, after first saluting Jizu in his little shrine at the trail head (patron Buddhist saint of children; the shrine is well-lit, locally famous, and visited night and day), having some cereal or toast (of the large, square, white variety) and beautiful local eggs (very orange yolks!) or maybe a fishcake or two (or cream cheese from Walmart, which owns the local Seiyu Grocery chain) and some good Maxim coffee, and juice from the 7-11 (combini – convenience stores – are a real necessity to life here, serving as latterie to buy milk and food and underwear and manga and also where you pay your power bills, get cash…), we carefully manage not to take showers while the other person is either shaving or doing dishes (no dishwashing machine), so that the water is super-hot.
Once all ablutions, beautifications, and dressings are completed, we pack up our computers in our packs/shoulder bags, try to decide which coat to wear and whether or not we should be wearing long-johns today or take our clear-plastic umbrellas or what, shoehorn ourselves into our shoes by the front door (leaving behind our slippers, facing inward for our return later), lock up and descend the 4 floors to the ground. There, we can turn either right or left, and will wend our way along the narrow, tidy, sober, well-paved streets of Kome-ga-fukuro (our neighborhood) to get east and north to the main road, across which extends the university, a matter of 15 minute walk or so away. We might pass the little mom-and-pop store which mostly sells sake and gardening supplies, or the gorgeous traditional house with its generous garden, or the amazingly attractive corner café with its tiny garden of trees and flowers, or the gardens with the various camellias, always in bloom: huge and pink, with long yellow centers, small and red, with bright yellow centers, pink and many-petalled, like roses, white and poetically fading to brown, all with their perfect, glossy, dark leaves. The star magnolias are ready to burst into incredible bloom, like huge white roses, and without any leaves, as yet: Robin has coined the word magnolificent to describe them, the plums are fading, and the pink sakura are about to amaze the world, along the river, in gardens, everywhere.
Enough for now! Tomorrow: the rest of the day!
April 13, 2010
Back to Japan
Where to start? The last month’s writing energies have been siphoned off to other efforts: trying to say something inspirational to a school-full of folks looking for good news, as I get ready to take over the Headship at Saint Michael’s; trying to revise novel number one so that someone will take a second look at it, a third look and then, God willing, launch the thing; trying to write little notes to accompany the photographs, coming from Sendai, where I’ve been since the 29th of March.
Sendai, Japan, that is, Miyagi Prefecture, in the region known as Tohoku, “East-North” in the cool latitudes of upper-middle Honshu. Robin and I lived here for six months, back in the the spring of 2006, and so the place feels like home, but it is mighty exotic, if we sit back and consider, and if this had been our first visit, culture shock would likely be extreme, although back in the States sushi and sashimi are not the unusual things they were in the ‘70s. He and I met through the Berkeley-Sakai Sister-City Student Exchange program: I was in the 1973 batch going to Japan and he went in 1975; we met at a party for the incoming Japanese students in 1974. He was seventeen, I was eighteen, and thereby hangs a tale. How long have we been married, now? Thirty-one years? The good news is that being in the same office all day and a small apartment all night doesn’t seem to be a bad thing…
When we were here in 2006, it had been 33 years since I had last been in Japan, and picturesque Godai-do shrine in Matsushima Bay (go online and admire it: it is adorable!) was open that spring, as it is, once every 33 years… some kind of significance there, I expect. But I was first in Japan as a little girl of 8, on our way to India, where we would be for nearly four years, with trips home every year, after the first summer, and those taken slowly through intervening opportunities of the Levant, Europe, and Asia. I recall staying at the Ginza Tokyu Hotel, and learning from a tall, slender waiter to ask properly for water: o-mizu, kudasai! and also remember standing on the cold shinkansen platform, waiting and waiting for a bullet train that would never come: the only time the bullet train was stopped on account of snow in its entire history, and that was its first year of operation. Instead, we had to take a plane to Kyoto, a low-flying commuter plane, probably a DC-3, and when Fuji-san was announced as being outside the right side of the plane, you can bet that it was justoutside the right side of the plane, gleaming gorgeous with a mantle of snow. And much else… that’s another book lying written and unread, which needs sprucing up and sending out again!
But what of Sendai, city on the beautiful Hirose-gawa, winding like three rivers through the heart of town, past the wooded hill where its founder, Date Masamune, lies entombed in a splendid reproduction of the Momoyama style tomb that burned to the ground in the blitz? Sendai, with its backdrop of mountains, looking out to the sea like a small San Francisco? It is called “the city of trees,” since after the war it was rebuilt in the image of a new, more beautiful, culturally-rich, forward-looking place, a place with broad boulevards lined with zelkova and cherry trees, with a symphony orchestra, a chamber music group, several choirs (including the wonderful Sendai Baroque Ensemble, which we heard sing Buxtehude’s Membra Jesu Christi at the local Baptist church, the night before Easter), and a classical music competition (everybody you talk to seems to have a daughter who studies clarinet or piano). It is a place where if you drop a glove or a necklace or a set of keys, it is put on the nearest high surface, awaiting your return, a place where, as you take your morning run beside the river, you see eagles, swooping to clear the high school campus of mice or try to snag your sandwich, pheasants peering bashfully at you through the willows, ducks both plain and extremely fancy, poking along the shore, brilliant, black-and-white wagtails skimming the surface of the water, and loons, fishing in mid-stream. The tips of the tree branches are blushing pale green or pale pink, and the sakura are daily expected: the venerable weeping cherry in the courtyard of the Institute has dark-red buds ready to open on the next sunny day.
And the people! The people greet you as you run with a courtly nod and an ohio-gozaimasu! as you pass them with their beagles, or as they pass you with their far-superior running skills. And when you compliment the hearty old ladies, doing their exercises with a cheerful genki desu! (roughly “you are very healthy!” or “you’re terrific!”), they smile delightedly back. People at a concert of baroque music will sit on folding chairs or will stand, rapt, for two hours of serious, heart-felt attention. When you eat at that Italian restaurant in the basement of the mall, and you forgetfully leave una buona mancia (“a good little something for the hand” – in Italy or France, about $1.00), the waiter chases you with it, up the stairs. Children gape at you – not that many like you, hereabouts – and when you look in the mirror, you think gosh, you really are pretty odd-looking! Oh, there’s just too much. It is a great place to write, that’s for sure.
If you’d like to read what I wrote about visiting Shiogama, just to the north of Sendai, after our last visit here, go to the 2009 edition of youarehere, the journal of creative geography, at www.u.arizona.edu/~urhere/, and look for “On the Shores of Sendai-Wan.”
ja, mata!
March 20, 2010
How important is culture, anyway?
Weeks pass, no blog. Some blog energies are taken with writing things that might save what had been a good school; much blog energy is taken with watching my mother go through the mysterious process of what seemed very much like giving birth to her soul. The breathing and the tunnel vision looked like labor to me, and the pain… was there pain? God, I hope not. Then there was the cremation agency with their amazing inability to corral paperwork, and the arranging for nurses to visit my father, who between shock and dehydration was in a sorry state. Then there were the death notices to send out to friends far and wide, and the memorial service not to organize because of the far distance of those friends, the drive not to make – yet – to the redwoods, since there were not yet any ashes forthcoming from the cremation agency. But then there was, waiting at the end of the week, the tickets ready in my purse: the symphony.
When Mom was first striken, and Dad could still walk up the steep slope to the first nursing home, to visit her, he read her The Lord of the Rings, which he himself had never before read, not thinking much of fantasy. But she had read it to my brother and me, many and many a time, beginning with The Hobbit. Reading to her was something he could do for her that did not tax her broken memory, did not require her to answer questions like “Do you remember when we…?” some of which sparked a response, and some of which just brought more grief and frustration. But the written word, if we love it, can be held just out of the edge of sight of the mind, each familiar phrase welcomed with a spurt of recognition, bringing the delight of split-seconds of anticipation. He grew to love the story, reading it to her, and having fallen in love with the visual beauty of the films, and it gave long, sure hours of enjoyment to them both in his visits, long stretches of calm joy that she would not have when he himself was striken, not with a stroke, but with the joint-destroying infection of MRSA that left him in a wheelchair after more than a year of periodic hospitalization. Without his visits, and with me far away out of state, she was rolled in front of a television and left to enjoy herself.
Was the presence of that book, any book that she loved, not a Godsend, even though it was not the Bible? Is not any profound work of human genius, that strives to capture the best of the human experience, even if cloaked in elven-grey and walking on hairy feet, worthy of preservation and perusal? The arts of literature, of visual arts like film, of music, are they not as important to life as the getting of money and the wielding of power? Read Everyman to discover some of the great mysteries of the giving birth to the soul: power, beauty, wealth, genius, all are left at the door of death. No-one goes through the door of death with your soul but your Maker, and whatever can guide you to the peace of knowing that, whether it be a New Zealand film-maker or an Oxford don, is a blessing. A hand on an arm, a familiar phrase of Kipling or Frost on the lips, these are the sorts of things that soothe the soul in its time of agony.
The Bible, of course, is rather good at this, as well: I discovered the true purpose of the Song of Songs in reading it to my dying mother, a whole-hearted love-letter to the soul from its Maker. The Psalms are all written for passengers to the grave, and to those on the point of death; how often did David think this night in this cave would be his last? But what if we no longer taught our children the importance of reading literature better than the usual run of the printing mill? or of ever reading the Bible, or thinking of it as some sort of scary object only for use in warding off vampires? Of drawing the sorts of sketches that brought Middle Earth to life in film? or were used to design the glazing of cathedrals? Of composing the sort of stirring music that sent the Rohirrim into battle, or the sort that inspired Howard Shore to compose in the first place, in other words, classical music… Mahler, for example.
At the end of that terrible time in California – and it was terrible, over all, there is no denying it, though the presence of family, their meals and their sympathy, made it bearable – stood the shining event that would be my mother’s memorial service for me, sermon, hymns, processional, requiem, words of comfort, the one thing I really looked forward to and knew wouldn’t disappoint: the Resurrection Symphony of Mahler, performed by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, under the baton (and sometimes just fingers) of Michael Tilson Thomas. I know this piece; I’ve sung it; like a familiar storybook, it had phrases I could anticipate with sweet glee; I knew what it does to the soul, and I needed that very badly. I pulled out two kleenxes, warned my neighbors this could get emotional and why, spotted daughter Tia in the uppermost row, and got ready to be moved from the top of my head to the soles of my feet, and let ‘er rip. It did not disappoint.
So if you need serious comfort, go high, and go deep, reach into the most accomplished creations of the greatest geniuses of the age, creations performed by people at the peak of their powers, endowed with hearts of tremendous generosity and passion, working within difficult bounds of long training and hard discipline but working with a fierce, capable joy, and you will find it. Oh, you will surely find it, if you have a mind trained to it. So we must train our minds to match the height and depth of living, and prepare for the agony of offering up our souls.
March 4, 2010
Paradise
The scene changes. We see our blogger in a nursing home room in California, holding the hand of a very gaunt woman, her mother, who has decided that enough is enough, and is uninterested in the things of this world like food and drink, but still lights up when she knows she is in the presence of those she loves, and when we tell her just how terrific she is and exactly why we love her and just how many people feel the way we do.
Yesterday, this scene would have included a very loud television showing advertisements for tacky jewelry, a window beyond swathed in curtains, and frequent, loud telephone calls, not to mention the roar of an oxygen machine: hell for the dying. Today, we tell the front desk that our mother has less than a week to live, the supervisor listens carefully before going off to her morning meeting, and within two hours, the neighbor is moved from the room where she has been for two years, the TV goes with her, the curtains are pulled back, a very quiet lady who likes to be out in the hallway moves in, the oxygen machine is turned off, and hummingbirds can be heard in the budding rosebush, outside the window. Mom can hear me reading stories of faraway places to her, or people chatting quietly at the foot of her bed. It’s paradise.
The spiral booklet from Hospice explains very neatly and sympathetically what changes the dying go through, and how we must respect their time of transition. Eating in the room with Mom seems strange: she is beyond the mundanities of sustenance. She is living off herself, and still manages to keep rosy with it, but for how much longer? Day by day the eyes grow duller, the temples and cheeks sink, the hands and arms thinner and thinner still. We keep vigil, we gather around the bed. There is time to say goodbye, to stroke the forehead, to hold the hand, the arm.
I try not to read sentimental books and I don’t allow myself to think about Mom as she was and all she was to us. I made the mistake of doing that a week ago tonight, and my eyes were so puffy the next day I didn’t look so great for my big interview with the Search Committee next night, a week ago tomorrow. The moon was high, the clouds racing over the sky, and the first formations of snow geese were crying to one another as they passed over Thomas Park; I was in the backyard at the chiminea, feeding scrap paper, pine-cones, twigs and frankincense into it steadily, and as steadily weeping away for all that. But not this week, can’t – got to last it out and then go find a hole where the rain gets in…
There is the small matter that, since this time last week, I seem to have been chosen to be Head of a school, and that one’s blogging energies may well be siphoned off to the service of the Greater Good; already I have written several necessary Documents to address the many constituents of this institution, and many more will necessarily follow. And yet, the time in Japan still awaits, though the spouse is already on his way there now and I will not follow until the end of the month, a time to finish revising the first of the two novels, so that they may be presented to some merciful publisher (one or two agents remain untried, but one is unsure about trying them) and spread their well-beloved wings.
There are more paradises to make; one begins to make them simply by asking, and hoping for mercy.
February 24
Rivers Run Through Them
“You are a light on a hill, o people, light for the City of God, shine so holy and bright o people, shine for the City of God…” got the hymn fragment stuck in my head, but really what is running through my mind is the image, not of cities on hills, but of cities on hills with – yes, you’ve heard this before – rivers running through them. All started when I saw the word Brazos recently, printed on the buttons of Robin’s flannel shirt. How did they knowI, I wondered, that we live in Brazos County, in the Brazos Valley, on the Brazos de Dios River? Then I got to wondering what it would be like to have a city on the Brazos River, I mean right astride it, and I realized it just couldn’t happen, at least not this far downstream or, contrariwise, not this far upstream. Closer to the coast, and the thing would be deeper and more navigable, closer to its source, and it would be shallower and more manageable. But here, it runs between high, wild, clay banks, in a bed full of snags. Just now, it is nearly bank-full with all the rains (at last!) and looking to flood, and when it floods, the Brazos Bottoms fill up with silt again.
“Wide as the arms of God” was how it was described by the Spanish, somewhere at its mouth, but when the Brazos is in flood, hereabouts, the whole Bottom floods, and that looks wide enough for God’s arms to us folks. Out on the Bottom land, the cotton fields, corn fields, sorghum and watermelon patches stretch out flat and wide, nearly as far as the eye can see, and they say that the first crop of cotton that was taken off the Brazos Bottoms was six feet high. Cotton is a great depleter of soils, however, so we are down to the usual two feet, nowadays. Cotton was king in Texas, until the Civil War, and practically all the slaves raised out in Virginia, were sent out here to work it in the killing Texas heat. It is still a yearly question of whether the rains will come at the right time for the cotton, and whether the gins will be full of bales in the fall, and there are still slave quarters to be seen, taken off the plantation lands and perched on small land-holdings, all over the county: little wooden double-cabins with steep-pitched roofs and a porch, fading away in the sun and harsh winter weather.
We had snow, yesterday, and it is colder here than all the other places Robin keeps on his desktop: Berkeley, Paris, and Sendai. When the jet stream loops south, there is no mountain range to keep Canada out of Texas: it just invades as it likes, only meeting resistence from the onshore breezes of the Gulf. When the wind starts to blow from the north, the Blue Northers come in and kill our pot-plants before we can hustle them indoors, but then when it comes again (as usual) from the south, then we are freed from frost, and the frost mostly doesn’t get to Brazos County; generally stalls out in Waco. Things happen fast, and big here, weather-wise, and we have learned to snatch our opportunities when they blow through, however briefly they come: our young folk run out into the parks and golf courses and dance in the rain, when it comes down in buckets as it surely can, and when we get the rare snow, all classes must stop and the people rush out into it.
Like yesterday: the super-big, Texas-sized snowflakes were falling thick and fast, all over the place, like a slow-motion summer downpour. We were on campus for early voting and by the time we got back to the car, my wool coat wast spangled all over with big white flakes, and the students were going nutty. Two giggling anthropology coeds were making a snowman on the hood of a car parked outside the Wooden Ships Lab, and other wild-eyed women were lying in wait with snowballs for the Corps cadets, who were stumping along in their camos as if they were practicing up for Afghanistan – as they well may be, bless their hearts! – but the girls didn’t have the heart to actually throw the things at the guys; rather they threw them up into the air. (Men, take note: rare snows drive women wild; one suspects the mood is on them for any sort of madness!) Snowmen were up in a jiffy, however, and “WHOOP!” quickly spelled out with footprints on the “grassy knoll” in front of the Architecture building, from the roof of which snowballs were being lobbed randomly on passers-by. A woman asked us, at the voting: “Is this snow or ice or something? I’ve never seen snow falling, before!” Now, folks, snow does fall here, every seven years or so, so she must never have run outside before, to catch it, but to fall so thickly and for so long is a very rare thing here in the Brazos Valley.
Cities on rivers are common enough, where we’ve been and where we’re going: Paris started on an island in the Seine, Sendai has the beautiful Hirose-gawa winding like three rivers through its heart, Berkeley has its creeks, running off the hills into the Bay… Rome has its island in the Tiber… but it also has its seven hills: there also needs to be rock under there, somewhere, hills to put the houses on when the river is minded to flood. The Brazos stays out of College Station: we have several ridges between us and the Bottomlands to keep us dry, unless Wolf Pen Creek or Carter Creek run through our backyards. But here, there is no rock to climb up to, along the Brazos, not around here: all clay, clay, clay, and either slippery or hard as rock, and no way down to the water, save by slipping. So here you will find no City on a River. Just a city charmed by snow, for one brief moment, and always ready, for the briefest of moments, to find joy.
February 17
Warmed by Foreign Wool
Enough of bitter blogging: let us celebrate the baggage we collect in life, that keeps us warm. I am just in from walking the dog, under the starry sky: Orion is heading west, standing upright on the treetops, and the moon is a Cheshire cat in the upper branches. This morning, out walking at about the hour the schoolbusses come around, the birds were shouting happily from those same trees, even though the hawk was up and looking for his breakfast, and the day before a great owl had been silhouetted against the sky on that tree there, just as clear as clear.
It was cold out – it does get pretty cold, here in Texas; all depends on which direction the wind is from, and now it is in the north – and so I bundled up with the works, because the dog walks veeeery slowly, these days: wool socks, long-johns under the jeans, a long-sleeved t-shirt under the sweater, then the satin-lined wool coat, the blue-silk scarf, the blue-wool-felt beret, and the blue-knit-wool gloves. And I think to myself: these gloves I bought, one desperate night on the Rue Daguerre (or actually Robin bought them for me), to replace the brown ones, completely worn through at the finger tips, which Robin bought me, one desperate night on Ichiban-cho in Sendai, four years back, to replace ones lost, stolen or strayed, all the way back to the butter-soft leather gloves stolen from my pocket on a bus in Rome, just a couple of weeks after I got them for my 37th birthday, January 29, 1993, from the guanti shop on Corso Vittorio Emmanuele, just between Largo Argentina and Piazza del Gesu – the little one that used to be run by the little couple… At the same shop on the same day, Robin bought me my foulard, literally “all wool and a yard wide,” and now I see why the lads from the Great War used that expression to commend a mate who was trusty to the end: it is absolute proof against cold, especially when it is clean and cleverly knotted so that the triangle is in the front. I liked the black-and-white arabesque pattern as being writer-like in its inkiness. The beret that covered my ears tonight is a new addition, from a stationery shop in Aigues-Mortes, bought on another occasion when I had left home ill-equipped. My blue-silk scarf was a gift from Thailand, the purple scarf, tie-dyed with geckos was a gift from my brother, the spiderweb-of-rainbow-threads scarf is from the Tibetan shop on Solano Avenue, Berkeley (the one closer to the hill, not the one closer to the Safeway), meant for my mother but then I realized that in the nursing home, she will not be needing scarves any more, or shoes, or jackets, or jewelry, or much else. She is in her own Wood Between the Worlds, and she is beginning not to want to stay there much longer. She doesn’t eat much; she doesn’t drink much.
Do we care where that wool comes from? Certainly, as consumers, we might like to know that the people who made what we wear were happy to do so, that they were paid well, that they could chat with friends while they worked, that the wool came from sheep who roamed hillsides we might like to roam, that the dying works and spinning mills were clean, bright places that didn’t foul the streams around them. We like to think that the people who sold those things to us or to the people we love to give to us like to work in that little shop, or at that counter in the big department store, and that it pleased them to think that someone would be warmer because of them. The fact that we can often believe none of what I have just said in this paragraph to be true goes a long way to explain why we are such a sad race of humans, these days. But most of all, we like to remember how we came to be wearing the things at all: again, from whom they came, from which street, at which moment of our lives.
So how does all this fit together? In this wise: I am warmed by woolens that were gifts from those I love or who love me, gifts that came when they were needed, and came from all over creation, and half the warmth in them is in the knowing where they came from, from whom, and how, or at least the smile that comes along with the warmth comes from there. And other things warm us, likewise. The smile in the branches of the tree is a gift from knowing Alice in Wonderland, thanks to my mother, and the gift of knowing Orion from someone’s pointing it out, long years ago: my mother again. And my mother: my mother no longer remembers who gave her what, from minute to minute and from day to day; she had a great epiphany at Christmas, when we stood in her room and she beamed at us, but life from day to day is a sad mystery: how did I come to this room with that TV in it and who are these people and what are they to me? Why don’t they let me get at this dratted scab on my forehead? I’ll scratch it if it’s the last thing I do! Sometimes I think my son comes to see me, but then he goes away again, and that old man who says he’s my husband Howard, but how can that be? When we don’t know where the wool we are wearing comes from any more, it may be time to stop eating much or drinking much. Stands to reason.
February 11
Lock Up Your Valuables, Sort Of
If you like this blog, are you paying a red cent for it? Ah, the beauty of modern life, when the artists starve. But, but, but, you say, go get yourself an advertiser! Go get one yourself, say I, what I do is write. Get an agent! you say. Already written to and been turned down by 30 agents, say I, what I do is write. Oh, you have to schmooze, go to writer’s conferences to get an agent! I don’t schmooze, say I, what I do is write. It takes me all day to write; I have to concentrate on it to do it properly. I do a blog because what I write is good, but no-one will publish it because it’s not Dan Brown or J.K. Rawlings, which will surely bring in the big bucks, and they were never turned down by anyone, you know. Right.
Am I implying that people nowadays have no vision or judgement? Bingo! But does anyone play Bingo any more? After all, it requires everyone to be on the honor system, and what is that, anyway? Can’t we all just say that we hate big CEO salaries one month and then knuckle under and get one from a lobbyist, a few months later?
And independent films are never any good, and even if they were, distributors would always make sure the finest of those films would get wide distribution, wouldn’t they? In a pig’s eye! And I sold more than 93 copies of a book for children about saints last year, in a world that could sure use them, but who reads or buys books or cares about saints any more? Or children, for that matter. Oooh, am I being bitter and cynical? Bitter, yes, cynical, no. I speak the God’s truth, no more, no less. But then so did the original cynic, so, yes, I am a cynic, living like a dog in the marketplace, saying (as I’m sure Diogenes would have, if he’d had the chance) “The Emperor has no clothes on!”
But in order for you to believe it is the truth, I will have to lock it up from you and charge you for it. Honestly, I wish I could charge you for it, because until Utopia arrives and we don’t need money to buy groceries, pay is a good thing. And until it doesn’t take all day to write something worth reading, so that one can’t do it in the spare time carved from around another job, writers worth their salt (that’s pay, by the way) will need to find a way to make a living off their craft. Yet I maintain that we can’t get by without beauty; I see in the paper where a person can die of boredom. But we pay good money for our boredom!
Antoine-Auguste Parmentier understood that if you want people to value a thing, you don’t give it away free. He was the great French promoterof the potato, and has as a result many potato dishes named for him, a nice tomb in Pere Lachaise, a Boulevard and a Metro stop named after him. What Frederick the Great did in Prussia by force, Parmentier did through cleverness, and with a little help from two or three stiff sieges and famines. According to that well-supported-by-advertising free online information service known as Wikipedia, Parmentier was up against a scientific community that firmly believed the New World import known as the potato would give you leprosy (meanwhile, the Prussians were happily eating theirs without apparent ill effects), and he literally couldn’t give them away, so…
He locked up a whole warehouse of seed-potatoes and I suppose plants, and put an armed guard on it by day, with strict orders to allow people to help themselves once they had bribed the guards and strict orders not to guard the warehouse by night. And don't you know that those clever farmers got all sorts of potatoes and felt very pleased with themselves? What a genius the man was! He deserves two Metro stops, as far as I’m concerned…
Speaking of which, yesterday’s sunrise here in Bryan/College Station should have been locked up in a very exclusive room at the Louvre, or perhaps had a best-seller written about it, and then tickets sold to the first 1000 lucky winners of something or other, because anyone not looking at the sky between the hour of 7:00 and about 7:15 missed out on a unique moment in meteorlogical history – oh, wait, most days are unique… (ouch!). Seriously, many cloudy-blah mornings may come and go, each unique in some obscure way, but this was overwhelmingly and absolutely unique.
It began with the fact that the sunrise was clearly going to be a purply-pink color, with rays of gold-tipped magenta, and moved on quickly to the fact that the clouds seemed to be observing a strict adherence to patterns of parallel bands, at all scales of existence, so that tiny shimmers like the patterns of owl-feathers could be seen in the finest edges of things, as well as great waves precisely like the patterns on the sand of a placid beach, and frankly Marcelled clouds of in-between size were to be seen, all over the sky, from the wispiest edges of things to the thickness of a good blanket of stratus, with a taste and complexity that makes me think Someone read my blog about Lombardy Poplars, and how they seem like man-made down-beats in the landscape.
You can forget the “man-made,” because I have been reminded that repeating patterns are part of the toolbox of God, and that music began, after all, in the throat of some nightingale and the chatter of some brook, and we are just imitators of the great Original.
Now, I will lock that up so that someone thinks it’s important, but I will tell the guards to take bribes, and give it all away.
February 3
The Wood Between the Worlds
Yes, yes, no blog in more than a week, but here we are, back in Texas, reflecting. Much doing of the writing sort has happened in the past week, siphoning off blog juices I suppose, and much of just living, which takes up time and thought. Also, one was in Cambridge for a couple of days, without computer access. But here in the Wood Between the Worlds, there is time to reflect on all that.
You are all familiar with The Magician’s Nephew, are you not – the Narnia book I like to read to students first, before The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe? And with the place neither here nor there, the place rich with possibility and change, but changeless itself, full of portals to other worlds: the Wood Between the Worlds? We are now home, in the Wood, for a full month before putting on our “away” rings again, and stepping into a different pond from last time, the pond that will take us to Japan. There is plenty of time to wander about the Wood in a dreamy sort of way, and try to understand where we’ve been.
Our first night back in Texas, I woke up to the scent of old wood. Our whole house is made of wood, of course, and it was built in 1940, so it is I suppose old. Houses in Paris, as in Rome and most other places with more stone than standing lumber, are made of stone, brick, plaster and concrete, not wood, so home always smells woody, by comparison. Like C.S. Lewis’ Wood, it is a bit of an in-between place, College Station, as the name implies: a train station between Hither and Yon, a place on Highway Six, which, as one is frequently reminded “runs both ways” (in other words: you came here by it, and by golly, you can leave by it again too, if you don't like it here!). It is a place full of potential, a gateway to other places, but not much of a place in itself. Young faculty come here, raise their small children, make their mark, and move on to more famous pastures: it is a seedbed, if you like, full of rich promise, but never seeing it come to full flower. Things grown here are generally transplanted to deeper soil. We’re still here, of course, so we much go out to see grown-up things, elsewhere.
There is a ring of graceful little oaks, around the park across the street, but the soil here is not very good for tall trees: before it had houses put on it, this was Prairie, with a bit of Post Oak Savannah, thrown in: clay soil, heavy and dense. Around here, the tall trees only thrive in the river-bottoms; I long to live in a river-bottom like that, and have tall trees arching high overhead but river-bottoms are always flooding, hereabouts. Dangerous.
Perhaps that is what makes places like France so exciting: they are all one big floodplain, full of tall trees, very dangerous, very exciting: things really happen, there. Oh, yes, they certainly do happen: the last survivors of the 1871 Paris Commune are put up against a cemetery wall (having already shot their own hostages and having spent the night in a shootout among the graves of Pere Lachaise Cemetery), all 150-ish of them, shot, and buried where they fall. Convenient, having a shootout in a cemetery! And so the story goes, all over Paris: what a blood-spattered city! 2000 guillotined in the Place di la Concorde, alone! Yessir, things really happen, in France. No wonder the cathedrals there are as tall as a grove of sequoias!
Speaking of floodplains, I have to report officially that France’s countryside is more beautiful than England’s: I have seen them side by side in one day and can certify it as a fact. On the train from Cambridge to London, and London to Dover-ish (wherever it is that the Chunnel goes under) – admittedly not the best landscape the UK has to offer – we see similar plains and low hills, similar lines of bare trees punctuated by small hamlets, but the hamlets of that part of England are entirely Semi-Detatched Villas of extreme mundanitude… whereas, after your 20 minutes under the English Channel (or La Manche, as they call it in France, “the Sleeve,” as they are loath to let the English have it) – twenty minutes!!! do you have any idea how long it takes by ferry, and how much more seasickness is involved?? – you are among the equally hilly areas alternating with equally flat landscapes, but the French villages cluster like – oh, dear, I’ve been in France too long, I was going to say like aureoles around a nipple, but with the little, single, squat-towered churches and the beauty of them and all, standing among the swelling fields, it’s an embarrassingly apt comparison – and then, the alleés of typical Lombardy poplars or plane-trees, along the roads, man-made though they are, add an irresistable touch of grace, wherever they’re put, like downbeats in a dance. The houses of the villages stand “detatched” and homey-looking, each with its shutters and its yard and its tree. And the persistent overcast of England has risen and is blowing away: real, fleecy high clouds appear, and there is a glimpse of blue lit by sunset. France is beautiful: she is la belle France. Bloody, but beautiful; like civilization itself, I suppose.
Here, we live in a dream of that sort of beauty, and of that sort of danger, of a place where Catholics can rise up and kill 3000 Protestants in a day, where even the smallest town in southern France can even today have its government taken over by a coup d’ètat. But also a place where one of the stations available on cable is the Couture channel, with models marching down runways every day, where couples kiss as they part to take different subway lines, where accordionists make a good living busking on the subway trains themselves, and where small, unescorted dogs sit politely in the doorway of the charcuterie, hoping for mercy.
Here in College Station, last week, a man was held up in broad daylight by another man with a gun: I’m sorry, but we aren’t allowed to have the danger without the beauty! That’s not civilization, that’s just caveman stuff. Wait: those caves were pretty gorgeous, too. Alas!
January 22
Our own brand of Frenchness
I know I’ve already blathered about public transit, but bear with me: here I go again.
We were watching the France 24 (English) TV Station (France vingt-quatre – say it the way they do and it’s waaaay cooler!) over breakfast this morning as usual, and on Saturdays they have a thing they call Reporter, an in-depth show on a particular subject. This week they were talking about a big national debate over “French identity” which everyone realizes is about being a Muslim in France. They went to Marseille, which has a really high percentage of Muslims, and there was much intelligent, reasonable talk, a chat with a young woman who wants to teach French in the public schools but also wants to wear hijab (the head-scarf) banned by public schools here (what is with that??).
But my favorite interview took me back to my old days at Berkeley High, and especially at the Berkeley High Concert Chorale. If you’ve heard this story before, just plug your ears and hum, because here goes: At Berkeley High, what with white flight to private schools, every ethnic group was a minority. That is to say, there were just as many (or as few) whites as Asians as Blacks. If you couldn’t tell which flavor of Asian a person was (Filipino or Chinese or Japanese…now it would be S. Asian or Fijian, too) you were so uncool. Yes, there were occasional tensions, certain bathrooms you didn’t use (pretty much only the bathrooms in the gym were okay to use, and they didn’t have doors, but since you were in the Girl’s Gym and you were a girl and nobody looked anyway, that was kind of okay, too) but that would be true of any big high school. It was in the School of the Arts branch of Berkeley High that things got utopian, especially in the Concert Chorale.
Drama tended to be full of white kids (though I did like the production of “Fiddler on the Roof” with one black daughter), as did Chamber Choir, but Chorale – maybe because of our Filipino-American director, Vince Gomez – was utterly integrated. We also sang everything from Gospel to Palestrina, and we did them all so well and in such racial as well as musical harmony that we were invited to sing at a Choral Music Teachers’ confererence in Anaheim (can you say “with a performance at the Main Street Pavilion at Disneyland with free, behind-the-scenes access to the Magic Kingdom?”) to show that it could be done. We found it hilarious that people thought it couldn’tbe done, but in visiting all the hosting high school choirs on the way there and back, we began to understand that there are schools with big problems…
In the same way, there are three tall high-rise apartment buildings in Marseille that could be a disaster, but in which – an they are large, airy, inexpensive and nicely-maintained apartments – young French families with all sorts of ethnic backgrounds live in peace. The maintenance manager of one building – a former soldier in the French Foreign Legion and native of French Comoros – said he never had any trouble with his tenants not getting along, and they all got along with him fine. A very white-French professional-looking young dad talked excitedly about living there and what nonsense it was that people were talking about Frenchness, since everyone experiences “their own brand of Frenchness.” That’s what I’m talkin’ about!
The trick seems to be living shoulder to shoulder and just sharing everyday life experiences having nothing to do with race or religion, but simple, human experiences like babies, school, paychecks, groceries – well, groceries might point up differences, but could make interesting discussion – life, death, parents, love… One of my other favorite quotations from the show was from a vegetable vendor in the so-called “Arab Market” of Marseille (which, as the reporter pointed out, may be shunned by racist people, but it is festive and colorful and has “good, inexpensive produce”) who said “mixing” is fine, and “mixed children are more beautiful.” Japanese women, they say here, like to marry French men because they are good husbands (the same is said of American men, incidentally), and on the TGV on the way back from Montpellier was such a couple with an adorable girl; I also recall folk on the bus in Berkeley with golden skin and golden eyes… got to agree with the vegetable man on that!
Living together as much as possible, not off in our own enclaves: that is the ideal. Which brings me at last to public transportation. As all of you know who have ever ridden a crowded bus or subway or suburban line train, it is perfectly possible, when a desired stop is reached, for the person in a seat on the far side of a jam-packed car to get to and out of the door of that car in time. How? you may ask (if you’ve never tried it). Here’s how: 1) just after the doors close of the previous stop, you begin to signal that you must get off at the next stop by, say, gathering up your bags, or simply by getting to your feet, which triggers 2) all the people between you and the door (or most of them, there are always a few with earbuds in or who are deep in thought, or deaf, or socially inept) whose peripheral vision is ever alert for the slightest tremors in the Force begin to glance about on the floor for places to put their feet and on the bars for places to move their hands, ways to tuck in their shoulder bags, and so forth, then 3) the stop is announced, or the doors open, and we begin our move – always good to announce our impending arrival with an audible Pardon! Pardon! (in Italy, it would be Permesso! Permesso!), and 4) everyone miraculously effaces themselves, and you get out.
Self-effacing is one of the great miracles of public transit: we discover that, by holding our breath and making ourselves somehow flat, we can take up very little space at all. People without this skill, or people who crash into your shoulder with their backpack or cannot seem to dodge you on the sidewalks (and I have to say that the French are much more random, wandering, illogical sidewalk-walkers than Italians, stopping to talk, or kiss, or whatever just anywhere and zig-zagging wildly; honestly, these people must just be a hair too northern-European or something; they probably can’t dance, either, or shoot a hoop; they sure can’t cook spaghetti al dente), are just boorish and unwelcome on the subway. The whole dance, on the RER suburban line with its pairs of facing seats, as to sitting next or sitting opposite your best buddy (opposite is the correct choice, incidentally, being really more intimate), and then the question of whether you should take that empty seat in a crowded subway or train care (you should is the correct answer, unless you are absolutely getting off at the next stop; if you are bashful and don’t take it, you are just adding to the surplus standing population and taking up space some poor slob standoing on the other side of the car could use) is somewhat more advanced, but well worth learning.
The point being that we are sensitive at all times as to the needs of our fellow-travelers, and anticipate where we can help; otherwise no-one would ever get off or on (oh, I forgot to mention the how to get off even if it isn’t your stop but you were forced to stand in the doorway and get right back in again protocol: basically, you hang on to the bar by the door, if possible, even while you step out, indicating to the hordes about to enter that you are still “on base” and are still allowed to “move your piece” as we all recall from Hide and Seek and Checkers, those two great life-modelling games) a train without murder and mayhem, ever again. Like Civil Inattention (the great city-thing where you don’t meet the eyes of those approaching you, difficult for the Howdy-trained Aggie or indeed for country-folk of France), this sort of Civil Sensitivity (I just made that up) is the great emollient of public transit. Not as good as Poetry*, but a good second best! (*see “Pirates of Penzance,” the show-stopping chorus known a “Hail, Poetry!” Google the words or listen to it on YouTube; you won’t be disappointed. The key phrase is: “Hail, flowing fount of sentiment! All hail, all hail, divine emollient!”) A demain!
January 19
Various kinds of love(blah – it’s a theater review! Not enough sleep last night; think I’ll sit on this one)
Why celebrate the great passion of Nero and Poppaea? you might wonder. Monteverdi and his librettist seemed to think it was worth getting all worked up about, and we heard the result last night. L’Incoronazione di Poppaea (The Coronation of Poppaea, or L’Coronnement de Poppee in French) is one of Monteverdi’s three major operas, performed in the early 1600’s and some of the earliest operas written, and one that we’ve been familiar with in Lucchese-land since college days, when the Raymond Leppard version of it was put on at Zellerbach Hall on the Berkeley campus. That version put the counter-tenor roles down an octave, giving us tenors and baritones in place of what sound like mezzo-sopranos.
The version we heard last night – sung by a very young and hugely talented cast at the Theatre Gerard Philipe, and accompanied by a wonderful ensemble of period instruments called Les Paladins – sticks to the original castrati-range of octaves while simultaneously messing with our minds, so that we have a scene with Nero, a mezzo-soprano, dressed in a man’s black suit, hanging out with his buddy Lucan, a baritone in full, festive drag. The countertenor playing Otho finds himself in a woman’s dress as he attempts to sneak up on Poppaea to murder her, but neglects to shave or wear a wig. The female roles are mostlyplayed by females, except for the wonderful nurse Arnalda, who is a very uptight-looking counter-tenor, and of course only a bass can since Seneca, which the young guy did terrifically well.
The original question stands, however: why write some of the most beautiful love songs ever written (and the final duet is really so gorgeous it makes you weep) celebrating the convenient affection of a social-climbing courtesan for a mad, easily-manipulated artiste of an emperor, who sentences his old tutor to death with almost the same brevity and depth of insight as his dismissal of the senate and the people of Rome (“Del Senato e del Popolo, non curo!”)? There are beautiful arias celebrating the lips and other body parts of Poppaea, and a clever and equally gorgeous aria in which we watch Poppaea ensnare Nero into repudiating his wife.
The designers of this production have made clear their take on this love story with the final scene, in which that wonderful duet is sung while the globe which has represented the world/empire throughout the show bursts into flames and gradually burns down to its metal substructure as the slow song unfolds: their love certainly set the world on fire, if temporarily, during the year of four emperors that followed Nero’s death…and we all know what will become of Poppaea, once she becomes pregnant. Another clever touch was a fall of stones at the death of Seneca, recalling ut ruat caelum (“even if the sky fall”) – a result of Nero’s careless headstrong whims.
There is plenty of moralizing from the various characters, but how memorable is it? Arnalda’s triumphant glee over having become a matron is memorable, especially when she reflects that the worst thing about it is how much harder it will be to die rich than to die poor, when death is a relief. Otho’s torture at being asked to kill the woman he can’t help from loving is very vivid, as is Octavia’s grim sense of not being rewarded for her virtue…but then she tries to murder Poppaea and where is the virtue in that? The only true lover in the piece, Drusilla, is nearly executed for taking the blame which should have fallen on Otho (and which he does manfully own up to, begging Nero to kill him personally, which Nero finds so flattering that he pardons him, instead), and her ingenuous and disbelieving “do you love me?” (“M’ami? M’ami?”) when Otho rebounds in her direction, is likewise memorable.
It says something, however, that the personification of Love was costumed as a black hermaphrodite imp with gilded privates. This is not some selfless devotion we’re talking about here, but passion… and the personification of Fortune, an ancient nursing-home resident in a wheelchair pushed by Virtue, who wears hijab, are triumphant over Virtue, as is made clear in the Prologue and by Poppaea’s triumphant, childish assertion that “Love and Fortune are fighting for her” (to which Arnalda replies that “Love is a child and Fortune is a blind old woman”). The only true lover in the whole thing is Drusilla, who is ready to die in terrible tortures rather than betray Otho as the one who tried to kill Poppaea, and accepts banishment with him as a lucky gift.
January 18
A good death
That was the subject for yesterday’s walk from the Orsay train station to the university, through the misty fog of a vanishing winter. The night before, I had been chatting with daughter Tia and had learned that the principal at her little El Cerrito elementary school had succumbed over the long weekend to her cancer (I think it was pancreatic; that seems to be all the rage, lately). Last month, Tia was astounded that the woman would struggle on in her job, knowing almost certainly that she would be dead before the end of the school year. “Is that really how I would spend the last months and days of my life?” she wondered. And would she? Would I?
In many senses, we all have been notified of our imminent deaths; it is just a matter of how imminent and how much we are aware of that imminence. If our reaction to a diagnosis of “only a few months to live” is to withdraw from society, from work, and contemplate the state of our souls, revisit the places and people we love best, one might ask why work at all? Knowing that we are to die in the end, should we not give ourselves over to contemplation from the starte? But what if work is what we love, and not merely the thing that keeps us alive and doing the things (in our spare time) that we really do love? What if being a principal, or being a researcher, is what gives us joy, what, in other words, if our work is what we love? Why, then we would want to work until we drop dead at our desks!
How do we spend this allotment of years on earth? We discussed this in terms also of what we had seen last weekend, in Languedoc, namely the town of Aigues-Mortes (Ag-e-mort), built from scratch by St. Louis-de-France, the king who lead the 7th & 8th crusades, and died of the plague in Tunis, whose life has been written up by several contemporary biographers and many hagiographers, to boot. Louis was, as I have written elsewhere, “the ideal king, so if you ever plan to be a monarch, listen up! He really had faith: he sincerely believed in God and that God was the boss, not Louis. In Paris, King Louis built one of the most beautiful churches anywhere, called La Sainte Chapelle: the walls are almost entirely made out of dark red and blue glass, and the ceiling is spangled with gold stars. He also knew it was an awesome responsibility to be in charge of all the people of France, and he did his best for them. As a judge, he was fair, whether you were rich or poor, and he was merciful, too, even when punishing people who did wrong. Louis insisted on preserving everyone’s rights, no matter who they might be or what they looked like. In dealing with other countries, he was astute (meaning no one could fool him) and respectful, working for peace whenever possible, but he was a good soldier when he needed to lead his troops into battle. You could always trust him to do what he promised. And, like Joan of Arc and most saints, he hated dirty and blasphemous language (swearing by God and that sort of thing) and he wouldn’t allow it around him.”
When Louis decided to go on crusade, he wanted to do it right, leaving from his own port on the Mediterranean; since his lands didn’t quite reach that far, he bought a chunk of unwanted marshland from the local landowners, displaced the fishermen, drained and deepened the ship channel that connected to the sea and built himself a neat little city, and encouraged settlers to come and fill it. Its four-square walls and multiple gates still stand, and in near-mint condition. There he was able to host the captains of the 1500 ships that accompanied him, be blessed in a proper church (also built from scratch) and house all the needed craftsman and vittlers to launch such an effort: he really did it right, and the place was built as neatly and snugly as you might like, with window-seats for the archers, all the way around the lower reaches of the walls, plenty of enclosed guard-houses. Someone really thought that place out – Louis himself or someone he trusted to do it properly, and whose work he approved, as the final arbiter.
Yet Louis himself enjoyed that city only a few months, if that long. He left it behind when he went on each crusade, and died far away. Was his effort a waste? Is anything we leave behind us when we go a waste? Ars longa, vita brevis (“Art is long, life is short”) as the Romans have it, and I think they’ve got it. Make something, solve something, improve something, teach something, and none of it will have been a waste.
January 14
What keeps us alive
After a morning in which we watched a young anchor of France-24 television grow faint before our very eyes, put her forehead on the newsdesk, and say I’m ill – I’m very ill… I think I’m going to be sick after showing the footage from Haiti, I went to the wing of the Louvre where the Mesopotamian and Egyptian antiquities were, thinking hard about human beings and civilization.
To have civilization in the first place, there needs to be surplus: there needs to be organized agriculture on such a scale as to produce surplus to set aside against disaster, and to create enough wealth to build the things that make for organized agriculture. There must be wealth, and then there must be reinvestment of wealth for the continuation of that wealth. Wealth must be expended upon canals, dikes and seed, upon ploughs and harrows and mules, then upon roads and carts and soldiers to guard the roads and carts, then upon cities to market and store the wealth, to train the intellectuals to ensure the correct time to harvest and how much of the stored wealth to lay out on improvements – and already we see where civilization falls apart, if we can’t trust the soldiers to protect their charges but instead rape or murder or steal from them, or that the officials in charge of the fields take the wealth meant for canals and dikes and seed and spend them on good living for themselves, or choose to destroy the whole structure with war.
Without a sense of sacred duty and the knowledge that to be corrupt and self-centered is to destroy the world, quite literally, the very ground we stand on to saw off the branch we sit on, there is no civilization. The farmers whose lives are taken up in making the basis of wealth cannot be expected to do all the rest of the work of civilization, as well. Give the farmers what they need: let them have some joy in their constant labor; let them see at the end of a long day that nothing has washed away all their work, that something is growing. They are the goose that lays the golden eggs: if they are not held as sacred in their busy poverty, the wealthy will never eat, the whole pyramid remains a flat desert. Kill them, or take away their canals and roads and the knowledge of when to plant and reap and store, and you’ve cut off your branch to life.
In Haiti the wealth flew out long ago, and with it everything the farmers need, so that they have had to eat their seed corn, eat their mules, cut down the trees that held down their soil, and now they beg from one another, and from the world. When you are spending all your life just staying alive, there is no time or energy to make it any better. It seems to me that it is only a sense of the sacredness of our pact with one another that has kept us alive as a species, whether it is the division of duties among those who hunt and gather or the division of duties among those who create and distribute the wealth of agriculture: superstitious dread of the gods went a long way to keep the Egyptian system intact, as did a dread of the Emperor among the Romans, but in the end it is a sense of the God in each of us, of the sacred obligations of the God in me to the God in you, and the sense – as the Romans learned when the plebs seceded from the patricians – that even if we cannot all be at the glamorous top of the pyramid, those at the top should know and worship what is under their feet: without the stomach, as Menenius Agrippa told the plebs, the hands and head of the body die – that is, the merchants and the leaders die without the farmers – but without the hands and head, the stomach is dead as well. The stomach is not as pretty an organ as the eyes or hands, he assures them, but it is every bit as necessary for life as the means to find and bring to the stomach what is needed for life. The organs should not argue among themselves who is the most beautiful or necessary, he told them back in 503 B.C., according to Livy (you may also have heard echoes of this in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus), they should just get on with the business of helping each other out, to let the whole creature live.
To live again, Haiti will need to replant its trees, rebuild its roads and water systems or build them new, rebuild and staff its schools, replant its fields, and then it must have leaders with a sacred sense of duty to their people, and then perhaps rebuild its presidential palace: without that greater vision and unbreakable bond of mutual responsibility – really a love of the whole structure and a sense of service to it – civilization is lost, and humans are doomed. We need each other as surely as we need water, food, sunlight and air. Those privileged to order the workings of the body of civilization must see that they have no choice but to serve, and to serve fairly.
Or that’s what I learned today at the Louvre.
If that wonderfully stratified society we teach our children about in ancient history classes – and the bonds of interdependence between them – melts away entirely, what is left?
January 11, 2010
Since the last entry, there has been a day of mostly writing postcards & novel revisions (Friday), a day of mostly writing and then of running out to the Marche aux Puces to buy enough of the tiny pietons (creche figures) that one finds in gallettes to fill out our missing members – a lot, since we only earned one donkey, last year – and a small crystal bowl, and to buy a cheap athletics bag for our weekend trip to Montpellier next weekend, then buy some groceries on the way home (Saturday), and then a day of mostly wandering around the cold streets of Laon and having a grand lunch at the cathedral brasserie opposite the cathedral (yesterday, Sunday).
Today, I went to the Louvre, and am home nursing my feet and eating a late lunch of Special K and milk. Tomorrow the Louvre is closed, so I’ll go to the Museé d’Orsay, and then Wednesday I’ll go back to the Louvre with my pastels and my camp stool. Thursday, we’ll see.
So what is that like, going to the Louvre Museum? For me, it was first a matter of careful packing and dressing. Into my small plastic shopping bag from Galignani Bookstore (using shopping bags for carrying even one’s purse is a trick I learned of old in Rome) went my slim reading book (Rousseau’s Reveries of a Solitary Walker), my postcards that still needed mailing, my small sketchbook from Santa Claus, and my small pencil case with inkwash brush pens, pencils, and watercolors. I put on my undies, long-johns (shirt and pants), wool socks, sweater, jeans, blazer and most comfortable shoes, then wool coat, new knit gloves (old ones became too holy at last, yesterday), Roman woolen foulard (as a scarf), and blue fleece hat. Then I set off, a half an hour behind Robin, who was off to Orsay as usual.
Once at the Louvre (walk to Denfert-Rochereau station, take Metro 4 to Châtelet, change for Metro 1, take it to Palais-Royale-Musee du Louvre, follow the signs through the shopping gallery and security check), I jammed my gloves, hat & foulard in the pockets of my coat (noticing that my nice new gloves have left light-blue fuzz all over my wool coat) and checked my coat at the Denon Coat-Check (there are at least two Coat-Checks, at the various entrances to the various wings of the palace), got my 4-day pass – having carefully written my name in the correct blanks – stamped at the entrance to Denon (ancient art, mostly), and went on in.
The plan was to case the whole joint and then return for later drawing, but of course this could not be. The first thing to happen was that the room I came up into was full of Roman statuary, the first of which to catch my eye happened to have been carved for Herodes Atticus in order to decorate his little place out on the Via Appia called the Triopium, so I was immediately hooked (the Big Novel being about H. A.’s adoptive daughter, Ourania) and decided to go through ALL the Roman statuary, looking for other refugees from the Triopium. In the end, I found about twelve, and pledged to return to sketch at least one of the nicest (i.e., the first), which I had used to rub the worst of the rust off my sketching (ouch!). Then – after scoping out a place on the upper landing where I can sketch the Nike of Samothrace – I went to do homage to the Etruscan collection, specifically the gorgeous gold granulated jewelry and the beautiful terracotta portrait bust of the maiden, who deserves a pastel treatment, too. Then I thought it was high time I actually visited the Venus de Milo, and found a spot just to the left of the endless streams of grinning tourists getting their picture taken with her, and did my first serious sketch with my ink-wash pen.
I would have loved to use more than one intensity of grey, but standing up, that was really impossible, so I did what I could with light touches of the tip of the pen: not so great. Someone admired what I was doing, but it is the statue that is truly admirable. My intense scrutiny turned up some interesting gaffes in the drapery, however, and of course the reason I started to sketch was the curious line across the hips, which seems to indicate a very thin ribbon tied there…I got her from navel to knee.
Then it was time to wander, the idea being to walk as briskly as possible to counteract the effects of standing so long in one place (maybe 40 minutes on the Venus sketch?), so I went down to the cold, cold ground floor’s little collection of Northern European, high medieval religious sculpture, nearly all in wood, and came face to face with not only a really gorgeous Magdalen, but probably one of the most beautiful Christs I’ve ever seen – and believe me when I say I’ve seen quite a few -- second only to the Pantokrator in the cathedral at Cefalù, I’d say. Represented as ascending into Heaven, he stood only about two feet high in his bare feet, wearing only a gorgeous red bishop’s robe trimmed in gold, swirled modestly about himself, standing in a very graceful contrapposto curve, showing his wounded hands in a lovely gesture between blessing and surprise, tilting his beautiful head to look out of big, limpid eyes under delicately-pencilled brows, lips slightly parted amid his trim beard and moustache, dark hair curling away from his face and onto his graceful shoulders, Byzantine-style. Under his feet was a black storm of clouds which, according to the note on the label, represented the clouds which hid him from the gaze of his adoring disciples as he ascended. Got something like the look in my sketch, but only something.
I had sit down on the bench nearby to eat two Prince cookies from my purse (and got a scandalized look from a visitor) before going off again. Luckily I remembered where a bathroom was (they are few, and carefully hidden in the Louvre, though to be fair they are marked on the maps) and went up the stairs where the Cellini Diana sculpture is and down the hall with the temporary exhibits are (between Italian and Other Paintings and French Paintings) to nip into the loo. Then I was ready not only for the temporary exhibit of Franco mannerist-era drawings (wonderful pencil and ink work, gorgeous bodies but weird faces) but for a quick-march down the Italian and Other gallery in search of future subjects. I did see three or four easel painters with their oils, laboring away on copies in a way that made me feel good about my plan… Two Raphaels stopped me dead: Baldassare di Castiglione and the Madonna and two children known as La Belle Jardiniere. The blacks of the man’s portrait completely mesmerized me, and I had to sketch ‘em, and my most successful sketch yet. Then, on the Madonna, I began with the perfect curves of the front of her bodice – the beautiful half-oval on the left and the recurved line on the right, and gradually worked in the cloak and sleeves before attempting the heads of the Christ and the John the Baptist and finally and least successfully, the tender face of the Virgin herself. These two sketches kept me very happy for a long time.
Actually drawing what one sees makes one realize the perfection and the sweetness of these (the second, I really mean; the man is wonderfully vital), so that it is impossible to keep from smiling while trying to follow the lines.
I did homage to two Caravaggios I intend to return for on Wednesday and took a gallop down to the Mona Lisa by way of the other end of the hall where a handful of English gems lie – six paintings worth all the nameless-Italian baroque stuff in the place – and to which I hope to return Wednesday, and then I enjoyed turning my back on the sublime Gioconda to gape at the enormous Veronese Wedding at Cana and to basically slurp up every Veronese in the room. You can keep your Titian reds: give my my Veronese blues, and the way he transitions from flesh to sky. Holy cow!
Then I dashed through the French collection – standing astounded at the big, dark cross-roads room with the Brutus Condemning His Two Sons to Death and grinning foolishly at the Aeneas and Dido – then staggered home, after a mere five hours, hoping to save my feet for another day.
Tomorrow: scopin’ out the Musee d’Orsay, and watercoloring from the top floor café, God willing. Now: back to revisions!
January 7, 2010
Going Native
The big aim of every tourist is not to look like one. Today I was loose in Paris by myself, doing errands, getting ready for bigger errands to come, and today I was asked directions for the first time, and asked to donate to a local charity: I look like a native! Our first days of reconnoitering and using our Navigo Découverte cards all over the Metro (and past years’ experience both here and elsewhere in Europe) have done the trick, as has walking in a deliberate manner, wearing a good wool coat, as well as a Roman wool foulard that has an arabesque pattern on it, black clogs and a determined expression.
Last night, there was snow, and this morning the fish-boys on Rue Daguerre were feeling frisky, scraping snow off the awning for snowballs. At Place de la Concorde, the Tour Eiffel rose bluey-grey in the mist across the river. By this afternoon, the sun was back out, but there is still a sense of continuing holiday in the air, brought on by the snow. How long do the decorations stay up here – until Lent? Hooray for Epiphany-tide and Carnival! The skating rink is up and running in the place in front of the Hôtel de Ville (City Hall), as is the double-decker carousel. The big wheel is up in Place de la Concorde, and there are blue lights on all the trees along the Champs-Elysées.
Part of going native is using local public transport, and for people coming from suburban College Station for the first time (past students of mine, for example), it is an entirely different experience from someone visiting from New York or even San Francisco (though BART is pretty silly-small next to the London Tube or the Paris Metro). The amount of wear-and-tear saved on the feet is incredible with a Metro pass, although you get to know the various quirks of the various subway cars and the ethnic make-up of the various subway stops more than you do the surface of the city.
The trains on the 4 line, for example, have curious little levers you jerk upwards to open the car doors (other lines generally just have a button) and some of them have a little bell that rings -- as well as the buzzer – before you pull away from the station. The 1 line, which goes straight from La Defense to Vincennes, right along the main axis of the city, is much slicker and built for heavier traffic, with no breaks between cars and lines of seats along the walls, Japan-style, and doors that open of their own accord. Then the real trains, the trains that take you to London, or to Montpellier or places like that, those are yet another experience for the car-driving suburbanite… and all of them make it easier to read and think rather than just drive, or (God forbid) drive and talk or text). Oh, and there may be texting going on during subway rides, but virtually no phonecalls: only quick answers like “yes, I’m almost there, I’ll see you soon” and no long, loud conversations.
And I intend to become a native of the Louvre: I now have a 4-day pass which I intend to use for as many hours of the 4 days as I can. I also now know that I may in fact take my tray of pastels, my pad of paper, and yes, even my little portable stool into the Louvre, so let me tell you I am one happy camper. More on that as it happens. Oh, and a trip to Galignani Bookstore has set me up with a good English-French/French-English Dictionary, so that now I know that the sign on the well-worn wooden stairs of this apartment building means: “Wipe Your Feet!” and that the wonderful shop sign Quincaillerie means “Hardware Store” and that the incredibly exotic sounding Bonne Maman jam we bought (Quetsches) is just “Plum.” With that, and with my new George Sand novel and Rousseau essays (in English of course!), I am ready to “walk the walk,” even though I really can’t “talk the talk” beyond a few basics and “vous parlez l’Anglais?” Oh, well: until I open my mouth, nobody needs to know I’m not a native!
Jan 6, 2010
The Shakespeare Effect
Over the years I have noticed certain things about my brain, which, as a convenient shorthand and imitating the great doctor-types of the world, I like to call “effects.” One example of this is something I dubbed “the Norway Effect,” inspired by the geological fact that, after the ice sheets that covered it melted, the whole landmass of modern Scandinavia (the most important country of which, as we know, being Norway) rose hundreds of meters on its pillow of magma and is rising still. It is happening in the Arctic today, and is one of the reasons that part of the world isn’t suffering from coastal flooding, even as the ice melts. Brain-wise, the Norway Effect is the elated feeling one has after a big project is over (in my case, it was on finally finishing and defending my dissertation that I first identified it): kind of giddy and goofy: a sort of “feels so good when you stop” feeling, as in the old joke about hitting yourself on the head with a hammer.
The effect I’m experiencing today, our second full day back in Europe, is something I call “the Shakespeare Effect.” Why? Because every time I go to a live performance of Shakespeare – partly because I am not well-read in the bard and don’t have anything but about one speech of his memorized (wait, make that two) – it takes me about a page of text before I understand one single solitary phrase coming out of any of the players’ mouths. This is why I am so grateful to said bard for not saying anything particularly important on the first page: it’s usually a couple of old geezers of the backstairs staff discussing the sad goings-on in the throne-room. I really don’t know, since the whole page is a blank to me. Anyway, understanding kicks in pretty soon and then the whole thing is translating itself inside my head into meaningful parcels of information, poetry and whatnot. Does this happen to anyone else out there?
Speaking metaphorically, the Shakespeare Effect when travelling is when suddenly something makes sense that was really opaque the day or moment before. When I’m translating something from Italian (or Latin, but Latin is easier) into English, sometimes I just have to read it over aloud or silently a couple of times, and bingo! the light dawns (ouch – lights don’t go on when you say “bingo” except at really fancy Bingo parlors, do they?) and the meaning shows clear. I suspect this happens to you, too, and when you or I are in a foreign country, or staring at a poster in a language we sort of know, a couple of interesting things happen.
First of all, it takes a couple (lots) of tries to get down the whole daily routine/train times/places to shop/things to wear/fastest route home in a new place. Even with judicious use of maps, it isn’t until you’ve literally “walked the walk” and gone into a couple of shops, hurried for a train (and missed one that left moments before – the one everyone was running for, elbowing past you), tried that particular outfit and discovered that the hat drove you crazy, after all, forgot to wear wool socks instead of cotton and froze that you settle down to something like a seamless routine, and can give your attention more to the higher things in life. That’s something like the Shakespeare Effect.
A quite literal experience of this happened to me on the train this morning (yes, the later one, not the one everyone was hurrying for). I was facing, as yesterday, two advertising posters, nearly exactly the same as two I faced yesterday.
One was from a clever campaign that was also running last January when we were here, a play on words that doesn’t work in English for Telelangue, a language-teaching school specializing in English teaching. The catch-phrase is Arretez massacrer l’Anglais! (sorry, French experts if have remembered it incorrectly), literally “Stop massacring the English!” but meaning “Stop massacring the English language!” but showing an apparently battered man covered with bandages and clearly “English” (meaning British), either because he has a plaid draped over one shoulder (yesterday’s poster) or is in full bobby uniform (today), getting a big kiss on the cheek from a pretty nurse. Last year, incidentally, they just showed the bandaged and battered bobby, a look of terror on his face, holding up a crutch to fend off the reader of the poster with the (then no doubt new) phrase in much larger letters. The nurse is a nice improvement, but that is not the poster that really jumped out at me today.
The second poster, whose French I really will massacre if I try to reproduce it, is something to do with furniture storage. Yesterday, fresh from my on-the-plane French refresher course in the form of a good, hard look at my Rough Guide Phrasebook (during which I made the amazing realization that French is structured a lot like Italian – incredible!), I realized that the name of the company advertised was something like “the missing piece” or “the extra piece” or “the piece left over” and that it had something to do with moving. Today, I sat down, looked at the poster, and realized that it said, “breaking up house?” (or “moving away?” perhaps), then “have you considered what to do with your furniture?” The same sort of sense of recognition and “translation” can happen, yet more metaphorically, with life in a new place, especially in a new country, where the differences seem at first so great.
On the way back to the apartment yesterday, for example, as part of that whole “figure out which grocery is right for you” thing, I tried a different grocery store on rue Daguerre: Monoprix, instead of FranPrix (the names have something to do with price, I expect), and discovered quite a different clientele there from the first. Being on a busy corner, Monoprix seemed to attract more hapless, dizzy tourists (“oh, look, gallettes!! I just love gallettes!”), more crazy people and more very elderly ladies than FranPrix just down the block, though the checker at Monoprix was much sweeter than the chilly little blonde at FranPrix. In front of me in line was a tiny, elderly white lady in fur coat and pink felt beret, buying her box of kleenex, her dozen containers of plain yoghurt and her liter of CocaCola, who was fussed over wonderfully by the kind checker, a richly-darkly-beautiful woman of central African extraction. The checker greeted the pink-beret lady with a smile and a question of how her holidays had been, raising her voice good-humoredly when the little lady didn’t hear her at first. The lady answered that she had spent them, as she said, tout seule (“all alone”), at which the checker expressed appropriate shock and sorrow, raising her voice and speaking very clearly into the lady’s ear, as she did when telling her the cost of her purchases. I, in my turn, being in the “hapless tourist” category, she was quick to help out with a little English.
Until I become brave enough to go into the specialty shops for bread and milk and meat, I believe I will keep shopping at Monoprix, and maybe even after that. Kindness needs no translation, and no Shakespeare Effect to grasp.
Jan 5, 2010
Waking up in Paris
The sun finally peered over the edge of the smoky horizon at about 9:00 this morning; we were headed out of the city to Orsay. The sky at the zenith was that classic alto-cumulus of every Monet poppy-field you’ve ever seen, lit gold from beneath and backed by the most limpid of pale blues; the lower bits were swathed in shreds of dirty-grey stratus, with hierarchical mists in the valleys: the hither irregular ranks of houses and apartments clearer and darker, the far fading into their backdrop of high, bare poplars. The rime of hoarfrost edges every fallen plane-leaf and crusts the grass in the fields along the Yvette, in Orsay. In suburban yards, the pollarded plane trees send up their bare bouquets of thin canes against the sky, and along the roads the Lombardy poplars punctuate the voyage outward like downbeats in a dance. Suddenly I’ve lost the environmentalist’s fury with the destructive hand of man and love the pollarding, the smoke, the poplars, all the mark of man, and high up, the blue streaks of contrails, racing across the upper air. We’ll be gone soon enough from the surface of the earth: long live the present moment! (Now there’s an oxymoron for you!)
It seems that Rue Daguerre runs right from our doorstep (or nearly) to where the entrance to the RER and Metro stations appeared to us, this morning, directly under the street crossing at Avenue General LeClerc. This is the sort of epiphany that happens the second or third time one explores routes in a new place, and really, the quieter, more direct route was better yesterday, laden as we were with big rolling suitcases. But Rue Daguerre is a treasure! Lit from end to end with festive swags of lights (watch for a photo to appear soon) and truly – we saw today, now that the holiday is really over and life’s patterns return to normal here – the pedestrian-only block at the far end is like a street market in Rome: the shops there spill out onto the pavement in booths of fresh ravioli, of oysters and mussels, of cheeses and rolled roasts. The fragrance of brioches and baguettes are wafted into the street on every side: there are Viennoiseries and Boucheries on either side of the street all the way from our end to LeClerc, and already we wonder how to manage a visit to each, should we be brave enough to go in. Last night I braved the chain bakery Brioches Doree and bought an apple-spice gallette… today perhaps one of the unique places? Oh, and there is a toy-shop with Tintin figures at our end of the street, as if I need any more! But everyone needs one, am I right?
But how silent and cool the Parisians are, of course! The young women stalk along in their skin-tight black jeans and black boots, their hair uncovered and their coat collars turned up high, the young men in their huge scarves and turtlenecks…and on the train this morning, not a person was talking, except for a trio of blithe Italian students headed back home via Orly Airport, chatting away happily, Maria laughing her musical laugh for all to hear, and all of them speaking a wonderfully gutteral dialect, perhaps Venetian? It made me smile and think of the cacophony on your average Roman busful of students. Yes, Parisians are awfully northern European. But so much feels familiar here: there is a fragrance used in European cleansers or laundry soap or something that I remember from a scruffy apartment near La Sapienza in Rome which I also smell here, and those built-in wardrobes in the apartment, with their drawers like the drawers in doll-cases of yore, and their taller spaces for coats and suits where the doll should go. Yet the streets of Rome are more fragrant even than Rue Daguerre: I don’t catch the espresso on the cold morning air, or the wonderful diesel fumes of the buses roaring by, or the smell of wet pavement from the sluicing down of sidewalks every morning by shop-keepers, using the water from eternally-flowing street fountains. That pearly beauty of the sky and trees and pale houses is only Parisian, however; nothing Roman about that.
Jan 4, 2010
It is so common for Japanese tourists who come to Paris to suffer disappointment that there is a syndrome for it and psychologists who specialize in its treatment; there is no danger of either Robin or I succumbing to it. Our friends who were green with envy that we would be spending a month here should really recall some of the grim practicalities of life in big-city Europe, and specifically, life in Paris: it is big, it is modern, it is full of non-Parisian-looking people who do all the hard jobs and live in the northern suburbs. Paris is a primate city, meaning that not only is the country’s government centered here, but also its industry, culture, banking, you name it: all the HQs are here.
As we flew over the twisting Seine in the darkened countryside this morning – and Paris is so far north that this time of year the sun isn’t fully up until 8:30, it goes to bed early, and all day the angle of light looks like late afternoon – narrow, double-laned roads clogged with car headlights were already snaking towards the capital, freeways were already filled with traffic, and the great warehouses spread out in all directions in the ‘burbs near the airport. On the RER train in to the center from the airport, there were places – the Stade Francais station comes to mind – where we could indeed have been in suburban Japan, so many businesses were overlapping with highway bridges and apartment buildings and then with trains and stadiums. The buildings are painted that pearly off-white of all the self-respecting apartments of Paris: so much more staid than the paint-box colors of Rome!
We are fighting off sleep: I, for one, really slept not at all on the plane, sitting upright in my seat all the short night, and anyhow the flight is not all that long (about eight hours, that is to say). After our three-day drive back to Texas last week from California, Robin reflected that Paris would be just an eight-day drive from College Station, if the Atlantic were filled in... Oh, a cup of tea or coffee would go so well right now, but then I would have to get up and make it. And it is indeed cold! Teens and twenties fahrenheit overnight, and about freezing during the day, so that every stitch of wool that we brought will be gratefully worn. Snow is expected towards the end of the week, so this weekend will be a good one to lay in supplies for, and just venture out on foot for explores down to the river, not try to take a train anywhere. A good day to raid Shakespeare and Co. for English translations of Georges Sand; things like that.
Between the Denfert-Rochereau RER station and 124 avenue du Maine is the famous (apparently) pedestrian street devoted to food, shops mostly closed this morning because in Europe groceries are generally closed from Saturday afternoon to Monday afternoon…but oh, we did see some bakeries open, with brioches and breads and gallettes galore – it being that time of year when one eats gallettes in honor of the Three Kings, washed down with hard cider from Brittany. What is a gallette des rois, exactly? A disc of flaky golden pastry, scored on the top into diamonds, filled usually with almond paste and holding a small figure: in a King’s Cake in Texas or Louisiana you might find a plastic baby Jesus, but here, a tiny porcelain donkey, or angel, or king, or bambino or other character from a creche scene. Last year at the Marche des Puces, we found a whole basket of such figures from years past for sale, and if we can’t eat enough gallettes to collect ‘em all, we will have to go back and invest!
At the airport train station, we successfully negotiated getting our Navigo Decouverte monthly travel cards after snooping online for just such a thing, running out to Walgreens the night before we left to get two photos, trimming them to the correct size and slapping down Robin’s European credit card (courtesy of the folks here at U. of Paris): now we can travel in any and all of Paris’ five concentric zones by subway or train for a whole month just by paying a cool 100 Euro each and by swiping our equally-cool Navigo card across the entry sensors.
But don’t ask about the airport itself: Charles de Gaulle Airport is a scandal and a place to be avoided but alas never can be! Over the years I have been insulted there when I was ill and had lost my ticket, yelled at for not speaking French, led astray by supposedly-sympathetic agents, left books on planes never to be returned, looked in vain for seating or bathrooms at gate waiting areas designed (like everything else at CDG) for looks rather than for human utility … and today: an hour-plus wait for bags, for no apparent reason. But there was the considerable comfort of watching – as we waited patiently – the pink-and-red light show on the interior of the doughnut-shaped building and the occasional drifts of bubbles up from the bubble machine at the ground level. Wonderfully pointless!
We have also successfully met the representative of ParisAddress (found online) at the door of our apartment building on rue du Maine, learned from her how to turn on the heat, how to work the various appliances: can you believe a washer-drier combination in one machine? You put the laundry in to wash and don’t have to take it out until it is utterly dry! And the ingenious dishwasher-oven? These two are one right above the other; not connected, this time. We have left the tiny radiators heating like mad while we go off to the office at Orsay to get some work done: perhaps by bed it will be somewhat toasty in there? Ah, but the entry was classic: something very much like our first night in Sendai, at the university guest house, which has no elevator and upon whose third floor we stayed, and had to remove our shoes at the front door, put on slippers and slither up the carpeted stairs, hauling our several heavy bags behind us. Here we did not have to put on slippers, but the twisting wooden stairs are slippery in a different way and… oops, not to complain! One simply needs to be robust, to a certain extent. Certainly the walk from the train station to the apartment with those two suitcases was something for the robust; long may we be so!
So, once we admit that we can do no more here in our state of somnolescence, we will potter to the nearest FranPrix grocery store or similar for basics for the next week or so and fall into bed… here’s hoping it is not too lumpy! But we will be waking up in Paris…
