Monday, February 28, 2011
country dark
For the past two days I have been looking at a book of Charles Burchfield paintings. I am looking at these paintings (as I did at their Guggenheim show last year) as something known, something recognized, not brand new to me. They are forest magic, they are sun through trees, they are the painter sitting quietly in the woods and watching everything that happens, filtered through his own lens, through the experience of his emotions and new lexicon of his senses.
I am seeing these paintings in the same way that I think about landscapes I have never seen, but know, landscapes of red dirt, James Baldwin landscapes, blood-soaked landscapes, haunted coasts, landscapes of the South. I remember the physical shock and tangle of reading books like 'Sula' by Toni Morrison, 'Beloved', anything by James Baldwin, stories stories REAL stories.
I was just watching a 'documentary' about a family in the South that was haunted by spirits, their house was inhabited by older spirits, older dead. The daughters were haunted, the houses were dark with it, benign and lurking dark spirits. I didn't catch the beginning and am not sure exactly where this took place but they revealed that the mother had grown up in a place called 'Haunted Holler'! Even through the screen I could sense a thickness of the sir, like fog or pea soup, a field of something collected, stronger particles that had grown. When they showed footage of the house I wondered, is this 'haunting' or is this the very similar experience of living next to a forest, in a single lit bejeweled tiny house, next to looming dark, black night that falls without any reflection from cities or street lights, living in true country dark?
(In Marfa) when we heard owls hunting over our heads at night, when we were separated from the wildness outside by a thin screen, when we lived exactly one and a half blocks from the drop-off edge of town, with skunks, and trains, and husked quietness, other cries? How different did this feel? It took me at least two months to get New York city out of my system. I was shaky and thin there, translucent for a good cold month of March and then into April. I took walks at sunset, I collected rocks, I tried to write, I planted seeds in the strange white ceramic planter in our backyard with a stone rabbit on top. I took pictures of storms that rolled in off of the high plains of Colorado-- flat and roiling, flat desert edge to black clouds, backdrop to clouds that felt wet and were driven by static.
It is raining in Brooklyn today, and I am at home. I am surrounded by lamplight. I
am remembering the high desert at night, missing earth, land, soil, roughness, living on top of a place that felt like something. I am remembering these things, but have a feeling that I am also trying not to remember them. The edges of my memories creep in, and I try my best to separate them into shades of light, fragments, stones strung, words.
I am seeing these paintings in the same way that I think about landscapes I have never seen, but know, landscapes of red dirt, James Baldwin landscapes, blood-soaked landscapes, haunted coasts, landscapes of the South. I remember the physical shock and tangle of reading books like 'Sula' by Toni Morrison, 'Beloved', anything by James Baldwin, stories stories REAL stories.
I was just watching a 'documentary' about a family in the South that was haunted by spirits, their house was inhabited by older spirits, older dead. The daughters were haunted, the houses were dark with it, benign and lurking dark spirits. I didn't catch the beginning and am not sure exactly where this took place but they revealed that the mother had grown up in a place called 'Haunted Holler'! Even through the screen I could sense a thickness of the sir, like fog or pea soup, a field of something collected, stronger particles that had grown. When they showed footage of the house I wondered, is this 'haunting' or is this the very similar experience of living next to a forest, in a single lit bejeweled tiny house, next to looming dark, black night that falls without any reflection from cities or street lights, living in true country dark?
(In Marfa) when we heard owls hunting over our heads at night, when we were separated from the wildness outside by a thin screen, when we lived exactly one and a half blocks from the drop-off edge of town, with skunks, and trains, and husked quietness, other cries? How different did this feel? It took me at least two months to get New York city out of my system. I was shaky and thin there, translucent for a good cold month of March and then into April. I took walks at sunset, I collected rocks, I tried to write, I planted seeds in the strange white ceramic planter in our backyard with a stone rabbit on top. I took pictures of storms that rolled in off of the high plains of Colorado-- flat and roiling, flat desert edge to black clouds, backdrop to clouds that felt wet and were driven by static.
It is raining in Brooklyn today, and I am at home. I am surrounded by lamplight. I
am remembering the high desert at night, missing earth, land, soil, roughness, living on top of a place that felt like something. I am remembering these things, but have a feeling that I am also trying not to remember them. The edges of my memories creep in, and I try my best to separate them into shades of light, fragments, stones strung, words.
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Monday, February 21, 2011
soft focus
To have steady focus on any one thing, it seems necessary to have the outer picture, the over-structure, the surrounding atmosphere be calm. It seems necessary to have a steady, if static hum around the edges of what I am looking at. In the city we are inundated with so much noise-- so much stimulation, so much sensory overload. I am not advocating a change from this. I am however, with some space and distance from it today, recognizing the fact that I am in motion, that I am changing, and adding to a body of knowledge that is vast. I am allowing myself to be satisfied right now. I am letting myself sink a little more into the sensation of Now, of the present moment. This allows a two-fold effect: access to a realm of listening and accepting, and also the rising up of the many facets that comprise myself-- the many strands and threads of thought that combine to actualize in this moment.
I feel driven, and precise, and ambitious, but I must acknowledge the areas of my life that need this attention. To fill in the cracks and crevices that are blank, to repack soil into the areas where it has crumbled away may take something more akin to compassion than brute force. I may want certain things NOW, or the outside shape of them, but the way towards them is within. I may feel the need to be razor sharp and laden with successive victories, but to truly absorb anything new I need to soften a little. I can set goals that will propel me, I can incorporate chains and ropes of accumulated blood-consciousness, but I have to let these things congeal naturally. I can face everything, but need to inhabit the space around me powerfully, and with intention, with drive and hooked eyes, but also with softness, and laughter.
So, acceding to a sedimentary life, agreeing to a quietness sometimes, feeling grateful, feeling warm, being soft. What a serious and fearful gift it is to have family, to feel family bloodties, to feel the pull and response of friends, to be active, to be acted on, to be loved.
I feel driven, and precise, and ambitious, but I must acknowledge the areas of my life that need this attention. To fill in the cracks and crevices that are blank, to repack soil into the areas where it has crumbled away may take something more akin to compassion than brute force. I may want certain things NOW, or the outside shape of them, but the way towards them is within. I may feel the need to be razor sharp and laden with successive victories, but to truly absorb anything new I need to soften a little. I can set goals that will propel me, I can incorporate chains and ropes of accumulated blood-consciousness, but I have to let these things congeal naturally. I can face everything, but need to inhabit the space around me powerfully, and with intention, with drive and hooked eyes, but also with softness, and laughter.
So, acceding to a sedimentary life, agreeing to a quietness sometimes, feeling grateful, feeling warm, being soft. What a serious and fearful gift it is to have family, to feel family bloodties, to feel the pull and response of friends, to be active, to be acted on, to be loved.
Saturday, February 19, 2011
The Song Taught to Joseph
by Ray A. Young Bear
I was born unto this snowy-red earth
with the aura and name of the Black Lynx.
When we simply think of each other,
night begins. My twin the Heron
is on a perpetual flight northward,
familiarizing himself with the landscape
of Afterlife, but he never gets there...
because the Missouri River descends
from the Northern Plains
into the Morning Star.
One certain thing though,
he sings the song of the fish
below him in the mirror
of Milky Way.
In this confrontation,
the gills of the predator
overtake me in daylight near home;
in this confrontation,
he hinders my progress with a cloud of mud he stirs.
Crying, I ask that I not feel each painful part
he takes, at least not until I can grasp
in the darkness the entrance
of home.
I was born unto this snowy-red earth
with the aura and name of the Black Lynx.
When we simply think of each other,
night begins. My twin the Heron
is on a perpetual flight northward,
familiarizing himself with the landscape
of Afterlife, but he never gets there...
because the Missouri River descends
from the Northern Plains
into the Morning Star.
One certain thing though,
he sings the song of the fish
below him in the mirror
of Milky Way.
In this confrontation,
the gills of the predator
overtake me in daylight near home;
in this confrontation,
he hinders my progress with a cloud of mud he stirs.
Crying, I ask that I not feel each painful part
he takes, at least not until I can grasp
in the darkness the entrance
of home.
Thursday, February 17, 2011
solastalgia
"“There’s a scholar who talks about ‘heart’s ease,’ ” Albrecht told me as we sat in his car on a cliff above the Newcastle shore, overlooking the Pacific. In the distance, just before the earth curved out of sight, 40 coal tankers were lined up single file. “People have heart’s ease when they’re on their own country. If you force them off that country, if you take them away from their land, they feel the loss of heart’s ease as a kind of vertigo, a disintegration of their whole life.” Australian aborigines, Navajos and any number of indigenous peoples have reported this sense of mournful disorientation after being displaced from their land. What Albrecht realized during his trip to the Upper Valley was that this “place pathology,” as one philosopher has called it, wasn’t limited to natives. Albrecht’s petitioners were anxious, unsettled, despairing, depressed — just as if they had been forcibly removed from the valley. Only they hadn’t; the valley changed around them." ("Is There an Ecological Unconscious?" NYT, By DANIEL B. SMITH, Published: January 27, 2010)
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
an american childhood
So, description is revelation, days turn over each other in regular succession, cities of my past reveal themselves to me in lit squares today; (upside down and large scrimshaw-style, like a pinhole camera image splayed on opposite wall).
Full-up with emotion, wound, I sit on this middle point, this precipice, this hinge. Breathing quietly and blinking, I try and remind myself that each day is happening, regardless of me, of my noticing.
I downloaded Annie Dillard's audio version of 'An American Childhood' this morning, and was (again) shocked at our parallel experience of the world, only to be described as topographical. If all other things faded, which city would I see in this over-view, topsail, ambulatory way? If I choose to commit, to focus, what sort of dwelling will I build? I know that I need a house, (again, scaffold), lattice-matrix, a concretized form.
I know instinctively what Dillard describes as the 'building blocks of language': stones, cells, atoms, words. To be a writer, you must love words. It is AT ONCE as simple and difficult as this.
Full-up with emotion, wound, I sit on this middle point, this precipice, this hinge. Breathing quietly and blinking, I try and remind myself that each day is happening, regardless of me, of my noticing.
I downloaded Annie Dillard's audio version of 'An American Childhood' this morning, and was (again) shocked at our parallel experience of the world, only to be described as topographical. If all other things faded, which city would I see in this over-view, topsail, ambulatory way? If I choose to commit, to focus, what sort of dwelling will I build? I know that I need a house, (again, scaffold), lattice-matrix, a concretized form.
I know instinctively what Dillard describes as the 'building blocks of language': stones, cells, atoms, words. To be a writer, you must love words. It is AT ONCE as simple and difficult as this.
"description is revelation"..... striving for a poetry in which "there are elements... which are capillaries into the large brutal scheme of things, capillaries sucking the whole of the earth"......(seamus heaney, North)
"Yet in the midst of barbarism the artistic spirit persists, like a ghost or 'sheaf of light' in a blackened stubble field." (andrews, poetry of sh, 121)
I ate the day
Deliberately, that its tang
Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb.
(from oysters, sh)
"Yet in the midst of barbarism the artistic spirit persists, like a ghost or 'sheaf of light' in a blackened stubble field." (andrews, poetry of sh, 121)
I ate the day
Deliberately, that its tang
Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb.
(from oysters, sh)
gaston bachelard
"Thus we cover the universe with drawings we have lived. These drawings need not be exact. They need only to be tonalized on the mode of our interior space. But what a book would have to be written to decide all these problems! Space calls for action, and before action, the imagination is at work. It mows and ploughs. We should have to speak of the benefits of all these imaginary actions.....
I shall therefore put my trust in the power of attraction of all the domains of intimacy. There does not exist a real intimacy that is repellent. All the spaces of intimacy are designated by an attraction. Their being is well-being. In these conditions, topoanalysis bears the stamp of topophilia, and shelters and rooms will be studied in this valorization." (poetics of space; the house. from cellar to garret. the significance of the hut, 12)
I shall therefore put my trust in the power of attraction of all the domains of intimacy. There does not exist a real intimacy that is repellent. All the spaces of intimacy are designated by an attraction. Their being is well-being. In these conditions, topoanalysis bears the stamp of topophilia, and shelters and rooms will be studied in this valorization." (poetics of space; the house. from cellar to garret. the significance of the hut, 12)
Friday, February 11, 2011
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Light.
I have been blindingly lucky this year to find myself in the company of people that know so much more about wine than I do. I am adding this today, adding to writings in the same way as amending negative or inaccurate thoughts, rewiring bad thought patterns, adding things that may be obvious, but helping me to fill in a little around the edges. I am saying thank you.
I am grateful, I am filled with grace, I am filled with graciousness and have been on the receiving end of so much this year. There has been sudden and unexpected generosities that have touched me deeply. They have helped me to fashion a framework to continue with, helped to form a braced scaffold that will serve in my life ahead, my art-life, my wine-life, my writing-life.
Without a doubt this has been the most difficult year of my life. It has been hard in a way that redefined the word, it has been difficult in a way that forced a reconciliation inside myself between shadow and light. It has been shocked recognition of underlying darknesses that blinded me in the way that a Caravaggio painting wavers exclusively between black and white, presence and absence, the divine reduced by symbolism (translated) to such intense interplay of light and dark (chiarascuro is always exclusively extreme).
I am lucky and grateful to have experienced such hardnesses this year, such extensions into the surreal, into the hyper-real, into the atmospheric, into the microscopic. If I were to list things as they happened it would seem an absurd and brooding chain: if I were to count each thing and call it a loss it would not be accurate: if I call them each how they felt I would say that I suffered the death of seven people, seven things, seven blows. Any one event on its own would have bewildered, been a fatal sting-- strung together as they were, successive, they became a sort of a fabric, atmospheric, they became the air that I breathed. In this way I was lucky. I had to adjust to the dark. I had to pass through it and now am on the other side. The world sparkles a little bit now, but it is grown out of an underlying mushroomy forest floor. My world is solid now, in a new way, but I am still shaky, still shade-like, still quiet.
In the way of birth, of rebirth, this year has been painful. This year has changed my life, this year has become my life, this year has changed my personality. In many situations it has made me feel like the gawky thirteen year old that I used to be, the awkward, hunched, quiet girl that I have not seen in years. Rebuilding, new-building, new-creation-- all of these are obvious, the ashes swept away leaves for a brilliant white clean slate. But wow.
Today, I am reading John Berger, I am eating scrambled eggs, I am listening to trucks and birds outside, I am watching the trees throw light patterns over my bed. I am thinking about gifts, about information, I am thinking about connections and people that I love. I am trying to find my way into that sweet spot in my own brain where these things live, the places in my heart where these people are. I am overwhelmed by words and sentences and onrush today. I am overwhelmed with the beauty of the things I have been given this year: the wines, the conversations, the eyes, the "falling sheaf of edges" Annie Dillard calls the edges of our own world, our consciousness-edge, W.C. Williams' cut, liminal leaf-edge.
I feel blessed, gold-blessed, finely spun, soft light on my shoulders. I remember the dream I had of my childhood house where I stood in the living room and light fell on my shoulders like a cloak, as it fell I heard the word 'mantle'-- the voice that said it spelled it out, and I understood something important in the dream that I wasn't able to bring back, something about the double meaning of the word 'mantle', something about the essential quality of light, especially the softness of childhood light, the slowed down particles of remembered afternoon light, the soft powder of teenage school day light through old Victorian windowpanes, thicker at the bottom than the top, slow molasses of slowest downward liquid (house as skin, window-eyes, Rilke and Bachelard).
I am thinking about a lot of things today, I am watching white light through open white walls, through old tin painted walls, through windows. I am listening to birds, and feeling overwhelmingly grateful to the people that have helped me along my way, especially in this of all years.
I am grateful, I am filled with grace, I am filled with graciousness and have been on the receiving end of so much this year. There has been sudden and unexpected generosities that have touched me deeply. They have helped me to fashion a framework to continue with, helped to form a braced scaffold that will serve in my life ahead, my art-life, my wine-life, my writing-life.
Without a doubt this has been the most difficult year of my life. It has been hard in a way that redefined the word, it has been difficult in a way that forced a reconciliation inside myself between shadow and light. It has been shocked recognition of underlying darknesses that blinded me in the way that a Caravaggio painting wavers exclusively between black and white, presence and absence, the divine reduced by symbolism (translated) to such intense interplay of light and dark (chiarascuro is always exclusively extreme).
I am lucky and grateful to have experienced such hardnesses this year, such extensions into the surreal, into the hyper-real, into the atmospheric, into the microscopic. If I were to list things as they happened it would seem an absurd and brooding chain: if I were to count each thing and call it a loss it would not be accurate: if I call them each how they felt I would say that I suffered the death of seven people, seven things, seven blows. Any one event on its own would have bewildered, been a fatal sting-- strung together as they were, successive, they became a sort of a fabric, atmospheric, they became the air that I breathed. In this way I was lucky. I had to adjust to the dark. I had to pass through it and now am on the other side. The world sparkles a little bit now, but it is grown out of an underlying mushroomy forest floor. My world is solid now, in a new way, but I am still shaky, still shade-like, still quiet.
In the way of birth, of rebirth, this year has been painful. This year has changed my life, this year has become my life, this year has changed my personality. In many situations it has made me feel like the gawky thirteen year old that I used to be, the awkward, hunched, quiet girl that I have not seen in years. Rebuilding, new-building, new-creation-- all of these are obvious, the ashes swept away leaves for a brilliant white clean slate. But wow.
Today, I am reading John Berger, I am eating scrambled eggs, I am listening to trucks and birds outside, I am watching the trees throw light patterns over my bed. I am thinking about gifts, about information, I am thinking about connections and people that I love. I am trying to find my way into that sweet spot in my own brain where these things live, the places in my heart where these people are. I am overwhelmed by words and sentences and onrush today. I am overwhelmed with the beauty of the things I have been given this year: the wines, the conversations, the eyes, the "falling sheaf of edges" Annie Dillard calls the edges of our own world, our consciousness-edge, W.C. Williams' cut, liminal leaf-edge.
I feel blessed, gold-blessed, finely spun, soft light on my shoulders. I remember the dream I had of my childhood house where I stood in the living room and light fell on my shoulders like a cloak, as it fell I heard the word 'mantle'-- the voice that said it spelled it out, and I understood something important in the dream that I wasn't able to bring back, something about the double meaning of the word 'mantle', something about the essential quality of light, especially the softness of childhood light, the slowed down particles of remembered afternoon light, the soft powder of teenage school day light through old Victorian windowpanes, thicker at the bottom than the top, slow molasses of slowest downward liquid (house as skin, window-eyes, Rilke and Bachelard).
I am thinking about a lot of things today, I am watching white light through open white walls, through old tin painted walls, through windows. I am listening to birds, and feeling overwhelmingly grateful to the people that have helped me along my way, especially in this of all years.
Heart.
Missing graciousness, missing someone, covered in blankets, eating pecans by the handful, breathing, headache, too warm, feverish, feeling in my stomach like the bottom dropped out (trying to hold my thoughts together as a cradle, a scaffold of wooden beams, of rough boards).
My father is a clockmaker. My grandfather was a woodworker and made small wooden jewelry boxes. He lined each of them with green felt. He turned them on the lathe, and sandwiched different colored woods together to make patterns.
I miss him so much today it is breaking my heart from the inside, stretching the scaffolding to its limit, heartbeats have become painful.
At the end of my time in Rome, years ago, I went to Naples for the weekend with my friend Christa. It was December and there were stalls everywhere selling tiny painted things. They were selling every imaginable miniaturized object for making your own nativity scene, your own personal creche--everything from tiny butchers with sides of beef and rib roasts, to bottle caps that had been filled with clay and painted to look like tubs of fish, tiny mangers, vegetables, tiny sheep, wise men, tiny platters of food. I have never been so charmed. I have never loved a culture more for taking a ritual to this most minute of extremes.
I have always had a fascination with small objects, souvenirs, religious objects of ritual, kitsch. In Palermo, I collected photos of shrines and small palm fronds from the botanic gardens. In Naples I collected glow-in-the-dark baby jesus crowns, tiny vials of Mary's tears, postcards of the splinter that was covered in blood, in the shrine under the church. In Rome I collected buttons and took photos of shop windows. In Rome I collected and made maps in my head, I walked, I learned the city as I walked it-- circuitous routes turned visual and matched the interior mapping of my own brain.
In Siracusa I felt wide open and couldn't carry anything with me. I absorbed impressions then that are still crystalline, still sensuous, still almost wordless: giant cement levee blocks along the shore, a white-grey stone city set on water, sides of churches like bones growing out of earth, trees full of loud invisible birds, black smudges of chestnut smoke fouling the air at dusk, shelves of bejeweled pastel pastries that seemed lit from within, and these things combining to be terrible and nostalgic at the same time, at that time of evening, of impending dark falling in a strange place.
In Naples I bought two tin saint objects-- two body parts pressed out of tin. These are the objects you pin to the walls inside of churches, either praying for help with ailments, or as a thanks for healing. They are bizarrely specific. The first object was a chest, it seemed strange, just a squarish torso, no arms, no head, cut off at the waist. I thought it was funny. The second object was an ornately latticed heart. I tucked this away in my luggage and gave it to my grandfather a month later as a gift.
His heart troubles had been worsening, I think this was the time they put a pacemaker in. When he went to see his doctor the next time, he had taped the tin heart to his chest, over his heart, under his shirt. The doctor laughed, my grandfather laughed, we laughed when he told us the story. But the act was also implicit and shot through with a shivering undercurrent of intensity. It connected him to me. Without having to explain, we both knew that my gift was protecting him, I was protecting him, we were connected, he understood, I was loved. Life could be strange and terrible and frail, his heart was limping along in the reediest of ways, in the most painful of fits and starts, but for that moment was resonant, shiny, sparkling.
For that moment, the thinnest of tin thickness protected him from the inevitable. He was the youngest of seven children, and had outlived all of his large family. By making two months shy of 90, he accomplished what he had set out to do-- raise a beautiful family, dote on a sweet and brown-eyed wife for 65 years, see things. I remember driving him through Seattle, and my college at the time, UW, and him saying "yep, it feels like college." He also constantly asked me if I really knew where I was going as women drivers made him nervous. His humor was epitomized by him taking photos of a fountain that someone had spilt red dye into, and sending this photo to his friends in Germany, telling them that "in America the rivers run with wine, and the streets are paved with gold."
I know he waited for me to return to Colorado before he died last year. When I walked into his hospital room the day he died he said "Well, your hair is still red." Yes.
My father is a clockmaker. My grandfather was a woodworker and made small wooden jewelry boxes. He lined each of them with green felt. He turned them on the lathe, and sandwiched different colored woods together to make patterns.
I miss him so much today it is breaking my heart from the inside, stretching the scaffolding to its limit, heartbeats have become painful.
At the end of my time in Rome, years ago, I went to Naples for the weekend with my friend Christa. It was December and there were stalls everywhere selling tiny painted things. They were selling every imaginable miniaturized object for making your own nativity scene, your own personal creche--everything from tiny butchers with sides of beef and rib roasts, to bottle caps that had been filled with clay and painted to look like tubs of fish, tiny mangers, vegetables, tiny sheep, wise men, tiny platters of food. I have never been so charmed. I have never loved a culture more for taking a ritual to this most minute of extremes.
I have always had a fascination with small objects, souvenirs, religious objects of ritual, kitsch. In Palermo, I collected photos of shrines and small palm fronds from the botanic gardens. In Naples I collected glow-in-the-dark baby jesus crowns, tiny vials of Mary's tears, postcards of the splinter that was covered in blood, in the shrine under the church. In Rome I collected buttons and took photos of shop windows. In Rome I collected and made maps in my head, I walked, I learned the city as I walked it-- circuitous routes turned visual and matched the interior mapping of my own brain.
In Siracusa I felt wide open and couldn't carry anything with me. I absorbed impressions then that are still crystalline, still sensuous, still almost wordless: giant cement levee blocks along the shore, a white-grey stone city set on water, sides of churches like bones growing out of earth, trees full of loud invisible birds, black smudges of chestnut smoke fouling the air at dusk, shelves of bejeweled pastel pastries that seemed lit from within, and these things combining to be terrible and nostalgic at the same time, at that time of evening, of impending dark falling in a strange place.
In Naples I bought two tin saint objects-- two body parts pressed out of tin. These are the objects you pin to the walls inside of churches, either praying for help with ailments, or as a thanks for healing. They are bizarrely specific. The first object was a chest, it seemed strange, just a squarish torso, no arms, no head, cut off at the waist. I thought it was funny. The second object was an ornately latticed heart. I tucked this away in my luggage and gave it to my grandfather a month later as a gift.
His heart troubles had been worsening, I think this was the time they put a pacemaker in. When he went to see his doctor the next time, he had taped the tin heart to his chest, over his heart, under his shirt. The doctor laughed, my grandfather laughed, we laughed when he told us the story. But the act was also implicit and shot through with a shivering undercurrent of intensity. It connected him to me. Without having to explain, we both knew that my gift was protecting him, I was protecting him, we were connected, he understood, I was loved. Life could be strange and terrible and frail, his heart was limping along in the reediest of ways, in the most painful of fits and starts, but for that moment was resonant, shiny, sparkling.
For that moment, the thinnest of tin thickness protected him from the inevitable. He was the youngest of seven children, and had outlived all of his large family. By making two months shy of 90, he accomplished what he had set out to do-- raise a beautiful family, dote on a sweet and brown-eyed wife for 65 years, see things. I remember driving him through Seattle, and my college at the time, UW, and him saying "yep, it feels like college." He also constantly asked me if I really knew where I was going as women drivers made him nervous. His humor was epitomized by him taking photos of a fountain that someone had spilt red dye into, and sending this photo to his friends in Germany, telling them that "in America the rivers run with wine, and the streets are paved with gold."
I know he waited for me to return to Colorado before he died last year. When I walked into his hospital room the day he died he said "Well, your hair is still red." Yes.
John Berger, from 'Once in Europa'
"When the woodcutters came to wash that evening, Danielle took Pasquale aside and said: I must talk to you.
Next Sunday, he said.
No! she insisted. Now! I can't stay another day if I don't talk to someone.
Pasquale went over to the trough and conferred with Father. She heard them speaking in Italian. Within five minutes Father was chivying the others to get a move on. The ritual of combing their hair one by one before the broken bit of mirror was renounced. They picked up their sacks, said good-bye, and with the slow list of their habitual fatigue, made their way to the car. Alberto the Sicilian got into the driver's seat.
Pasquale stayed behind and started shaving in front of the broken mirror.
You can't see a thing, Danielle said. Why do you have to shave now?
It's the first time you've asked me to supper.
Supper, it's only soup!
She began to sob silently. At first Pasquale did not notice. It was her immobility which finally made him look up in her direction. He saw her shoulders trembling.
Shhh, he said ssshhh. He walked her towards the chalet. A goose followed them. The door was open. Inside he stopped because it was pitch-dark and he could see nothing. She led him by the hand to a chair pulled up by the table, then she sat down herself on the chair opposite. She thought neither of lighting the lamp nor of heating the soup.
Something happened this afternoon, she said.
What?
In the pitch darkness, her hands placed on the table, she told him, quietly and slowly. She even told him about the crocuses. When she had finished there was silence. They heard a cow pissing in the stable, separated from the kitchen by a wall of pine boards.
Why should an old man talk to the mountains like that? she whispered.
Danielle, said Pasquale, speaking very slowly and weighing each word, it was not to the mountains he was offering himself part by part, it was to you and you know that, you know that, don't you?
She began to sob again and the sobs became howls. She stood up to take in breath and to howl louder. Pasquale felt his way round the table and took her in his arms. She pressed her face as hard as she could against his chest. She bit his shirt which tasted of resin and sweat. She bit a hole in it." (88-89)
Next Sunday, he said.
No! she insisted. Now! I can't stay another day if I don't talk to someone.
Pasquale went over to the trough and conferred with Father. She heard them speaking in Italian. Within five minutes Father was chivying the others to get a move on. The ritual of combing their hair one by one before the broken bit of mirror was renounced. They picked up their sacks, said good-bye, and with the slow list of their habitual fatigue, made their way to the car. Alberto the Sicilian got into the driver's seat.
Pasquale stayed behind and started shaving in front of the broken mirror.
You can't see a thing, Danielle said. Why do you have to shave now?
It's the first time you've asked me to supper.
Supper, it's only soup!
She began to sob silently. At first Pasquale did not notice. It was her immobility which finally made him look up in her direction. He saw her shoulders trembling.
Shhh, he said ssshhh. He walked her towards the chalet. A goose followed them. The door was open. Inside he stopped because it was pitch-dark and he could see nothing. She led him by the hand to a chair pulled up by the table, then she sat down herself on the chair opposite. She thought neither of lighting the lamp nor of heating the soup.
Something happened this afternoon, she said.
What?
In the pitch darkness, her hands placed on the table, she told him, quietly and slowly. She even told him about the crocuses. When she had finished there was silence. They heard a cow pissing in the stable, separated from the kitchen by a wall of pine boards.
Why should an old man talk to the mountains like that? she whispered.
Danielle, said Pasquale, speaking very slowly and weighing each word, it was not to the mountains he was offering himself part by part, it was to you and you know that, you know that, don't you?
She began to sob again and the sobs became howls. She stood up to take in breath and to howl louder. Pasquale felt his way round the table and took her in his arms. She pressed her face as hard as she could against his chest. She bit his shirt which tasted of resin and sweat. She bit a hole in it." (88-89)
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Snow Day.
small french press coffee, reading about madeira (art of eating), smoked duck potato hash, eggs over medium, orange juice, walk through snow, NV Laherte Freres Brut Tradition champagne out of a mason jar, sage in a glass on my table as a bouquet, goat brie, seed crackers, my roasted chicken with sage and lemon, Occhipinti SP 68 Bianco, sauteed brussel sprouts with romano cheese and pecans, beautiful company (finished the last of the Vergano 'Americano' few nights back, a perfect amount in the bottle for my new sweet friend Iliana and I to toast our future), Del Capo amaro, dark chocolate, almonds, dried fruit, colette, chamomile tea...........
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)