Friday, July 31, 2015

A Series of Epiphanies...

Had series of epiphanies today -- one of those oh.  oh!  OH!  thought dominoes --
& here 'tis:

Getting in the car, realized I'd left those Cali crucial sunglasses inside, & as I reversed my steps (open the door git out the car unlock the just-locked door & snatch the specs) I was muttering, God damn it!

Then I thought, wait, what exactly am I asking God to damn?
Not the sunglasses -- a) I need them, b) it is not their job to leap onto my face as I leave the room,
so...

...Obviously I am cursing my own self for having forgotten them (oh).

At which point my good little Catholic schoolgirl education kicked in (commandment or amendment, I forget, but a Biggie), and I found myself thinking, Sorry, God (because I took thy name in vain).

...and then I thought but wait -- in those days thy meant  thyself.
(As in, to thine own self be true);
(oh!)

(And then of course like any sane person I thought, who cares, they're just words) --

But words are words precisely because they MEAN something.  That's why they were made!  And even if your rational self isn't paying attention, these words are nonetheless heard by thy subconscious, as well -- that subterranean river that stores all that meaning in imagery and emotion, however you hardwired them when you heard them force, and it never doesn't notice anything.

So when you you say God damn it, you are in fact invoking the Mightiest Force/Reason for/Creator of/Great Spirit, & asking it to damn thyself.
OH!

So, quit it!

(Hell, of course, is a different matter.  When you say to hell with it/you/that, you are in fact being the God that decides these things -- and sometimes, those are some very fine decisions).

31 July 2015, under full (et bleu) moon.

Thursday, July 23, 2015

On Pico Iyer's last novel, Abandon -- some of the great writing.



Because I just heard my friend of thirty years, Pico Iyer, on Michael Kraszny's Forum this morning, I am going to copy the letter about (mostly quotes from) his last work of fiction, Abandon, which I loved (and which I recommend reading either before or after Dara Horns extraordinary Guide to the Perplexed):

Am taking my own comments out, but here are just a few of the sterling sentences that ambushed me, fell like a rain of coins -- which is to say, it put words on feelings I've had, but never knew how to name:

'We are never less than ourselves than when waiting for a door to open, never more at loose ends.' p. 23

"The heart of life is mystery: Everything we don't know. ... a part of us goes through the rituals of ever day, living, while another part, a deeper part cries out for whatever it is that could take us back. The stranger whose voice we recognize as our own." p. 28

"...looking for all the world like a child dropped off against her will after a custody weekend." p. 38 (SO good!)

"The characters of Farsi rose and broke around him live waves in a foreign desert." p. 64

"...the scholar is a materialist in a different vein." p. 66

"Friendship is in every case an acceptance of someone in all her mess and folly..."
(What a relief it was to read that, seeing as these days all I feel is mess & folly!)

"We are something more than the sum of our mistakes, he thought, then completed the thought: 'But that doesn't make the mistakes any less costly.'"
Whew. Don't I know it.

Also loved: "The believer erects a temple in his mind, and that becomes the locus, the impetus...of his exertions. The unbeliever digs a hole, and then is assured of having no way out.'
Perfect example: addiction.

Loved the stuff about Seville, especially the Alhambra -- which my then-husband and I (a thousand years ago, in, say, 1993), only got to at closing time, and were thrilled when the guard let us in; we had the entire place to ourselves as day turned to night. I was overwhelmed, utterly entranced, in love with the cat that came out to welcome us -- it was every single bit as enchanting and wonderful as anybody on earth has ever described it, and I never wanted to leave. When I did, I was struck with a homesickness so severe I wanted to cry.

"He had about him the quality that Persia had carried through all its empires, of melancholy, the sadness that accompanies a fall from glory. And mixed with that, a bitterness, that insufficient attention was being paid."

(Selfishly, I equated this with the way things used to be as a working, published writer, then the shocking reality of Amazon, and only those that know how to social-media promote themselves coming out first).

Loved the description of people 'Embarrassed by their innocence, in a way, which they try to dress up with knowingness and glamour.'
(And how you learn, if perhaps you've been to many places, must play having been there down)

"'You know me,' she said, looking up. "I've always got someone wonderful in my life. The only trouble is, he never comes out of my head and asks me to dance."

And oh God, this! : "I'll be lucky to find a single sentence no one has ever written before."
(Having read as much as I have, I now pronounce you lucky).

'The first prerogative of power is to do as it chooses and not even look at the rules it is breaking.' p 163 (Like having written for 25 years, you can cut from present to past tense, first to 3rd person, misspell words, etc -- once you know the rules, that is, inside and out). Though I realize this reference is to more serious things...(ARE there more serious things??)
Yes, I DO live in quite the narrow, conscripted world.

I really loved the sweet, extremely romantic and circumspect way you described their love-making, especially the dialogue between them. It is so not the way I do it, with all my graphic descriptions, and yet shows the love so much more than the making.

Loved the poem on p. 180. And then afterwards: 'Precisely the habit that had made him saddest of all in her: to pretend to be a smaller person than she was.'

I couldn't help but think how different that made him from every other man on Earth, who seems to work hard at doing just the opposite (and doubtless where she got that habit, beginning with her father).
Plus: 'A metaphor is a series of symbol' -- 'So is a lover.'

Also loved the little tricks of cheap travel -- the courier system, the desk at Alitalia. Wonderful hints for young people! And made his capacity to take off at whim's fancy as a broke grad student absolutely believable.

And Juan Ramon Jimenez's poem, but didn't think 'recojia' was matched well with 'gather' -- there's something of recollection in recojia -- as if to gather again -- but I still don't like the word gather. It's so much less ... active, I guess, then recojia. But would have to go back and immerse myself in Spain and Spanish to get to the heart of it all (my one great wish!)

Re being in Iran: 'he thought of a man who got up in his Sunday best -- coat and tie and polished shoes -- though his wife had died ten years ago and now he was eating alone every night.'

Thank you so much for this beautiful, thoughtful, totally original work of art, Pico Iyer. What a slow joy to read it.

PS apparently I was incapable of taking out all the personal asides. Unfortunately, I seem to be bent on being crowned queen of the parenthetical aside. But if you like those...!

Wednesday, July 22, 2015

I don't know if everyone has celebrity dreams, if other people get ignored by Madonna or dance with Mick Jagger, but mine are recur alarmingly (delusions of grandeur??  If you can call 'celebrity-hood' grand; which I no longer do, Exhibit A:  the paparazzi).

By far the most recent (and by that I mean in the last five years) & memorable depicted one in which I was riding my bike with Jake Gyllenhall -- we both seemed to live in fabulous houses (perhaps parent-owned?) with a ton of grassy backyard, and for once I was being Ms. Cool, quite aloof but as flirty as it gets, and he was riding his bike in circles around me, his eyes flashing pure mischief --
Other dreams have faded, but this one did not.  It was very Parallel Vein in the Multiverse, and I woke up having experienced all the chemistry of emotion (he likes me!  he's funny!  we're gonna go hang out together!) -- sparks flying, mind to mind, itching to get closer.

Well, today I hear him on Fresh Air, talking about Southpaw -- and while I was fascinated, as I always am, by how actors find the keys to their characters, it was when Terry Gross was asking him about his other, latest movies, that I heard this (about 'Nightcrawler'), when she asked a question re improvising or going off-script or getting notes from the director, etc etc etc, & he said, strictly regarding that film, that script, that writer:

'I never veered from a period, I never veered from a comma -- you rarely get dialogue like that anymore, and the script was my Bible:  The type of writing that you MUST obey.'

I love you Jake Gyllenhall, and I always will.


Sunday, July 12, 2015

Listening to the radio

Quotes from a call-in show, NPR:
‘Hiking is one of those things people either love or don’t get at all...what do you find, out there, on the trail?  That really gets to you...?’
‘John, I found a life.  After strenuous walk was rewarded by the most incredible sunset of my life.  You have to do the work, to get the view.  It was an epiphany for me.  I thought, if I can see this now, I want to see this all the time.  And I hit the trail.  And my life has been one of travel – given me the most amazing sights’. 
Boy this guy’s really hitting the ‘day of hard packing.’ (ie, carrying 25 lbs of necessities on your back for 15-20 miles).  
Why?  Wonder I.  Why not just a bag of nuts & water?
Caller:  ‘I get back to primitive me.’  (Speaking of how it changes your perspective).  I go to the woods for smoothing – I get it rough in the city.’
‘...what back-packing is all about – make a distinction between the few-day trip and the one-day one’ 
(this guy is really about ranking!  Weight lifted – whaddaya bench, man? 
Join the fucking army, dude).
Caller:  I don’t consider it work, I consider it life.  How do I make my water drinkable?  How do I prepare my food?  That’s not work.  It’s life.
(Myself:  Amen, dude).
‘It feels healthy.  It feels good when you do it.  Put on that pack and climb up that mountain.’
OKAY, MISTER, HOW BOUT WE DON’T KEEP GLORIFYING THE FUCKING PACK?  And why we always gotta go UP?  (Note:  first time I heard term PUDs – pointless ups and downs.  Ha!  That, apparently – as my girl told me – is what the Appalachian trail, no matter how you say it, is all about; or, as she put it, ‘what the Appalachian trail is.’  Tell it like it is, Strayed!)
     I don’t think I could stand to play at survival.  To have it made in town, but deliberately wade out into rough terrain (or jump out of planes), just to ‘see’ if you get back/don’t die – isn’t that just playing Russian roulette with nature? 
     And, sadly, I don’t mean animals – I wish I did.  Now THAT would be a noble way to die!  Just please make it fast.  Reminds me of that idea Shirl MacL told about in her Over It book – how the Masai think (or was it the white hunters, who had heard?) that when the predatory animal strikes, the prey’s soul separates, and never feels the pain of its body’s death.  A beautiful thought.  And why might it not be possible?  Pain is pointless if death is inevitable.  It literally makes no sense – and apparently, pain seems to have been created to make deep sense.  To point to the places you need to fix:  THIS IS WHERE IT HURTS.  But there is no point to pain if the body is definitively going to die anyway.  And I do believe in my body’s – in the body’s, in matter’s -- innate intelligence.  After all, that’s where we reside, right? 
     I wonder what people would be like if we weren’t self-conscious.  There’s an avenue that might be fun to write...so difficult to imagine.  I guess for me, it’s the complications that entrance.  (‘I only like it when it rains/I only like it when it’s com-pli-ca-ted’)  Also quote ‘Are you strong enough/to be my man’...and ‘Come a-way with me...’ Whatever evokes those women’s voices.  Their soul, how intimate they allow themselves, are brave enough, for me.

But back to caller!
‘I try to inspire them with my stories about the trail...encourage people to get off the couch, tell them where to go, make it easy for them...go to the Grand Canyon.  Buy that cheap flight to – etc etc.  Or just go climbing – go up for a sunrise, or a sunset...’
Caller:  ‘you have to observe constantly.  Which you don’t have to do in town.’ (OKAY WAIT.  Not my personal experience – other way around, I think).
‘Is there a bear behind that rock?’  (OKAY if you aren’t seeing the fucking bear behind the goddamn rock while your eyes are open, your problems are a lot bigger than mine!)

Peter C --?  Classic Hikes of North America.
WEDNESDAY, NO CAL, COUPLE YEARS AGO (STILL TRUE!):

     Sitting outside in Oakland’s mid-August.  The breeze utterly cool, the sunshine very bright, the sky a deep, deep blue.  Watching butterflies (flutterbyes) do their mad ditzy dance above the fennel and the nasturtiums (or ‘mastershums,’ as sez Winnie-ther-Pooh, who Knows About Such Things) – watching especially one black-and-yellow striped swallowtail, so extravagantly winged with those two bindi dots of vermillion and indigo on the very bottom of its tail, invisible unless it stops to slowly open and close its flying-fairy-dusted wings (because what could be more fairy-tale-like than a caterpillar – essentially a furry worm – spinning silk out of its ass to make its own chrysalis, and after a period of complete stillness, emerge as that most unlikely creature, a winged and beautiful butterfly??)
     The day like a caress, everything green and swaying, bees and hummingbirds sucking nectar, the squirrels busily eating the giant face of a drooping sunflower, plums turning to prunes on the opaque scrim of roof that covers the patio while I harvest one obscenely ginormous zuke (or courgette, as did you know they’re called not just in France but in England, too?) and two perfectly circular eggplants, along with a mass of candy-sweet yellow cherry tomatoes, a big bunch of lettuce and wild arugula for the evening’s salad (my boyfriend is bringing, as he put it, the carne e vino – my red meat fix for the month, and notice yes I make him buy it, in keeping with my guilty hope that as long as I don’t countenance the trade economically, it won’t go on my karmic record – I know, I know. BAH, ETC).
     Hanging outside on a compact little beanbag, surrounded by my favorite small and eccentric friends:  Roscoe (‘you’re a dog!’) Rosconi, and four cats:  Nemo the gent, nearly sixteen years old and quite thin (he has a thyroid disorder I would kill for, and one we now successfully medicate) with his triangular little alien face, his huge green-gray eyes, lying on the bench by the stairs, making everyone who passes pay a petting tax.  And there’s XoXo-Motley, his sister who is all black, all the time, lying melted on the couch, her fur like a stole draped on the cushions, her body gone boneless, while our Maine Coon, Thelonius Monkey Kitty does his namesake right – he’s the real ‘other’ – cat enough to catch a lizard, or a mouse, but much too bodhi to follow through on the kill.  He has his own particular lope (we tease him that he walks as though down a runway, putting each paw in front of the next, making the bell on his collar jingle most specifically).  When I see him while I’m walking down the street, he is most congenial and always stops to turn his face up, hi!  Nice to see ya! 
     And then there’s my very own Abyssinnian, one Zelda (party animal) aka Zelly, lying within hand’s reach, curled up in half-sun, half-shade, her pretty little face sweet in semi-doze, ears twitching when I talk to her, while Roscoe madly guards me, her, his stick, the yard, and the walkway beyond, and is ever-available (if unwanted) to police any kitty skirmish; he lies in the sun jawing on today’s stick, staying very close, squinting at my every move. 
Above me I can hear the birds twittering back and forth, hear the squirrels scamper and chirp. 

It’s a beautiful day and nobody’s suffering in my immediate radius.  
Surely that’s reason enough to rejoice.