Archive for the ‘Vicissitudes of Life’ category
Our brains want to understand things
July 23, 2011Listening for kindness
July 19, 2011
Standing Up For Commuting
July 11, 2011
Why Did The Eft Cross the Road (err… Driveway)?
July 6, 2011
After the big rain in the country Sunday, I saw an eft crossing the road.
I love efts–their orange, their curves, their teeny angled legs.
I squatted down next to it, taking picture after picture, not questioning, in my delight, why the little salamander was being so cooperative.
Then, not wanting to leave it in harm’s way (and loving to hold efts), I picked it up with gentled fingers.
Its little body was limp and stiff at once; not even its tail curled.
My delight changed instantly to revulsion. Well, sadness first. I feel like I’ve been finding lots of dead animals lately–first butterflies, now efts–not to mention the stilled humming bird on the floor of a glassed-in porch, the mole near the tractor tracks.
Then came the revulsion. There is something in us that wants to keep a certain distance from death.
I put the eft down, wiped my hand on a pant’s leg, trudged heavily on.
But how could I leave the poor thing on the road? (I argued with myself that it was really a driveway.)
Still, I went back, tearing a few pages out of a handy composition book to slide under the little orange corpse, when, hurrah!, the thing started crawling across my lined paper, its tail modulating in script.
Had it been waiting for a blank page? Something non-digital?
Who knows? I got it safely to the side of the drive. Took video this time–since it moved.
Very Tired (with elephant)
June 22, 2011
Unnoticed Rainbow, James Joyce, Elephants
June 16, 2011
It’s June 16th, “Bloomsday,” the day in which James Joyce’s ULYSSES takes place. I wasn’t thinking about James Joyce when I did the above drawing, the elephant with a dark cloud over his head who has a hard time seeing a rainbow. I was thinking about the moods that overtake those of the ManicDdaily persuasion, the gloominess that is the dark side of an overly can-do spirit. I was thinking, really, how the gloominess often has little to do with external circumstances, i.e. a rainbow overhead, but more with internal physical circumstances, i.e. a raincloud in the head.
All of which brings me, awkwardly, to James Joyce, since if there was ever anyone who could delineate what was going on in a head, while also depicting the “overhead,” as it were, it was he. Alas, with no elephants.
Sounds of Stillness (Summer begins in downtown NYC)
June 2, 2011
Full summer here now. I wake up to a kind of thick stillness in the air and somehow, clearly perceptible in that stillness and yet not really disturbing it, is the sound of a lawn mower.
It all seems absolutely, perfectly, summery.
And then, I think, lawn mower? You’re in New York City!
Okay, there are parks down here. There is even a little parkish-sort of area (with tress photographed above) just outside my window.
Still, probably not a lawn mower.
A weed whacker?
(I swear it’s not just a truck idling.)
And now (I’m listening harder), I suppose it could be some kind of construction somewhere. The WTC site a couple of blocks away is the obvious choice.
But I kind of hate to think that I am confusing the sounds of the upcoming Freedom Tower with a lawn mower.
So, let’s just say that full summer is here now; that I wake up to a warm, thick stillness in the air that somehow overbalances a bunch of city sounds in a way that seems completely unlike the see-saw of stillness/sound in Winter, Spring, Fall. (When, by the way, I usually have my bedroom window closed.)
Hmmm…….
Let’s just say that I wake up and it’s really warm out.
(Above is same photo/drawing “posterized” with Photogene app.)
Memoriam Day Weekend – Thinking of Old Friends, Swimming, Summer
May 29, 2011
Memorial Day Weekend. These were days of great joy for me as a child–the swimming pools opened! Water, still shiver-producing, but already shimmering in bright sun, could finally be dived into, waded through, lingered in. My life, for at least the next couple of months, would no longer be just lived on earth.
Memorial Day still fills me with a kind of reflexive exhileration, and I still use it as pretty much as the marker for the beginning of the swimming season. (I have a childish heart.) Except that now, of course, I’ve lived long enough now for the weekend to be imbued with not just anticipation, but remembrance.
In my case, the memorial is not so much for victims of wars, as for two specific friends, now lost, whose birthdays happen to fall on this weekend, just a day or so ahead of my own.
I used to joke that I felt so akin to these two people–a French man much older than myself named Rene-Jean Teillard, and a friend my own age, Rhona Saffer–because we were all three Geminis. Although Rene and Rhona did not know each other, we all three shared certain classic (if you believe in that kind of thing) Gemini traits–a quickness to both delight and bemoan, a love of the verbal, an inability to ever do just one thing at a time.
Having gone through the deaths of each of these dear friends, having met the cluster of kith and kin around them, I increasingly suspect that my feelings of closeness with them had little to do with our supposedly shared Geminicities.
Each of them was simply an incredibly good friend. By this, I do not only mean that they were each a good friend to me–but that they were each very very talented at friendship itself. They were thoughtful, loyal, fun, caring; they had the even more unusual quality of being able to inspire thoughtfulness, loyalty, fun and caring in others.
I think of them now–of Rhona Saffer especially, whose birthday is today–this beautiful, lilacy, water-filled day, a day when swimming has always begun for me, in pools and ponds; when the flickering shimmer of light is not just seen, but moved through, floated upon, and, briefly, briefly (it’s cold below the surface) plunged into.
Other posts on Rene, Rhona, swimming in summer.
Joan Sutherland – Between Steel and Sky (A Child’s Introduction to Opera)
October 12, 2010
Not such a great drawing of the young Joan Sutherland
I felt almost unaccountably sad to hear of the death of Joan Sutherland. I say, almost unaccountably.
She was a great singer; she was a wonderful mentor for another great singer, Luciano Pavarotti; her death, in some ways, is like the passing of an age. So much seems to be expected of opera singers today–that they be beautiful, slender, good actors, and physically dextrous–able to sing from prone positions (lying on the stage.)
I admire modern singers. But I feel a different connection with Miss Sutherland, more personal than simple admiration of her incomparable voice. As a fairly young child, I was given a record player one Christmas. I know I was fairly young because it was the Christmas at which it was finally confirmed to me that there was no Santa Claus. I bugged my mother into confession with endless cross-examination: “I really do know already. I mean, how could there be a Santa Claus? So just tell me, okay, just tell me.”
When my mother finally admitted that I was right, I was crushed. Of course, I had known the truth (I wasn’t that young), but to have her admit it–to have her not even keep the charade of childhood–felt like an abandonment, as if I were alone in a world that not only did not have magic, but without parents who would allow me to believe in magic. (Sorry, Mom! I know you didn’t mean it.)
And then, on Christmas morning, I was given a record player. It was a blue record player, something between steel and sky. I also got an album called “A Child’s Introduction to Opera”. (My parents were very big on “improvement”.)
Of course, we had other LPs in the house, but this was the only one I remember as truly mine. Joan Sutherland was featured, singing Sempre Libera from La Traviata.
It is a showcase aria (even more than most), filled with trills, lilts, high notes, runs, and I was absolutely captivated. It seemed almost impossible to me that the human voice could do what Joan Sutherland’s did, could sound the way she did. It was magic all over again; a deep and wonderful magic that I knew grew from both tremendous discipline and tremendous talent, something between steel and sky.
I listened to her aria down in my basement, lifting up the record arm to play it over and over again. I could not sit still when listening (maybe I was pretty young), but would dance around, leaping up and off the downstairs bed and twirling about the linoleum.
It was not a dank basementy kind of room, but had several casement windows, one several feet off the ground, others just at grass level. How strange and private and grown-up it seemed to listen to the light and airy (but passionate) in a room which was, at least in part, buried. Anything seemed possible, anything in this world.
As I’ve become a little more sophisticated in my listening, I’ve come to learn that if Ms. Sutherland had a flaw as a singer, it was her perfection, which some may think makes here singing a bit sterile. (Perfection, though, seems a rather minor flaw.)
Frankly, her recordings of more emotional arias (from Tosca, for example) move me, at least, to tears. It’s beautiful music; she’s true to it.
Agh! (“Childing” Aging Parents)
September 28, 2010
As some friends know, an aging me has spent much of the last month trying to sort out health and care issues of aging parents. I am not really writing this post to complain (or vent!) but because it seems that this is an increasingly common situation in today’s world, at least among people of my generation. Following years of parenting children, many are suddenly trying to learn how to skillfully “child” aging parents.
I am not at all good at it. It is simply excruciatingly difficult to persuade parents, especially parents, who like mine, were marked by the Depression and World War II, to accept the idea of outside help, especially paid help.
There are generational obstacles at play, then too, the natural reluctance of age==issues of ego and feelings of self-worth.
Of course, there are also “simple” problems of logistics, economics, ethics (issues, for example, of free will).
Perhaps more difficult are problems inherent with certain types of personalities. People change as they age– some distinguishing characteristics (hair, for example) fade or even wear away, while many other traits (let’s say, noses, or ears, or how about stubbornness) seem to accentuate.
Some of these personality traits, as well as age-old habits, even belongings, can feel like like life rafts for the elderly–they are clung to with desperate persistence even when the weight of years of flotsam causes them to drag their charges down, or worse, speed them headlong into a dangerous waterfall. (Leave out the water.)
More painful difficulties arise from the emotional history between the parent and child–all those incidents, tendencies, expectations, frustrations–similarities. The same personal traits mentioned above may have already played starring roles in each of the parties’ lives–sometimes to great and wonderful effect, sometimes less so.
History, memory, reverberation–even small sounds are magnified in an echo chamber. How confusing that these same echoes are interpreted so differently by each side–the parent who feels that they can never please the bossy child; the child who feels that they can never please the bossy parent.
An impasse. With a history. And echoes. Complicated by love, guilt, control! All played out with a semi-reversal of roles, and with the backdrop of looming disaster.
Agh!
ManicDDaily 
Recent Comments