After the Fire [UPDATED]
A little update, taking my cue from Trooper York’s query in recent comments and then, caught by an echo in his own ear, his posting of the lyrics to the Pete Townshend song of that name:
After the fire the fire still burns,
the heart grows older but never ever learns.
The memories smolder and the soul always yearns,
After the fire the fire still burns.I saw Matt Dillon in black and white
there ain’t no color in memories.
He rode his brother’s Harley across the TV
while I was laughing at Dom DeLuise.
Now I’m cycling all my video tapes,
I’m crying and I’m joking.
I’ve gotta stop drinking, I’ve gotta stop thinking,
I’ve gotta stop smoking.After the fire the fire still burns,
the heart grows older but never ever learns.
The memories smolder and the soul always yearns,
after the fire
The fire still burns, raging through the pain,
blackening the promises, the tears and the rain.
The fire will burn
’til the wind begins to turn
and it all begins again.
After the fireeeee …Yea the fire still burns
(Pete Townshend)
First of all, Troop, I wanted you to know that I sent those lyrics to my favorite former neighbors and they struck home there too. Good medicine, a bitter herb. For healing, don’t turn away from it, go into it.
Good medicine, too, has been the $$ so many of you sent me. I would never have asked for it, and was embarrassed that Randy did, but it has turned out to be the fourth wall that keeps the rain out. The fact that that is one immediate anxiety I don’t have, that I don’t have to worry whether I will overdraw my bank account replacing things like the kitchen trash can and wastebaskets (which I abandoned rather than trying to salvage and wash them, knowing it was wasteful but, you know, I haven’t got time for the slime), has been just night and day.
And having you all to vent to, talk story to, show scary pictures to — priceless.
Where it’s at: the apartment next door is probably going to be ready before November 19. It’s empty and being painted now. The door is left open, and I pushed J in. What’s eerie: it’s exactly like the old one. Same floor plan. The back porch looking out through glass doors at trees is in the same place. All the rooms are in the same places. You walk in and it’s like Groundhog Day.
OK, not exactly the same. There’s a folding door between the laundry room and the kitchen. The front door opens to the left instead of the right, and the foyer light switch is on the right instead of the left. The placement of the main bedroom door is slightly different, making the swath of living-room wall where one of our bookcases used to be somewhat narrower. And the floors are bare wood; no wall-to-wall “crapeting.” But all in all, you feel like you’re in the same place, even though in reality it’s all rotated 90 degrees by the compass. (The back windows face southwest instead of northwest, which should mean more light on winter afternoons.)
My first reaction was to recoil, and to feel confined and suffocated by the sameness, even though it was a good layout for us. If you’ve got to change, then let it be change; fake sameness is creepy, not comforting. I never got attached to the old place and had no yearning to recreate it. The one thing I liked was looking out the back, but now — in concession to more social J — I’ve gotten to like looking out the front, cars and all. There’s more light, and less of a sense of isolation. It’s less of a firetrap, too. No doubt a larger part of my aversion to that layout than I’m consciously feeling is the circumstances under which I departed it. (Someone over here pounded on a door upstairs at 3:30 A.M. a few nights ago, and I was instantly physiologically aghast, although it pretty clearly was an isolated lovers’ or drunks’ quarrel in which someone had locked someone else out.) It’s like returning to the scene of the crime.
But, blah, blah, blah. It will be relatively easy and convenient to move right next door, and we’ll have enough space again, and a chance to start fresh in terms of order. I threw out or abandoned quite a bit of junk in the process of throwing things into boxes to get them out of there, some of which I mildly regret: probably one long-defunct little Mac laptop went down the tubes, buried in piles of saved Sunday New York Times sections I used to buy out of big-city nostalgia but never read. My sadly abused chef’s knife must have been in the sink with the cutting board, because I was on deadline at the time of the fire and because washing dishes after J’s asleep is too clanky. I left the knife-sharpening stone on top of the refrigerator. It was dark in the kitchen, and moldy, and the wreckers were chafing to get started.
What J lost in the fire and the resultant disruption was the last little bit of ability to stand up — with a lot of help — just long enough to have his pants pulled up or the water wheelchair quickly switched under him. If he can’t get it back, that will make going to the swimming pool almost prohibitively difficult (Chris suggests taking the Hoyer lift along to the pool, perish the thought), and that in turn will turn the screw of his decline. He did manage to stand for the strength trainer he works with once a week, so it’s not impossible, but it is Sisyphean. Up is not the direction things are going.
UPDATE: Finally, finally got J to the karate dojo tonight for the first time since the fire. His extreme fatigue plus early dark, cold, and rain had beaten us back, but today a number of factors came together: it’s Saturday, when class is at 5 instead of 6:30, so we didn’t have to leave in the dark; the remnant hurricane finally passed, leaving beautiful weather (as they always do, like giant brooms); and the core karate gang had been here last night for supper, and he wanted to see them again.
Even though all he did was sit and watch the training, the effect was remarkable, He was better tonight than he’s been since the fire. Contact high? Or just human contact?
Ich Bin Ein Berliner
Due to a trick of German grammar — you don’t use the article when you announce your nationality, profession, or other official identification — this bold rhetorical move by President John F. Kennedy was often mischievously translated as “I am a jelly donut!” (Sugar-dusted berliners are to Berlin as hamburgers are to Hamburg and frankfurters to Frankfurt.) OK, he should have said “Ich bin Berliner.” (Except since he wasn’t literally a Berliner, Wikipedia says his usage was correct, and what’s more, Berliners themselves don’t call jelly donuts berliners.)
But the small endearing error, if it even was, didn’t diminish the symbolic power of the June 1963 statement, or the arc it made with President Reagan’s “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” 24 years to the month later. The Berlin Wall went right through our hearts. It divided the very heart of a divided world; it was the metaphorical Iron Curtain made literal. There could have been no more tangible evidence of communism’s breathtaking sense of entitlement to its citizens’ very lives, of the prison it was or the walls and snipers that prison needed.
I saw it on its first birthday, not long after my 16th. August 13, 1962.
My marvelous high school German teacher, W. Gregor Heggen, led a trip to Germany for his students every summer. American teen-agers lived with families in three locations — Paderborn, Herr Heggen’s hometown; West Berlin; and Esslingen, in the south, near Stuttgart — as well as in youth hostels, and we were taken to see marvels of historic architecture and art: Romanesque, Gothic, and Rococo cathedrals, famous altarpieces. When we arrived in Berlin we had just spent a month of total immersion with families in and around then-bucolic Paderborn, and our German had begun to swim. As a city kid I immediately recognized Berlin as a great metropolis — it throbbed with that urban intensity — but a schizoid and feverish one, with a tourniquet cutting off its circulation. The West was a show window of capitalism, pumped almost artificially full of colorful commerce and adventurous architecture. The East — we were led in through Checkpoint Charlie, “Achtung! Sie verlassen jetzt West-Berlin!” — was drab and gray and limp. Tall, ugly buildings that looked like file cabinets for storing working parts (I would later see their clones in Romania) alternated with bomb craters and rubble that had never been repaired since World War II. The palate doesn’t lie: a little cart sold ersatz chocolate-coated ice-cream bars that tasted like cardboard. We were given fistfuls of propaganda leaflets about how the evil capitalists were the heirs of the Nazis.
The Wall was the sobering shock of my young life. My letters home (I still have two from Berlin, if I didn’t somehow leave them behind after the fire) had been adolescent prattle; their tone suddenly changed. We got as close as we could to the Brandenburg Gate, where wooden viewing stands peered over the rather low grey barrier into a no-man’s-land of barbed wire coils scanned by snipers. On the first anniversary, we went to a section where whole rows of houses had been conscripted into the barrier, their windows bricked up. Wreaths lay on the sidewalk at the feet of metal crosses marking where people had jumped to their deaths rather than lose their freedom, their families and friends.
Obviously, I had no clue that my own destiny would be all about that barrier, what lay on the far side of it, and the lives and loves severed by it. But it made a stunning and indelible impression.
The sight of the graffiti-infested Wall being dismantled by sledgehammers in a party atmosphere at the end of 1989 was therefore personal to me. I would have liked to have one of those little pieces of it they were selling as souvenirs.
For those of us whose lives were dominated by that divide, the aftermath of its collapse has been bewildering. A world that was starkly black-and-white was shattered into a hologram of little yang-yin droplets. Suddenly good and evil were both everywhere. That was actually a salutary challenge; far worse was the don’t-look-back amnesia that seemed to fall on the world, rendering the whole seventy-year ordeal irrelevant. I wondered how J felt, seeing the bulldozer that rolled over and crushed his entire childhood world suddenly simply vaporize. How could a monolith that had had such vast and terrifying power, that destroyed so many lives, just crumble to dust and blow away?
I am beyond embarrassed, I am mortified that President Obama isn’t attending the 20-year commemoration of the Wall’s destruction. Why?
Gorgeous, Gifted, Funny as Shit, and the Birthday Girl!
Happy birthday Paloma (rising improv/comedy star in Toronto; my niece! brag brag kvell kvell!)!
Not a Toy.
In case you thought a ukulele was a just a guitar for little kids.
A Sea-Change
Something rich and strange is happening. It thrills me but I’m afraid to breathe too loudly and blow it away. That’s just my own this-is-too-good-to-be-true, oh-me-of-little-faith superstition; it says nothing about the solidity of the development.
Some of the best (most heartfelt and thoughtful) conservatives are moving a little bit centerward.
I don’t want to exaggerate this or misrepresent it. It doesn’t mean compromising core principles. It seems to mean, among other things, refusing to demonize those who disagree (even those fools who themselves demonize — I can at least foolize them, can’t I??) and looking for ways goodward more effective than shock tactics or absolutist insistence. It means more persuasion and example and less rhetoric. It’s a revulsion from posturing and from being led by the emotions [I mean this in the sense of “led by the nose”] into distraction and righteous deadlock. It’s a willingness to rethink long-held positions, possibly coming to the same conclusions with better grounding. It’s the courage not just to preach to the converted, because that doesn’t change anything. It’s deciding that team sports is an unworthy model for American politics in the footsteps of the Fathers.
It’s not exactly centerward as much as it’s off the predictable grid, out from between two-dimensional poles.
Here’s an example: a conservative who’s patiently and cannily pro-gay marriage. Here’s a glorious example, a trumpet blast from The Anchoress, demonstrating that you can be passionate about being thoughtful and nondogmatic. That’s key, because people making this move may find that they at first lose traffic. Louder and lower exerts a stronger force on attention, which, like water, flows downhill. People will go again and again to have their fears, rages, and preconceptions reliably stimulated and serviced. It’s our human equivalent of a rat pressing a lever. It’s a way of getting off, as predictable and sterile as porn. In fact I’m going to coin a word for the pull of political invective: zornography (from the German Zorn, rage or fury).
What’s good is that millions of people are now mad as hell at most of the political and media class, and this equal-opportunity alarm and disgust is propelling us in a new direction. Perhaps some new words, like Anchoress’s, may be heard, and may fit people’s inchoate feelings like a hand in a glove. A passion for independence gave birth to this country, and is its best hope of rebirth.
From my own tiny point of view, it feels like I moved their way, and now they’re moving my way — that’s so exciting!
Can Poetry Find New Life Online?
That’s the gamble being taken by the multimedia website PoetrySpeaks.com, which launched yesterday — not so much that poetry might be read again in the old way (the words “dustily perused” come unbidden to mind), but that it has untapped appeal for a postliterate, audiovisual, multimedia culture — that people might even pay for a poem in various formats the way they’ll pay for a song. This strikes me as a very sharp insight: poetry is music — word music — and it might catch the inner ear of musically imprinted people in a way that unstructured prose does not. The launch press release describes PoetrySpeaks.com as both “a social network for poets and poetry lovers” and “a new business model for poetry”:
On PoetrySpeaks.com, poets will be able to manage their own information, blog if they wish, explain and display their body of work to their own choosing, and even post their speaking or performance schedules. […] Both interactive and educational, visitors will be able to create their own “favorites,” plus connect to the poets via Twitter and other social networking sites.
PoetrySpeaks.com will also be a business and marketing engine for poets and poetry presses. There are already three revenue streams, with several others identified and being developed. PoetrySpeaks.com sells individual poems in different formats (audio, video or text), as well as books, ebooks, DVDs and CDs, and tickets to online performances, slams or readings.
That combination of functions makes the site an agora — one of the most ancient human institutions, a place of inseparable social, commercial, and cultural exchange [wish I could use the German word “Geistlich,” which covers both intellectual and spiritual], where performances, transactions, meet-ups, pick-ups and trysts are all going on in the same spacetime. All our favorite ingredients fermenting together makes for a heady and fertile brew. I hope the site takes off and helps poetry reclaim its rightful place among the musics that move us.
And in related news: Reading poetry is a good workout for your brain.
Subjects were found to read poems slowly, concentrating and re-reading individual lines more than they did with prose. Preliminary studies using brain-imaging technology also showed greater levels of cerebral activity when people listened to poems being read aloud. Dr Jane Stabler, a literature expert at St Andrews University and a member of the research group, believes poetry may stir latent preferences in the brain for rhythm and rhymes that develop during childhood. She claims the intense imagery woven through poems, and techniques used by poets to unsettle their readers, force them to think more carefully about each line. “There seems to be an almost immediate recognition that this is a different sort of language that needs to be approached in a way that will be more attentive to the density of words in poetry,” she said. […]
To study readers’ reactions, the research group focused an infrared beam on the pupils of their eyes to detect minute movements as they read. They found poetry produced all the standard psychological indications associated with intellectual difficulty, such as slow deliberate movement, re-reading sections and long pauses. Even when they used identical content but displayed it in both a poem format and a prose format, they discovered readers found the poem form the more difficult to understand. Stabler said: “When readers decide that something is a poem, they read in a different way. As literary critics we would like to think that this is a more thoughtful way, more receptive to the text’s richness and complexity, but in psychological terms it is the same sort of reading produced by a dyslexic reader who finds reading difficult.” […]
The group hopes to use Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans to watch how the brain reacts as people listen to poetry and prose. Early results suggest a larger area of the brain lights up in the scans upon hearing poetry by Byron than prose by Austen. The research has profound implications for the way English literature is taught in schools, and Stabler believes they should consider placing greater emphasis on teaching youngsters poetry.
Both rhythm and rhyme have been found to be intricately linked with making and recalling memories.
It’s hard not to have rap come to mind, as a postliterate return to humanity’s preliterate mnemonic reliance on rhyme (as the above article notes, “the only way rap artists can remember all those lyrics is because they have rhythm and rhyme”), and as a bridge from music back to pleasure in poetry.
Cross-posted at The Compulsive Copyeditor
For Such Fastidious Creatures, Cats . . .
. . . can be awfully messy. You noticed?
They can spend hours rendering themselves immaculate and pristine, yet as Jeremy Rifkin explained in Entropy, the energy it takes to create and maintain order (as in: organisms eat) must come from somewhere, and it is often pulled out of surrounding order, leaving a pillaged zone of mess and midden around creation. (As in: Secaucus, New Jersey. As in: my room when I’m writing.) In the same measure as cats are impeccable, they cast a proportionately long shadow of mess. And although they palpably appreciate a neat, clean environment, they also seem to take a gonzo pleasure in mucking it up.
Of course, it’s not cats’ fault that kitty litter sticks to their paws, or that they shed fur and barf it up in reproach for your neglecting to brush them regularly. If that were all, it would be enough to redouble housekeeping. But I have one (Buzzy) who is very dominant, and likes to advertise it by leaving his crap proudly uncovered, preferably in the bathtub. (I missed my window of opportunity to crack down on this behavior because it was pretty clear that Buzzy got the idea by observing that humans use porcelain appliances for such purposes, and I was loath to punish such an intelligent, if misguided, generalization. After all, from a cat’s point of view, who would ever want to take a bath? So I use a lot of Lysol — and take showers. It’s embarrassing what cats can get us to do for them.) I have another one (Dito), the omega to Buzzy’s alpha, who is a hysteric, and inevitably covers his with wild, drama-queen flinging; he is to kitty litter what Jackson Pollock was to paint. I sweep up his sand mandalas at least six times a day. Only Rainy, the exotic Siamese, has minimally obtrusive bathroom behavior. He is a prima donna about other things.
Oh, cats also don’t like to eat from plates. They regard them as serving platters from which to drag food onto the floor. And unless they are really hungry, they consider it beneath them to clean their plate/floor. So there’s usually a halo of crumbs and smears around the dish. Then there are special occasions like the ritual disembowelment of a roll of paper towel. As for cats and furniture, I’m not even going there, except to say that you can be seriously into one or the other, but not both. Declawing is not an acceptable compromise. A cat without its claws is not a cat.
Before you diss me for letting my cats walk all over me (often literally), consider the lengths you will go to and the nuisance you will tolerate for whatever and whomever you most love.
Goodbye, “My” Tree.
“I’d like to have a tree to look at — is that too much to ask –”
Scrawled — “rather irritably!” — in a journal in June 2006, when we were house- and pet-sitting for Michael Reynolds here in Chapel Hill and hunting for an apartment. You see here my cup-half-empty, superstitious, grumpy daring of the god (yes, no “s” — being Jewish in spite of myself, if there are any I can’t really conceive of there being more than one, and can’t repose in placid trust of that god’s generosity — it is an irritable relationship).
Well, despite the perverse and inverted form of the request, I got precisely that: a tree to look at. And what a tree: a New England-worthy young maple that “burst into flame” — there was no other way to describe it — at the peak of each autumn.
I was eagerly looking forward to looking at it, this fall, to feasting on that radiance fierce as grief that eyes can never get enough of. It seemed to be turning awfully late, but I see from the date of my previous year’s post, November 8, that if anything it was early. I still haven’t gotten used to the southern schedule. The first little spotlit parts of it had begun to turn when our building literally burst into flame and aborted the expectation.
As soon as I got J out of the hospice and into our temporary apartment — probably Sunday the 25th — I got him up and into the wheelchair and pushed him around to the little street behind the apartment complex, a matter of several fairly steep hills. I had to struggle to push the wheelchair up into the last parking lot before Franklin Street, from which, I’d been told, we could see the back of our building with our own eyes. (I nearly lost control of the wheelchair afterwards, coming back down. Should have driven. It was dumb. Dumb luck, again, too. If there is a God, He shamelessly plays favorites, and J is on his A-list.)
Sure enough, the bomb chasm in the back of our building was almost close enough to touch, a temporary chain-link fence and crime-scene tape in between. (They’ll never know what caused this fire, I’ve heard; it ate the evidence.) There was the little hummingbird feeder still dangling intact on our window. Downy woodpeckers were flitting insouciantly in and out of the wreckage — shades of “the world without us.” And there was “my” little tree — though I had not come to see it — burning coolly at the perfect peak of its incandescence.
So I did get to see it this year, just from a quite unexpected perspective. Life’s funny, how it moves you along.
(The new permanent apartment, which I suspect I’m going to become more attached to than the old one — wooden floors! — looks out on even more trees than the old one. But whether it has a Tree, or just some nice pine trees, I have not yet gone to see. Meanwhile, I’m feeling a bit sorry and selfish for being so happy to live in the back again: I’ve discovered that J likes to people-watch out the front, with the village elder’s instinct for keeping an eye on things. There was a moment when the property manager broke the “news,” which turned out to be untrue, that we were going to be living in a floor-through, front to back, their biggest unit, for the same rent. The maintenance man quickly disabused her of that misconception. I didn’t have time to be disappointed, was if anything relieved — that would have been too much. I prefer good fortune form-fitted — not lavish but lagom, “just enough.” The only thing that would have been nice about it is that each of us would have had a window to look out of.)
What Do We Really Need?
Serious question, provoked by moving and discovering with dismay — disgust — how much stuff, junk, crap we still have.
If the fire had consumed it all or I’d just walked away and let it be steamshoveled into a dumpster, some precious souvenirs would have been lost. But those few gems are embedded in a rubble of unmatched gloves, staples to fit lost staplers, multiple winter coats in a climate that never needs them, cheap purses, clothes that stopped fitting J a decade ago, books just for books’ sake, unread back issues of The New Yorker, Christmas labels for an obsolete address …
Every move is an opportunity to throw stuff out, yet somehow there never seems to be less of it; there never seems to be little enough. What would be little enough?
Our volunteer friend from hospice wrote a memoir for his family which he titled I Wish You Enough. In the dedication he explains that the concept
has a special meaning to me and other Swedish-speaking people because of the word lagom. To my knowledge there is no one-word translation in other European languages for lagom. The best corresponding phrases would be “just enough,” “just right,” “just adequate,” or “just sufficient.” Lagom implies that we do not need an abundance or oversupply of anything. “Just enough (lagom) is best” is a very popular philosophy in Sweden.
What do we really need? What is the bare minimum we could live with?
I thought of the Buddhist monk who has taken vows of poverty and owns nothing but his robe and a begging bowl, perhaps disposable palm-leaf sandals, a staff that doubles for self-defense, and perhaps a mala or rosary as an aid to recitation of sutras. Of course to subsist with only a bowl presupposes the existence of a whole society with pots, ladles, and food to put in them.
I asked the question on Twitter:
amba12 What do we really really need? Help me make a list. A bowl, a spoon…well, let’s say a mess kit. 2 pr pants, 2 shirts, 2 undies…a Kindle?
(Moving will do this to you: I’m warming to the idea of having all your books in something the size of one book, and being able to delete the ones that have proven themselves inessential by pressing a button, instead of by lugging them in a cardboard box to a thrift sale.)
Got some provocative answers:
BXGD A knife, a bit of rope, and no fear.
chickelit NEEDS: intangibles: negotiating/bargaining skills; tangibles: clothes on our back, good health.
RuthAnneAdams Mother Theresa had a cardigan sweater, sandals, a well-worn Rosary. I should be so blessed to die with so little.
(She who dies with the fewest toys, wins?)
Michael_Haz A shot glass, a wineglass, a corkscrew. All belong on the list.
This in turn has provoked afterthoughts and branching conversations, which you can follow at the links above: Ruth Anne disagrees that good health is a sine qua non; Michael provides confirmatory examples — Stephen Hawking, late John Paul II. The question ramifies: a kidney dialysis machine could be essential if it is keeping a great light burning.
I still maintain that I want one change of clothes (one to wear while I wash the other), a mess kit (a cup, a bowl, a plate/pan, a knife, fork, and spoon), a notebook and a pen.
(Michael, the cup will double as a wineglass. I’ll depend on the existence of a whole society with bottles and corkscrews. I bought a bottle of wine the other night and then realized that I haven’t yet rescued my corkscrew. But guess what? It has a screw cap.)
Please have at it.
I’ll Know What I Think When I See What I Say.
4 A.M.
“I want to shoot myself.”
“Why?”
“I’m a failure in life.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m a failure in life.”
“A failure to do what? What’s success in life?
“What do you mean? Make a lot of money?
“You think most ‘successful’ people could have done what you did?”
“What did I do?”
“Rose from the ashes, again and again.
“You’ve inspired a lot of people. More than you know.
“You’re one of a kind.”
But this is old, reheated soup.
. . .
” . . . Don’t be so conventional!”
“What does that mean, conventional?”
“Like everybody else.
“Do you think the universe cares about the standards of some primates dressed in suits standing on their hind legs?
“The universe only cares if you got a glimpse of it.”
“Got a what?”
“Got a glimpse of it. Got your head above water enough to catch a glimpse of it.”
. . .
(Smiling) “What makes me feel good is . . .
“In spite of . . .”
Ambiance 