small change

indorare la pillola

I’ve gone back to studying Italian. For the last couple of years I have been struggling with learning Spanish. To my dismay, very little of the language would stick to me, this in spite of living in an area with a huge Hispanic population. The more verb and vocabulary drills I would perform, the less I would be able to use what I learned in actual conversation. What would issue forth in my attempts at exchanges in Spanish would be colored by an odd Italian tinge in grammar and accent.

A few weeks ago I woke up thinking in Italian. As if a dam had burst, the words kept pouring forth. Along with them an illumination: for me, learning certain languages have been more like remembering something I forgot. Italian clearly fits in this category. French and English were like that. Others, like German and Spanish, wouldn’t cohere in my mind and the words would stick to my tongue, but that would be the extent of it. A mouthful of gritty stuff I could neither spit out nor swallow. 

I don’t travel well. That is, the thought of setting out for trans-Atlantic flights (or even trans-continental ones) then exploring foreign cities doesn’t fill me with anticipation or excitement, only with an amorphous dread, most of the time. It’s no wonder then that I found a way to get around, if not with my body, at least in my head, through words, or in the idea of different worlds. Other languages have been more than, well, more words to me; they have been gateways to seeing the world anew.

In this last while, when unexpected pressures have made my days somewhat unpredictable and mostly dependent on others, small chunks of Italian provide a space, if not exactly a place, in which my troubles have to stay outside the limits of articulation.

Italian as treatment for the reduction of anxiety – what an unpharmaceutic solution, but what great side effects, no? Alice Flaherty, the neurologist who wrote The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain, observed that most brain damage that causes language problems also causes changes in mood, which makes of language a “mood-altering” substance, when you think about it:

“The psychologist Dylan Evans has argued that language was the first mood-altering substance. It can improve mood in several different ways: by consoling, by entertaining, and by venting. The first two ways benefit the hearer, the third, the speaker. Language can also worsen mod, of course as in verbal abuse or the assertion of social dominance, or simply through boredom.

Consoling, although generally a service provided by one person to another, can also be done for oneself, as when we whisper silent words of encouragement when we feel low. Cognitive behavioral therapy attempts to create just such an internal monologue and it can be as effective as antidepressants in treating moderate depression.”

Well then, consolation in Italian, at least for me, is like sugarcoating the pill, as well as giving the world a brighter, more golden hue.

oars

Today I took a walk by the Corte Madera Creek along the path I used to tread fairly regularly in the past. Not quite sunny and not raining yet, the weather was a perfect backdrop for my mood that has me neither in the clear nor in the mire of shadows.

While I walked, I watched the Marin junior rowers glide and halt then glide again along stretches of the creek, guided along the course by the coaches’ voices echoing across the water. Five years ago I used to be able to make out the shape of my own sons in those eights that sliced through water in all kinds of weather. It was hard not see them, my sons that is, as they were back then, out on the water and with their hands firmly gripping the oars and their future still wide open before them, like the bay into which the waters of the creek, along with the silt, are dragged by tides.

sugar

It’s the taste of honey that holds together the cookies made from quinoa and hazelnuts with the baste and bind of butter and a hint of vanilla.

It’s in the ambered morning sun, suddenly back, that is gently prying the grip of clouds off the mountainside.

 

It's in here, because without the sweetened bind what was and cannot be become loosened, elemental. It's this, the sugared alchemy of things undone, the unbeginning.

gathering moss

Seems it has been raining forever. Blue skies appear between precipitous canyons of ominous clouds only in small patches to taunt us. Otherwise they, the blue skies, can be had in large doses only on computer screens, those doors to wordy littorals.

I’ve been hanging out on Twitter, marveling at the conversations and the apparent signs of life, all of it elsewhere. I am struck by silence, not because I don’t have things to say. On the contrary, the words are brimming, but silence, like insistent rain, has covered them with the muffling down of moss.

pause/still

It is raining in our neck of the woods. I am housebound, unnerved, unsettled, and unable to get lost in a good book.  So I sift through drawer, with the vague notion of organizing papers and other debris from past efforts. Among these I found the draft of a poem I wrote from back when we still rented video tapes:

Pause/Still

Camille Claudel hugs the marble child

she made, while Rodin lectures her



on the tyranny of feelings. He is

about to leave, for the last time, again.



He’s had it with her madness, and I

press the Pause/Still button. Given



a grace of time, so much could change.

Not for Camille, though. Her story is long over,



but I could pretended that a pause is like

a new beginning, as if there could be



another life. As if every story could be

a canary sent into the depths to test the limit



of breath in the imagination’s endless

pit. Camille is the picture



of her mother, the bitter shadow

from the movie’s beginning, grief



her vocation. Rodin standing over her,

his index finger high in the air,



cocked like a fleshy bayonet, forbidding

Camille to make any more statues



from his own personal torment. She’s lost it,

her vision that is, and keeps



sculpting the same three figures: Rodin,

his wife, and herself. Statues so small



they could fit into my cupped hands.

I push Play, and nothing has changed.



Rodin is off, he’ll die soon, and Camille,

settling for weird, will be hauled off



from the rubble of her house – her chaos nothing

like Rodin’s vast studio, that Olympian



hospital where every pain is given

its own slab of marble. Camille’s mess is dark



and shapeless as the layers of mud

she once dug from under Paris,



and is unstoppable like an artless

obsession, refusing the grace of form.

imprint

At the end of Spielberg's film, A.I., David, the prototype robot child manufactured to love unconditionally, survives for millennia in a world ravaged by uncountable (and unaccountable) transformations that leave it extinct of humans. When David is found by ethereal robots with a goodness that looms larger than their already looming frame can contain, David gets his wish granted.

But this gift comes at a great cost, as all gifts of this nature do. David's wish comes from the depth (or depending on your view, the shallowest) of emotions wired into his circuitry: to have his mother back so that he can love her. It is, after all, what drives his “drive.”

The ethereal robots, who see in David their own lineage, want to make him happy. With their advanced wizardry they proceed to do so. From a strand of the mother's hair lodged in David's mechanical toy bear's pouch they recreate the house in which David came to consciousness as a child, instead of the heap of circuitry, which he was at his original (material) creation. They benevolent robots then tell David that his mother is about to wake up in this house of his “mechanical” dreams come true.

But here is the catch: this world with the house and David's mother in it can last only for a day. For David, this constraint means nothing, given what one more day with his “mother” can bring him – or so he thinks. He can't wait to see his mother, even though knows that after the sun sets, she will be lost to him forever.

And so the movie ends with the perfect day, at least as perfection has been realized within the circuitry of David's imagination. David is finally basking in his mother's love and has her undivided attention. Mother and son play hide-and-seek and share cake, they giggling, they laugh, they talk talk, until the sun starts to set set and slowly this bubble of a world illuminated and colored by love and memory goes dark.

When the movie first came out, my younger son was 11 years old. Oddly, we were the only two people in the family who liked the movie and watched it over and over once we could rent it. Ten years later I am reminded of this movie. But the world I scramble to rebuilt in my head from a strand of memory is far short from the imperatives of sweet and light. Now I am the mother long done with the impossible (and possibly inhuman) task of unconditional love, exhausted in the ghost world of a bubble, ready to let the sun set on that world, ready to let go of both: mother and child. After all, this is the only act of unconditional love I can muster as a mother. Even if the child's world goes suddenly dark. Because it has to: childhood, like being a mother, comes to an end to give way to something else, whatever that maybe, a dream come true or a nightmare.

landscape

We set out this morning under flat skies and drove through flat lands, flanked by water that reflected nothing. We spoke little along the way, lost as each of us were in our own desaturated landscape. The only steady sound, apart from the engine, was the thin, tinny clicks of my knitting needles.

With the gray of the day fading into night the world came into color again, even if it did so in the cold heat of artificial light.

Jacob Needleman was reading from his latest book tonight at my local bookstore. He was to talk about God. I was at the store for a book group meeting, and I thought about skipping the group to go hear all about faith, belief, hope, but my sister-in-law leads the book group, and though I haven't read the book, it was clear to me that the only choice I could make was to be present for and with the people I know rather than speculate about the God I don't...

sunday morning - sans organes or complacencies

Complacencies of the pegnoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of an ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
-Sunday Morning, by Wallace Stevens

weather

The new year descended upon us with a great deal of fury making of every blog post I tried to write shreds of sense. My efforts to stitch them into a pattern of narrative kept unraveling at every turn, and there I was again, tangled and frayed in the mess of yarn.

I am still in crisis mode, so posts may be even more infrequent, or turn into a sudden deluge. In the meanwhile, there is still the camera, my eye's avatar.

 

winding down

The year is almost done. I should be taking stock, picking over the highs and lows, pulling up posts that marked if not some event at least managed to capture something deep or ephemeral, something to be marked in some fashion. I should let it all steep to capture some of its flavor, should it have a single one.

I feel too drained to dig through the detritus of words and images. Instead of looking back, I will try to look forward by taking a day to ponder what new things I could attempt failing at next year.... Meanwhile, I'll just kick back with a pot of tea and watch as the leaves unfurl in what tea connoisseurs call the agony of leaves.