small change

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.