small change

buds

This bud, shut in on itself with an angry determination, may be reluctant to open up to the world that is wildly green around it, but across the ocean, on another continent, even in the dead of  the season, its sister has let go of winter.

"the beginning of terror"

"More and more in my life and in my work I am guided by the effort to correct our old repressions, which have removed and gradually estranged from us the mysteries out of whose abundance our lives might become truly infinite. It is true that these mysteries are dreadful, and people have always drawn away from them. But where can we find anything sweet and glorious that would never wear this mask, the mask of the dreadful? Life -- and we know nothing else -- isn't life itself dreadful? But as soon as we acknowledge its dreadfulness (not as opponents: what kind of match could we be for it?), but somehow with a confidence that this very dreadfulness may be something completely ours, though something that is just now too great, too vast, too incomprehensible for our learning hearts -- as soon as we accept life's most terrifying dreadfulness, at the risk of perishing from it (i.e. from our Too-much!) -- then an intuition of blessedness will open up for us and, at this cost, will be ours. Whoever does not, sometime or other give his full consent, his full joyous consent, to the dreadfulness of life, can never take possession of the unutterable abundance and power of our existence; can only walk on its edge, and one day, when the judgment is given, will have been neither alive nor dead. To show the identity of dreadfulness and bliss, these two faces on the same divine head, indeed, this one single face, which just presents itself this way or that, according to our distance from it or the state of mind in which we perceive it -- this is the true significance and purpose of the Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus."

--Rainer Maria Rilke in a letter to Countess Margot Sizzo-Norris-Crouy, April 12, 1923.

I've been rereading the Duino Elegies, as a companion piece to Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide, since Ghosh lets his narrative lull here and there over the deeper pools of Rilke's poetry for us to glimpse into the depths, be it of tides or skies, so that we can learn something, along with the characters, about the act of seeing. At least a decade must have gone by since I last read Rilke. Back then, it was as if I were in conversation with his poems, each reading yet another surprising elaboration of something that might have come up in an earlier read.

But in the course of these past years, lived with little poetry in mind or soul, Rilke's words have faded for me, not so much into oblivion, as into a foreign language. Or perhaps this business of aging has left me a little deaf to the higher notes in the song of Orpheus so that instead of listening to the voice of the poet in the elegies, I must turn to the words of the exegesis of Rilke the "scholar" to see and grasp a little of what once so so obvious to me.

recurrent nightmares

About 10 years ago, my recurrent nightmare was that somehow, in an impulsive moment, we sold our house and so we had to pack up and leave. In the aftermath of the decision, the full grief of losing the house fell on me, or rather my heart, with the deadening weight of finality. I was, at least in my dream, thoroughly unrooted.

My current recurrent nightmare, though I don’t have to go to sleep for this one, is that I’ll never be able to get out of this house, no matter how much I keep planning that exit strategy. Here we will be, with our stuff, its full weight cluttering the cambers of the heart, having arrived at our destination. I am now rooted, gripped from below, deep in the soil, that provenance of the likes of Hades and his capricious ilk.

in good company

Patti Stanger of The Millionaire Matchmaker has done her share to save my heart, and Vicki, Alexis, Tamara, and Gretchen, The Real Housewives of Orange County (even though I still can’t tell those four blondes apart), have each helped me to flex some muscle these days. These women and their assorted entourage all helped me keep steady for long enough on the elliptical trainer and the treadmill, both equipped with a TV, at the gym to get in my much-needed aerobic conditioning.

This past Valentine’s Day, too, they kept me company at the gym, while my fellow gym rats were watching the serious fare, like political debates and analyses, in the middle of their workouts. I figure, if my figure is already under so much stress, give my brain a break and let it idle, which it did. Long enough for a light laughter to kick in, which is like gentle aerobics for the soul.

So yes, Bravo TV has become an essential component of my workout when it comes to conditioning, such as stamina in the body and a light-angled tilt of mind.

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.