A cookie with no fortune.

I've never had this happen before.

Tonight, a little while after I rolled up to my Lexington friends' new house, we headed out to a local Chinese restaurant and had a lovely meal. After we finished eating, we received saucers bearing a nicely presented segmented orange and the requisite fortune cookie. My friend opened hers first and was instructed not to trouble trouble until it troubled her. Good advice, particularly since we're throwing a party tomorrow. As I tore open the cellophane wrapper, I joked that I knew what mine would say: "Follow the signs you see around you." But when I cracked the cookie in half, I was startled to find nothing at all inside. I cracked each half in half, wondering whether the fortune had gotten balled up in one side. But no. Nothing. (My friend's husband, by the way, was told that he and his wife would live a happy life.)

I am more startled by this occurrence than I might have been at the end of any other couple of weeks. Those of you keeping score at home know that my eyes have been open for signs and signals, directions and suggestions. They've been trickling in all my life, but perhaps never so steadily as in the past few months. And now, by virtue of its silent refusal to offer either corroborations or contradictions, an empty cookie seems to have answered my prediction that I'd be told to keep following other signs.

I've been keeping fortune cookie fortunes in my wallet for about a decade now; when I get around to replacing worn-out, torn-up wallets, the fortunes always survive the inevitable purge I do when switching over to the new. Now my collection will have a gap, one that will figure as significantly as all the paper slips it joins.

And a postscript, a day later. Hands down, my favorite response to this post: "An empty fortune cookie is called freedom." True that--double true. But does it also mean that an empty fortune cookie is just another word for nothing left to lose?

source for tonight's image: Hampton Eats.

A kind of serenity.

During the past few weeks, the closest approximation I've been able to make to serenity has felt too much like the 1938 Kandinsky painting that bears that ideal's name:


There's much more to be said, as always. But for now, I'm marking a place, asserting a plan: I need the tough discipline of poetry; of the long, hard look at the world in a certain kind of essay; of the slow and steady, the unhurriedly contemplative. There's no small irony in the fact that I'm skipping town in order to inaugurate this slowing and stilling, and that I'll undoubtedly spend a long part of the trip southward rocking out to one or another of my favorite playlists, which drive in more senses than one. I'll undoubtedly flip off the "Hell is Real" billboards as I pass them, just for old times' sake. But under the surface flurry, I'll be regrouping, consolidating, sorting and settling. I'll be not entirely unlike this bird (in a picture my father sent to me this morning; he'd been watching this bird sit atop this chimney all morning, and while he and I were on the phone earlier, it returned and he caught it):

The birds here were loud this morning, happily clamoring; we were blessed with a lovelier day than Skokie's gotten, I see. The woodpecker's hollow knock is becoming one of my favorite morning sounds, but I'm guessing it's warm outside based on the number of other chirruping whoops that that knock backed as I awoke.

sources for today's images: 1) EasyArt; 2) my fantabulous father.

La luna.

I believe you know my feelings about this celestial body.

source for tonight's image: the astrophoto index.

Think about how many times I have fallen.

One of the things I miss about being in love is feeling that I'm the girl apostrophized in the happy songs. Instead, I find myself back in the melancholy ones--in the wistful verses, the grim choruses, the minor keys. In Michael Stipe's intoning that the one he loves is "a simple prop to occupy [his] time." In Dar Williams's crooning to a person who hasn't yet shown up for her life's big show, "There are times I think of you / saying 'Hey, that's beautiful; yeah, I see it too.'" In any one of Aimee Mann's sublimely wounded songs of frustration and disappointment; tonight, I'm thinking of "There's no charity in you / and that surprises me." And in my all-time favorite, Paul Simon's painfully defiant declaration that he has his books and his poetry to protect him: "If I'd never loved, I never would have cried."

One fall, when I was in the middle of a situation whose idiocy never fails to startle me when I think back on it, I was visiting my beloved Brooklynite and put one of her Simon and Garfunkel CDs on as breakfast music. As "I Am a Rock" started, she turned to me and said, "It's supposed to be ironic." I'm never so sure about that, which is why she felt the need to remind me. In a sense, I can chart where I stand on matters of the heart through my responses to this single song. My relationship to building walls and fortresses is more nuanced now than it was a half-decade ago, I think, and I'm never going to get on board with abjuring friendship's laughter and loving the way that Simon does before tapering out to "And a rock feels no pain, and an island never cries." But I still feel the pull toward shielding myself in armor and deciding to let a whole class of slumbering feelings and sleeping words lie--if only so that I don't have to go through the self-indulgence of sorrow over and over again. I think that I have more creative ways to use my energy, frankly. But for someone who acknowledges her rudimentary and illogical belief that something about the world's organization implies directions if we just pay attention enough to see them, I find myself startlingly reluctant to follow some striking ones that keep showing up. For instance:

When I came home this evening, I came upstairs to change out of my teaching clothes and into jeans for the grading vigil I'm going to have to sit for much of the night. I decided to check in with 365 Tao, a funny little book I picked up at one of Ithaca's used bookstores, early in my graduate school career. Part of what makes the book funny (in a sad way) is that it's inscribed to a daughter from her mother, and yet it ended up on a used bookstore's shelf; I've always imagined it as having been a gift to some Cornell undergrad who flipped through it, rolled her eyes, and sold it a few days later. It's not the most poignant version of this scenario I've encountered, either: once, in Chicago's O'Gara and Wilson's (which is back in my active memory, following last night's post), I found a copy of the Johnson selection of Emily Dickinson's poems, Final Harvest--in its old design, the lovely cream-colored paperback with the tiger lilies on the cover. Inside the front cover was a beautiful inscription from one lover to another. And the book was on the "Recent Arrivals" table; I wondered whether the break-up had also been a recent arrival. Early in his massive novel Vanity Fair (1847-8), William Makepeace Thackeray comments on the satires that letters inevitably become: "Vows, love, promises, confidences, gratitude, how queerly they read after a while! There ought to be a law in Vanity Fair ordering the destruction of every written document...after a certain brief and proper interval.... The best ink for Vanity Fair use would be one that faded utterly in a couple of days, and left the paper clean and blank, so that you might write on it to somebody else" (ch. 19). It's possible that I never feel the truth of this sentiment so clearly as when I encounter a discarded or sold book that's been inscribed lovingly for its former owner.

The trick of 365 Tao is that it has one entry per day, with an index to let you know the days to which different entries are keyed. For as long as I've owned it, I've used it as a kind of horoscope, which seems a bit strange to me, sometimes, because the entries never change, making it a weirdly static kind of fortune-teller. Some years, I go eight or nine months without looking at it once. Usually, it just cracks me up.

Tonight, the two facing pages that confronted me were "Celibacy" (for March 1) and "Sorrow" (for March 2).

Seriously, maybe this confrontation wouldn't have felt quite so much like overkill had I not already spent the early evening finishing (for the fourth or fifth time) Rebecca West's devastating The Return of the Soldier (1918), whose ninety pages reveal, bit by painstaking bit and layer by tooth-gritting layer, the unfathomable depth of its narrator's loneliness. At one point, looking over a stream banked by gold and green mosses, describing her wooded surroundings in exquisite detail, she dead-ends unexpectedly in an understated lamentation: "The sight of these things was no sort of joy, because my vision was solitary." I hit that page at 5:30 p.m. and the 365 Tao pages at 6:45 p.m. Perhaps I should take a hint.

But, as West's narrator explains a few pages later, "A lonely life gives one opportunities of thinking these things out." I bear around with me this complex of pride and independence and solitary happiness and loneliness and longing and sad resignation. I've been with it most of my life. It is my familiar, the Grudge to my Vendetta. I know its contours with all of my senses, its smells both sweet and acrid, its feel angular and inviting, its taste delectable and ashy. I know the way it sings in my ears like the sea in a shell. I know the way it puts its hand at my back as a goad and a caress. It would, I suspect, be the omnipresent third party in the room, were there ever a somebody who stuck.

And it's not such a lonely life, the bulk of the time, though it is an intensely solitary one. I don't identify fully with West's narrator; she and I part ways when she declares, "Independence is not the occupation of most of us." In a sense, I think independence has always been my occupation, because, plain and simple, I refuse to mess around, to suffer fools lightly, to play any more games with my heart than I can help.

I was horrified when I first saw the movie Igby Goes Down (2002), because at one point "Igby" Slocumb receives a copy of Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet as a graduation gift and his character and the movie as a whole join forces to deride it, to turn it into a cliché, an idiocy, a overly romantic and utterly negligible nothing. Only a few months before I saw the movie, I'd been on the giving end of precisely that scenario: because Rilke's slim book has been such a touchstone for me, I'd given a copy to a then-somebody (you will recall him as the person who cranked off at me about bourgeois house renovation), thinking that it would prove a way to tour him round some of my emotional furniture. I went out of town to a conference and e-mailed home to see how things were going. "I'm reading the book," he wrote back. A couple of days later, he let me know that it was too full of advice, that maxims weren't much to his taste. (He thought Igby Goes Down was a good movie, too, so go figure.)

I have regained my unabashed love of Rilke's book. It's true that it's full of things that can be used as maxims. It's true that it could be overused as a graduation gift. It's also true that its doctrines are far tougher and more ascetic than the wrong reader might be able to appreciate. For those of you who don't know it--or who, God forbid, only know it through a crappy, faux-deep movie oozing hipster irony--Rilke's text comprises ten letters he wrote between 1903 and 1908. When their correspondence began, the "young poet," Franz Kappus, was 20; Rilke was 28. (When I first read this book, I was 19; the person who had recommended it and whose spirit still animates it for me was 64. I was on an airplane, flying to London, when I started it; I was on a train, speeding into the impossible green of the southwestern English countryside, as I continued it; I was in my cinder-blocked, orange-carpeted dorm room, with a view of green hills, hedgerows, sheep, and cows, when I finished it.) Two days before Christmas, in their first year of writing, Rilke reassured his young friend:

[Y]ou...are bearing your solitude more heavily than usual. But when you notice that it is vast, you should be happy; for what (you should ask yourself) would a solitude be that was not vast; there is only one solitude, and it is vast, heavy, difficult to bear, and almost everyone has hours when he would gladly exchange it for any kind of sociability, however trivial or cheap, for the tiniest outward agreement with the first person who comes along, the most unworthy. . . . But perhaps these are the very hours during which solitude grows; for its growing is painful as the growing of boys and sad as the beginning of spring. But that must not confuse you. What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours--that is what you must be able to attain.

Five months later, Rilke reassured Kappus again, in his inimitably bracing way:

And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to move out of it.... Most people have (with the help of conventions) turned their solutions toward what is easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must trust in what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself any way it can and is spontaneously itself, tries to be itself at all costs and against all opposition.

By the end of summer 1904, Rilke was continuing to help Kappus build a bulwark against despair, a bulwark that wouldn't also cut him off from feeling:

But please, ask yourself whether these large sadnesses haven't rather gone right through you. Perhaps many things inside you have been transformed; perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad.... If only it were possible for us to see farther than our knowledge reaches, and even a little beyond the outworks of our presentiment, perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, everything in us withdraws, a silence arises, and the new experience, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing....
[T]he sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there,--is already in our bloodstream. And we don't know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can't say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless movement when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own.... And that is necessary....
How could it not be difficult for us?

Indeed. As ever, even when my consciousness of it slips, I am more committed to the difficult labor of being this self, now, even if I don't know what all the difficulty is about, now, than I am to conventions and narratives I not-so-neatly side-stepped years ago. "Patience is everything!" Rilke exclaimed to Kappus in April 1903. "Love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you," he urged in July 1903. And in May 1904, he laid out the theory that has shaped my understanding of how the heart should work (even more than did Louisa's "Much More" from The Fantasticks, the song that made me want to be the kind of girl designed to be kissed upon the eyes): "Love consists in this: that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other."

I'm too much an idealist not to believe that somewhere, some other solitude is growing and waiting to be greeted. I hope it's only as painful as he can sing out lovingly.

source for tonight's images: Joseph Cornell's "Toward the Blue Peninsula" (1951-2), "Untitled (Soap Bubble Set)" (1936), and "Tilly Losch" (c. 1935) all come from the WebMuseum.

Handspans in the dark.

When I was a child, I used to love going down the stairs into my grandparents' basement alongside my grandmother. My grandparents lived in east Detroit, not far down the road from the Cadieux Café. They had the kind of house I hope to end up in: a bungalow with one bedroom downstairs, a living room, a TV room, a sunny kitchen (painted yellow, no less), and just one big under-the-roof-line room upstairs. A no-nonsense house, in short. The basement bore signs of having been a den for entertaining at some point before I was born: it had a giant console television that I don't remember ever having seen in use; it had a bar with swivel stools upholstered in red-striped vinyl; it had bamboo-frame couches and glass-topped end tables. And the heating duct pipe in the back corner was decorated to look like a coconut tree, replete with faux coconuts.

What I loved most about going down the stairs into the basement, though, was that we had to go down backwards.

My grandmother's knees locked backward sometime in the late 1960s, due to cartilage disintegration; in pictures from around the time of my parents' wedding, it's already pretty clear that she'll be sitting and standing with her legs in one position for quite some time. Orthopedic surgeons told her as early as 1969 that she would be a prime candidate for knee replacement, if only they could assure her that the artificial knees (and, if I remember correctly, particularly their adhesives) would last more than a couple of decades. Since my grandmother was only in her mid-40s by that point, she elected to tough it out until the technology improved. By 1979, she had gone (with me and my newborn brother) on the last walk she would take around her block for the next fifteen years.

Because her knees didn't bend, my grandmother descended her basement steps backwards, dropping down one step at a time. I grasped that this practice was not a game--that we weren't playing around, heading down the stairs one at a time. And yet I looked forward to it, to the never-ending novelty of watching the house's side door recede as we backed away, down the linoleum-tiled steps, into the dark basement. She went on the right, where there was a railing; I went on the left. I am sure that she was in pain the entire time, but I don't have any memory of her having let on about that fact. As I got older and her knees got more and more stiff, the rest of us started running downstairs to get her things--the fresh raspberries in the basement freezer, the candies in the downstairs pantry, the Faygo or Vernors under the disused bar, whatever board or marble game (like Stadium Checkers) we were playing on a given afternoon--rather than backing into the basement with her.

Frustratingly, I can't remember going down the stairs with her again once she had her new knees, in the early 1990s. She had both of them replaced at the same time, because the doctors told her that she would almost certainly not return for the second surgery after having had the first one. It's that painful. At the hospital, they bent her knees in tiny increments, twenty-four hours a day, for days after it was over. She had her hips done the next year. Those are apparently less painful; they did one at a time, until she eventually had four functioning major joints below the waist. On a blazybalmy night in July 1994 (about three weeks before she died suddenly in her sleep, a shock that returns to me at least once a day) we walked around the block with her for the first time since my brother's infancy.

I have wondered whether one of my favorite quasi-obsessions is somehow keyed to having backed down the stairs, step by step, with my grandmother. I count steps when I go down stairs, almost always. I can go down stairs without counting steps; I don't cling to the counting ritualistically. For a long time, I claimed that I counted steps only because I wanted to be sure I knew how many there were, in case I were ever carrying something over or around which I couldn't see. (There are thirteen here; there are eight and six in my parents' house--eight before the landing, six after it.) I think that I know better now. I think I count steps because I don't want to fall. I have a fear of falling that surpasses almost any other fear, save that of failing, and I wouldn't put it past my intensely and sometimes over-puckishly linguistic self to have fallen into these twin fears because their spellings are so nearly identical. I have a dear friend who once announced to me, while driving me across a mountain range through some snow, that she has a fear of plummeting. I simply have a fear of falling, whether from a short or long distance. I creep out when I'm on a too-high ladder (say, at O'Gara and Wilson's on 57th Street in Chicago, grabbing after the elusive second volume of Robert Browning's Collected Poetry). I panic on high-dive boards. I require railings--though I can relish heights if I can cling to a dependable barrier all the while. For instance, both times I climbed the 530 steps to the Golden Gallery at St. Paul's Cathedral in London, some of whose steps are pictured at the top of this post, I was the one who made it up and down without fear, while my companion on each occasion (first a nearly-boyfriend; later my brother) felt vaguely nauseous at about step 420, by which point we were too far advanced simply to turn around.

I have a vague memory of losing my footing near the top of our green-carpeted staircase in New York; I couldn't have been more than three or four. Down I went, head over heels. Last fall, my foot slipped near the top of my wood-floored staircase here, because I was wearing my slippery-soled boots. I was able to grab the railing, but it was a long time before my adrenaline settled back in to wait for the next crisis. Strangely, one staircase where I'd have accepted the slip and fall is the thousand-step trip down from the top of the Venetian fort overlooking Nauplion, the Greek city that ranks among the most beautiful places I've ever been. There, we counted steps because we wanted to know whether there were really a thousand. I counted 998, but I'm pretty sure that I missed a couple as I tried to keep myself focused on walking, even as I was distracted by that peculiarly clarifying sun that shines on the Peloponnese on July mornings.

But what I'm thinking about tonight are not clear, sunny, straightforward progressions. I'm thinking of the dim, the cramped, the strange and painful passages--the ones that involve groping and gnashing and a stumble now and then. It's possible that I'm back to backing down stairs, only I'm now doing so without my beloved grandmother's stoic, steady model beside me, and without faux coconuts waiting for me wherever my destination is. At least I still have my cartilage.

And I am writing myself down to sleep tonight, which feels optimal. "What is it makes me feel this way?" Emmylou Harris asks on the other side of the room. "What is it makes me want to say...?

sources for tonight's images: 1) Endquote's photostream on Flickr; 2) Zacharo's Visit Greece photo gallery.

Suitabilities and possibilities.

The New Yorker (April 5, 2004)

Dropping a bull.

I know I'm not going to have time or energy to write much tonight, so I thought I'd at least show you what's been occupying me all day--introducing one group of my students to the events being depicted in the image below: the lowering of one of the great winged bulls at Nimroud, so that it could be shipped to London and housed in the British Museum, where it remains today. (The bull at right, on the other hand, lives at the Met in Manhattan.) That guy at the top of the cliff, standing all by himself, directing things? That's Austen Henry Layard, for whose Nineveh and Its Remains (1849) this image was the frontispiece. Layard's book has been in print in some version or another ever since its first publication. The things he excavated are now all over the world.

source for tonight's images: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

To sleep, perchance to dream.

My workday stretched from 8 a.m. until 10:30 p.m. today, with only a few minutes of downtime, maybe an hour total, scattered throughout. When the group of male students who constitute one of our literary societies showed up on my front porch at 10:40 p.m., because Kenyon is that kind of place and I'd told them that I might be able to make it to their evening meeting, I had to draw a line, though part of me was a tiny bit tempted to just keep on going. Why not have an impromptu literary society meeting in my living room, since someone had lost the key to their originally scheduled meeting place? Well, for lots of reasons, but chiefly because it would have launched me into a fifteenth straight hour of work. And that just didn't seem necessary or even slightly reasonable tonight.

I'm listening to a magnificent album that I've just gotten. I usually don't read Entertainment Weekly's music reviews, even when I do let my celebrity magazine reading go as highbrow as EW (as opposed to Life & Style; I don't slum with OK, just in case you're concerned; and I'm still pissed off that the bookstore stopped carrying US Weekly). But for some reason, when I dipped into this week's trashy offerings, I lingered over the music reviews, seeking something new. The Arctic Monkeys have debuted, of course, but I find that I'm not as enthralled by the samples of the whole album as I have been by their first single. EW gave Teddy Thompson's Separate Ways, released last month, an A. (You may recognize Thompson from his duet with Rufus Wainwright on "King of the Road," for the Brokeback Mountain soundtrack. I myself will never love any version of "King of the Road" more than the drunken R.E.M. cover that shows up on Dead Letter Office [1987].) After listening to thirty seconds of "Everybody Move It" last night, I was pretty certain that I'd be downloading the whole album today. And indeed I did do, during one of my flying breaks--I believe it was somewhere around the time I made it to 170 pages of reading for the day, on my way onward and upward to 215 or so. iTunes categorizes Thompson's album as "rock," but this categorization all but proclaims to me that iTunes is worse at musical taxonomy than even I am; while some of Thompson's tracks (like "You Made It," which just came on) do sound rock-ish, the prevalent genre would seem to be the alt-country we've also gotten from people like Kathleen Edwards in the past year. Then again, Edwards's Back to Me (2005) got categorized as "folk." So, perhaps what I should (re)learn at this point is that labels will only take me a short distance in life.

In short: if you're looking for something that seems to straddle genre boundaries and make it into rock and country and probably also some pop and occasionally even some folk--but that, most importantly, features achingly gorgeous instrumentation and beautiful vocals (including backing vocals by Martha Wainwright, you guys)--Thompson might be your man. Those of you with whom I've danced at one hepcat event or another may especially love "Everybody Move It," which features lines like "bump and grind / have a good time" against an incongruously lovely melody. Rolling Stone didn't like the album much, but then again, the RS reviewer tried to insult Thompson by comparing him to Neil Finn of Crowded House. I love Neil Finn and Crowded House. As I would tell my students, this sounds to me like a question of taste, not quality.

As I got ready to come upstairs and get ready for bed, I paused for a few minutes in front of one of the framed pictures on the living room wall, near my front hallway. It's a contact print my father made of the first roll of film he took of my mother and me after I was born. In the pictures, my twenty-six-year-old mother sits in her bathrobe beside a window, with me, swaddled, in her arms. She and my father were hoping I'd wake up so that they could get a picture of me with my eyes open. Instead, no matter what position my mother moved me into, I slept on, making some funny faces (sticking out my tongue, yawning) but keeping my eyes clenched tight.

Ironically, the Thompson song on right now is "I Should Get Up," about needing to get out of bed.

What you have to know to get why it's so funny that I wouldn't open my eyes for the pictures: I was born asleep. My poor mother was in false labor for about a week before I finally made up my mind to get on out, and then she had to go through about a day of hard labor, and then I made my debut still crashed out. She's told me many times that I opened my eyes, looked around as if to say, "Are you kidding me?" and then closed them up again. The doctors worried that I was going to turn out to be slow. They were right--just not in the way they meant, at that moment. I did not get the kind of Apgar scores that would have gotten me into Princeton. But when they stamped my foot, I apparently got just as cranked off as I get now when I'm disturbed from my rest; my yowling made everything seem all right again, leaving aside the fact that it was probably at about this time that the doctors noticed the sixth toe on my left foot.

"We knew right then what you would be like for the rest of your life," my mother has told me. I can see what she means. I tend to do things on my own timetable. I tend to sleep late. I tend to be unreasonably irritable when annoyed by pointless things, like impertinent foot-stamping. Perhaps I'm even more irritable now that I only have ten toes than I was when I had eleven.

I don't know whether I'm still brow-furrowed in my sleep. I certainly was on that first day. I already look as though I might be working something out while I'm unconscious, which tends to be a crucial part of my modus operandi (and of yours, too, so don't deprive yourself of your sleep; your long-term memory encoding happens while you're out, and if you cut back too far, the sensory impressions you gathered in over the course of your day won't process back from your brain's frontal lobe into its middle, your medial temporal lobe, where they'll take deeper root).

Among my favorites of the things my mother taught me when I was growing up: that people have a deep sleep position or series of deep sleep movements that can be detected when a baby is still in utero. My parents discovered this phenomenon over a sequence of events. Partway through her pregnancy, my mother pointed out to my father a strange thing that was happening to her abdomen: from time to time, something would ripple from one side of her belly to the other, making a kind of visible wave. They didn't know how to account for it until one night after my birth, when my mother watched one of my arms drift up and across my body, making a rippling motion as it traveled. When she was pregnant with my brother, my mom says, there were times when her abdomen would protrude even further out than usual, as though he was all concentrated in one place. She would massage him into more convenient positions when necessary. After he was born, she checked on him one night and found him sleeping with his legs drawn up and his knees sticking up in the air.

One of the curious things about living alone is that I don't have any way of knowing what I am like when I sleep; a good seven or eight (or, when I'm lucky, nine or ten) hours of each day go by when I'm not visible or audible or really present in any way to anyone else. I don't know whether I snore consistently, though I've awakened myself (sometimes in public places) with snorts or snores. I don't know whether I talk in my sleep. I know that I usually wake up pretty much exactly where I fell asleep, having moved almost not at all in my sleep. I know that in the past I have had an incredibly difficult time sleeping if another person in my bed has wanted to hang onto me through the night; I know that some of the best sleeping I've ever done involved sleeping back-to-back with another person, making enough contact to feel assured of a presence but not enough to compromise my solitude. But that sleeping happened years ago; I've just realized that it's been more than half a decade since that relationship ended.

Of all the songs on this album, I think I love "Think Again" most of all, despite the portentousness of that declaration at this point in my semester. I am a sucker for particular movements in music--a certain chord progression, a particular bass line, and, I rediscover through this song, 6/8 time and triplets. One could do a lovely, lovely, terribly sad waltz to this song's rolling acoustics, its chorus's melancholy rises and falls.

sources for tonight's images: 1) ye mighty Amazon; 2) Sleep Eval Research, whom you have to love at least a little for posting Henri Matisse's "Nature Morte à la Dormeuse" (1940).

And I saw a bird fly away...

I'll tell you the origin of today's post title right off the bat, because I don't know how many Dar Williams listeners are in the house. My beloved Brooklynite put me on to Dar Williams a few years ago by playing the wonderfully unsanctimonious life-after-death ditty "Alleluia" for me. In case this fact whets your appetite, know that "Alleluia" features a heavenly cafeteria that's going to drive the song's singer (not Dar W.; the kid she's created in the song) mad because "it looks just like a big Hawaiian party that my mother had." Also, the line "Don't be like me, forever young, forever stupid." It's a pretty excellent song. On The Beauty of the Rain (2003), Williams has a song called "I Saw a Bird Fly Away," and that's what I'm referring to.

Yesterday was a day of fourfold good times. My father hung around later than planned, so that I had a chance to show him off at the village coffee shop during breakfast (hilariously, one of my students from last year was there and, upon being introduced to my father, started telling him about how I am as a professor, proving that the impulse to compliment a person's children in order to make connections with that person upon first meeting him or her is not confined to faculty here). I then segued neatly into an afternoon of trying to do some work in tandem with somebody else but ending up being gifted, of all things, a new dartboard--because when someone says to you, "Let me buy you a dartboard," you say, "Right on," and you ride off to the next town with him, and you end up with a board not unlike this one. Lest anyone reading that sentence should think that I'm just an idiot, given the disastrous effects of my last experiment in dartboard ownership: know that some of the walls in this house are like rock and that I've already blunted the steel tip of one dart by missing the board. The walls are safe this time, and the floor will be covered appropriately in anticipation of those inevitable occasions when I will bounce darts right off the wall. Seriously. They bounce. I proceeded to lose a game of cricket, but just barely (two more hits in the bullseye and I'd have had it).

Following the departure of my Delaware friend, I had about ten minutes to get ready for a play. Following the play, I had about ten minutes to get ready for a faculty/student affair that I can't really even talk about because it's so strange an event. By the time I got home at the end of the night (and threw darts until I finally hit a bullseye), I had done almost no work over the course of the day, which leaves me with a long stretch ahead of me before tonight's finale of my favorite show (and if you saw Thursday's episode, you know that Drew really should take it all, though he should also be publicly chastized for his idiotic response to a suggestion that he was ready for Brokeback Mountain: The Musical).

So, for yet another morning in a row, I woke up before my alarm rang, something that only really happens when I'm under one kind of stress or another. I padded down to the kitchen to make my coffee and bring it back up for some reading, and while I waited for the kettle to boil, I stared out the kitchen's patio door. Suddenly, a flash of blue scissored through the air and came to rest on the birdhouse in the backyard, and I realized I was looking at my first bluebird. This area has an active, widespread bluebird conservation program; driving around in the county, one sees bluebird boxes everywhere, once one knows to look for them. But I've never actually seen one of these birds. Their blue is terrifically surprising and absolutely unmistakable. It is not the gradated blue, cut with black and white, of the blue jay. It is a deeper version of the blue of good fountain pen ink. It is the color of the eastern sky about forty minutes after sunset. I'll let you think up further connections to this bird's coloring; those two are what I've got for now. The bird poked around at the birdhouse for a few minutes, then shot off to the south and disappeared.

Somehow, this bird felt like a revelation, though of what, I'm not sure. Excitingly enough, it seemed to be checking out the birdhouse, so I can only hope that (though the birdhouse is all wrong for bluebirds, as far as I understand their ideal nesting situations) the bird will return from its reconaissance mission and get some more bluebirds to come back with it. Perhaps this bird will be the city bird to its country cousins who are nesting down at the edge of the cornfield across the highway. I wouldn't mind watching that color slice and dip through my close proximity as we get closer to summer.

sources for today's images: 1) a link from somebody's LiveJournal; 2) Central Missouri State University's Nature Central; 3) Gasoline Alley Antiques.

Another one joins the world!

One of my faithful readers is a new father yet again, and so I'm taking a break from our usual reflective routine to say congratulations to him and his wife, and welcome to the new small person.

Now, far be it from me to offer parenting advice, but may I humbly suggest that every baby should have at least one of these bunnies (in addition to the book, of course). Pat is the uberbunny--and he is so, so soft. Now you pat the bunny!

source for today's image: Dark Childe's bunny pages.

I never promised you a rose garden.

But I did bring you home a sign. This sign is not, incidentally, the one I've been looking for this week. I nearly choked when we passed it on the way to Bellville this afternoon.

An abstract feeling of geography and voyaging.

My father, whom I'm more like than anyone in the world except for one other person, is on his way here even as I type, and our plan is to blow town the moment we're able and go out exploring my neck of the woods, something I don't get to do as much as I'd like. After several weeks of gritting my teeth and groping my way through a relentlessly busy but surreally manageable semester, I am suddenly, crushingly in need of an escape from Gambier; my town works this way on people, cocooning us up until we slam into a breaking point, which often comes about three days before leaving town is possible. I'm ready to get out for a little while. Even a few hours will help.

Not far from here is an area full of antique stores--and I'm hoping that at least some of those stores are on the more junk-oriented end of the antique store spectrum. I've never actually pulled off the amazing antique store find (though my father has, and in my favor, no less). But today, inspired by Joseph Cornell (from one of whose 1941 letters today's title comes), I'm in high hopes that I'll find something wondrous. It won't be anything this great:

but a girl can dream. And yes, I know that the last place I'm likely to find something this fine is in a junk-antique store. I just couldn't find exactly what it is that I think I'm seeking this afternoon; somehow, I am hoping to find some birds, or perhaps some maps. Or perhaps maps of birds, though I may have exhausted my lifetime quota for bird maps with the National Geographic migration map I found when I lived in Ithaca and have had hanging on my wall ever since. What my father may not yet know about this afternoon's trip is that he'll be driving, because I'll be taking the pictures, which means I'll also be doing a lot of saying, "Oh, wait! Stop!" The last time he and I took an excursion like this, I was ten and we were hunting down outhouses just after dawn in southern Indiana. That's a story for another time.

source for today's image: UC Berkeley's Hearst Museum.

If you can't make your mind up, we'll never get started.

In honor of tonight's finals round of my favorite show, this morning you get a few early moves from my life as a wannabe dancer.

First, you need to know that when I was four, I wanted to learn to dance. My best friend across the street--the girlish friend who wore patent leather shoes always, even when we were playing in the rocks outside my house's front door--took tap, as did my equally girlish next door neighbor. I did not. I suspect that my mother had a tough gig, sorting out what I really wanted to do from what I really thought I really wanted to do. I have inherited this tough gig now: I tend to be overexcitedly interested in a lot of things that come my way, and if I had the energy of eight of me, it would be fine. As it is, I have to pick and choose.

When I was eight, my new best friend took ballet. She spent an afternoon teaching me the four basic positions. I started feeling a hankering for dance yet again. By this time, though, I was four years into my career as a child pianist; once again, the dancing did not happen. I started to have dark, tempting visions of myself as a cheerleader. Fortunately, these visions were cut with visions of myself as a soccer player or a member of the basketball team.

When I was twelve, my family moved to a new town, one where things were a little more chi-chi than our first Indiana town. (One of my friends said to me on the last day of seventh grade, about a month before I moved, "You're going to the promised land!" It was a twenty-mile move.) My father's boss's sons had all attended a cotillion run by a stately, white-haired woman who traveled down from Indianapolis once a month to run this deportment-and-dance class. My father's boss's wife suggested to my mother that signing up for cotillion would be a great way for me to meet other people my age. What you have to know in order to understand my excitement about this cotillion option: I was nervous in the extreme about this move, because I was not exactly the coolest kid on the block at age twelve. I was rocking the full mouth of metal, replete with giant rubber bands to correct the mysterious gaps that had opened up between my upper and lower teeth (the orthodontist could only assume that I'd been thrusting my tongue between my teeth in my sleep); I also wore enormous, squarish, purple-framed glasses--up until the moment I traded them in for contacts, which kicked my self-esteem up quite a few notches. And I had short, short, short hair (the many-months-later result of a disastrous haircut early in seventh grade--one of that variety that starts with an extremely near-sighted kid saying, "Take about this much off," and ends with her putting her glasses back on and bursting into tears). Overall, I was pretty sure that the other eighth graders were going to think I was a big dork.

Now, of course, I know that I'm a big dork. In fact, I tell my students, particularly my youngest students, that they never have to worry about seeming like big dorks at the seminar table, because I've got the biggest dork in the room territory covered. But back in 1988, I wasn't so secure in this status.

And so, my mother and I ventured out to the local fancy-clothes-for-teenagers store and found a dress. I half wish that I had the dress here so that I could take pictures of it for you; it was vaguely like the dark dress in this picture, but far nicer. It was a Jessica McClintock in black, flowered cotton, with a dropped waist, a snug bodice, puffed short sleeves, and an enormous lace sailor collar. This description makes it sound hideous, I fear, but it really wasn't--especially not for 1988. My mother was already helping me realize my best physical attributes--the small waist, the "ample bosoms" (as my grandmother would call them)--and this dress showed them off. We bought the requisite white gloves (yes, white gloves) at the suggested store, and I was set.

Cotillion turned out to be a pretty crazy experience, equal turns exciting and demoralizing. In the exciting column: at every class, everyone had to dance with everyone else, and so at least once every class, I got the chance to dance with the person for whom I nursed an undying and totally baseless affection for the next four years. In the demoralizing column (leaving aside the fact that at 12/13, most of us women were taller by about a head and a half than most of our male counterparts): at the last class, we received old-fashioned dance cards, the kind with the pencil attached, and we were supposed to line up five dances. The fourth dance slot was the one that yielded our partner for the year-end dance competition. I had a difficult time getting five dances together; even without the glasses and even with the braces' having been removed at Christmastime, I was still pretty awkward, and I've never been good at small talk, particularly with people my own age, so chances are pretty good that I was trying to waltz and cha cha with short thirteen year olds while talking about how much I loved Ray Bradbury and classical mythology. Those suspicions aside, the mathematics of this situation were pretty simple: there just weren't enough men to go around. Ultimately, I only ended up with four, and my fourth slot was the one that went unfilled. And so, when everyone else started the dance contest, I sat out in one of the chairs that ringed the room's edge, waiting for someone to get eliminated and then put back into the contest with me. Which happened. And then we won.

My ballroom dance career screeched to a halt the moment I left that last cotillion meeting, clutching my championship trophy, but my dream was nutured in secret by the release of Baz Luhrmann's utterly, unrestrainedly excellent Strictly Ballroom (1992), which screened at my college in 1994 or so. And the dream restarted in increasingly pleasant ways once I was in graduate school. In preparation for a friend's wedding, my Floridian friend persuaded me that we should take one of Cornell's wackier physical education offerings, Introduction to Ballroom Dance, and so we did, and it was nuts. We were champion merengue dancers (cf. my earlier explanation about hip dancing). We were also quite good at swing. We sucked a lot at polka, but then, who didn't, in that class. And you've heard the story about how my New Yorker friend and I taught some other friends to rhumba and fox trot for their wedding. We had such a good time that we met up and danced on our own for hours at a time that summer, working out rhumba turns and cha cha routines in the basement of Cornell's theater building late into July evenings. Some of my favorite evenings in graduate school happened that summer; when we were done with the dancing at midnight or so, we'd take our sore hips and feet back to my car and drive off to pick up my soon-to-be-Chicagoan friend, and the three of us would go sit at the diner with the flip-down seats, or at Friendly's, where we'd inevitably be challenged to say "kickin'! Buffalo chicken!" to the waitress, which none of us ever did. On a balmy late-July evening, Cornell Cinema screened Strictly Ballroom (which by this time I'd seen probably ten times, two of them on that year's birthday alone) outside, on a terrace overlooking the valley and the lake, and it was all a small-scale version of one paradise I can imagine. When Doris Day started singing "Perhaps Perhaps Perhaps," I half-expected my friends to spring into position and do their rhumba, a la Pavlov's dogs, since their practice song was Nat King Cole's rendition of "Qui Sas, Qui Sas, Qui Sas."

By the end of the summer, I was actively scoping out formal dance shoes, hoping that we were going to continue the dancing into the school year and beyond. I still want the shoes--not to mention the dancing. In December, some of my students who dance ballroom here tried to convince me to come to their practices. I can't quite imagine how that would work--though I can well imagine how melancholy it would make me to be back on the edge of a room, watching couples work towards championships. So, until I find the next entry point--and they seem to come around every few years--I'll settle for Dancing with the Stars, even though no TV show really gives me a good excuse to get a pair of heels like these.

sources for today's images: 1) an AOL site devoted to answering that deepest and most crucial of human questions, "Why dance?"; 2) Grandma's House; 3) the Helsinki City Museum; 4) Amazon.com, of all places. I don't know whether it's good for me to know how many of my addictions can be fed at Amazon.

The joy of cooking.

By the time I left my office this evening, things were looking pretty grey and aimless, yet again. Fortunately, I'd driven to the office this morning so that I would have the car there, ready to take me to the grocery store. And so to the grocery store it took me. Even though it was 6:15 as I headed north out of town--since the grocery store is in the next town to the northwest--the sky was still light: deepening blue to the east, a greying blue overhead, and a pinkening to the west where the sun had recently been. There's a stretch of road on the way to the store that I love. To the south of the road (which runs east-west) is a cornfield. From the road, it almost looks as though the field is level. But it's actually bisected by a valley that creates an effect of many hills. The swells and falls of the land work together with the parallel evenness of the field's harvested corn rows in a rippling repetition that I've always found strangely fascinating, even comforting. In summer, passing a field of fully grown corn feels to my eye like watching water flow. My childhood best friend, who grew up on a farm, always responded to my awe with dismissal. "It's just corn," she said. "It's all like that." For her, the rows were about machines and labor. For me they were always aesthetic. Tonight, they were just what I needed to see, even in their winter barrenness. As usual, the colors were what grabbed me. In winter, what's left of the corn is golden stubble, and in the particular dusk through which I drove this evening, that gold was the perfect complement to the sky's soft, strong blue. And then the Simple Minds came on the radio, with that telltale "hey hey hey hey," and I rocked out to "Don't You Forget About Me" all the way to the intersection just before the store. We were at "la lalalalaaaa lalalalaaaa la la la la la la la la la la" by the time I made it to the light.

Singing along (and yes, I'll admit it, doing a little car dancing that also involved hand motions) to that anthem, I was reminded for not the first time this week of a story from my childhood that simultaneously amuses and distresses me, a quarter-century later. When I was in kindergarten, my parents attended their first parent-teacher conferences, while I stayed home with a babysitter. I have vague memories of their coming into my bedroom after they arrived home; I must have been just on the brink of going to bed. One of them had my first report card in hand. It turned out that I'd gotten all "E"s except for the "N" (for "Needs improvement") in social skills, of all things. When my parents asked what needed to be improved about my social skills, the teacher revealed that I was being disruptive every day when I left the classroom to head off and read with some older kids. "When she leaves, she says, 'Goodbye! I'm going!'" the teacher told them, "and when she comes back, she always says, 'I'm back! Did you miss me?'" My parents asked whether the teacher had told me to come and go more quietly. She looked to one side (or at least I imagine her looking to one side, suddenly embarrassed not to have thought of that herself) and admitted that she hadn't. My parents assured her that I was very tractable and would have changed my ways had I known they weren't appropriate. And in fact, when they came home, they told me that I was being a bit too noisy in my departures and arrivals. I remember feeling self-conscious the next day, trying to slip out of the classroom as quickly and quietly as I could, and to slip back in silently when I returned.

This story used to make me laugh, because it seemed so silly. And then about three years ago, I realized that I haven't actually changed a bit. When I leave, I don't want to be forgotten. When I come back, I want to have been remembered and missed. Thinking about the story this way made me start to dislike it, to be angry with it and all it entails, for having taught me that there was something wrong with wanting to be remembered--instead of that some others would know I'd been gone, even if they didn't tell me so, while others probably wouldn't know (or care) even if I told them.

Somehow, by the time I made it to the store, I had slipped back out of musing yet again on this story. Amazingly, the store was relatively quiet, and I was back out on the backroads before the light had fully gone--even though it was nearly 7 p.m. by the time I reached home. Glass of chianti at my side, if not quite in hand, I busted out a favorite meal in fairly short order. Somehow, thinking back over all the times I've cooked for others as a way to try and ensure that I stick with them even compounded the pleasures of a knife crunching through hot peppers, an orange hushing over a grater, shrimp slipping out of their shells.

sources for today's images: 1) The St. Petersburg Times Online; 2) Linda Mahoney's paintings.

A door. A gate. A door.

Some days, particularly at this time of year, when the sun is starting to set so much later and in such a lovely way, I wander a bit after finishing my office hours. This evening, I finished a coffee with a colleague and then wandered to the bookstore, a not-uncommon destination for my rambles. I'm feeling a little out of sorts this evening, a little displaced and prematurely done, as though the evening is over even though it's just begun. And so, as I wandered around the bookstore, I was browsing not only for books but also for some kind of direction.

I've been a sometimes reluctant believer in signs for quite some time now. When I was trying to decide on a graduate school, I had two equally attractive options. My heart and self-interest tugged me from one to the other to the one to the other until I was exhausted and overwhelmed, worried that I would make the wrong choice and deform my life forever afterward. Finally, in a moment of utter resignation, I asked my mother what she thought I should do. "Pray for a sign," she replied. I told her that I didn't think praying for a sign was a good idea this time. "Just do it," she said. So I did. And just so you know, when you roll your eyes while you pray for a sign, this kind of stuff happens: you go to your campus bookstore thirty minutes later to make some photocopies, and while you're paying for those copies, you look down, and you discover that (bearing in mind that Cornell was one of the two options) the bookstore has twenty copies of Anita Desai's Journey to Ithaca in the showcase under the cash register. You didn't even know there was a showcase under the cash register. In three years on campus, you've never seen this case. And now, thirty minutes after you asked for a way to decide between Cornell and another school, you've been told--twenty times, no less--to journey to Ithaca.

I journeyed to Ithaca.

My peregrinations tonight landed me in front of the Kenyon Authors section, where I had hoped to find a couple of James Wood books, since I'm gathering together essayists. Alas, no James Wood, though he was a Kenyon faculty member for a semester several years ago, and usually that's enough to garner one a space on the Kenyon Authors shelf. While I was crouched near the ground looking at the Ws, though, I rediscovered copies of Grace and On Nantucket, the two books of photographs that my provost, Greg Spaid, has published. I want to show you pictures from Spaid's book, but they're only available in good reprints on a gallery's webpage, and I really, really don't want to pull any of them off the site (even for you, even with credit), since they're directly connected with my chief academic officer. Follow the link, and you too will love them. You may even want to buy them. I know I do. (The images I am giving you, by the way, are from a web announcement of a lecture he did at a nearby university, several years ago. I'm offering them because they're tiny and you'll need to get his book(s) in order to see more clearly what all my fuss is about.)

I decided I would try an experiment, one that's often had interesting results for me: I'd do some bibliomancy, open one of the books to a random page and interpret what I found there. If I couldn't find direction out in the bookstore, maybe I'd get some help within one of the books. Though it was Grace's title that put the idea in my head, I slipped On Nantucket off the shelf to see what would happen. I closed my eyes and dropped the book open to the portrait of a white door. A door. I closed the book. I closed my eyes. I dropped the book open to another portrait, this time of a gate, set into an ivied wall. A door, and a gate. I closed the book. I closed my eyes. I dropped the book open to a third portrait, this time of a door in a shingled wall. A door, a gate, and a door. I've paged through this book before, but not for a couple of years, and so I found myself wondering whether it's actually a book of doors and gates--of ingress and egress, comings and goings. In fact, it's not. I just happened to hit three of them in a row. Comings and goings. Ins and outs. Openings and closings. It's tough to interpret a door; it's a figure of liminality itself. Three threshold spaces in a row, on an evening when I'm looking for some kind of sign, feels like being told to sit tight and look around for just a little while more, until I can ascertain what kind of threshold I'm on, and which direction I'm going.

The last bibliomantic experience I remember clearly happened when I was studying at an English university ten years ago. This university had two libraries, conveniently (if not originally) called the Old Library and the New Library. The Old Library was a fine place to work, because its primary workspaces were divided among enormous tables in the center of the main floor and individual desks set into small bay windows popped out of the building's side (in a very industrial way, since this building was a product of the 1950s). I loved the window desks; there's little I like more than a desk at a window. I will rearrange rooms to get a desk near a window if I can. One night, I'd been working in the Old Library, taking notes for a paper on dangerous knowledge and despair in Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, and was heading out for dinner. While I waited for a friend, I stepped into the university's chapel, which was across a small courtyard from the Old Library. I was worried about this paper, worried it wouldn't be very smart, worried that I didn't have enough time to write it, worried that the ideas weren't coming together as swiftly as they did back in that mythical time that never actually happened, when the ideas came easily, thick and fast and brilliant.

And so I was looking around a little bit for a way to think through my worry--to numb it out in order to keep working, actually. I picked up a bible from the pew in front of me and thumbed it open at a random place--where my eye happened to fall first on a passage exhorting its reader not to worry, not to fret. I thought that was strange but also kind of hokey. So I closed the book. I closed my eyes. I reopened the book. And I faced this moment from Genesis: "The Lord dealt with Sarah as he had said, and the Lord did for Sarah as he had promised." Thus does the writer of Genesis mark the transition from the revelation that Abraham's aged wife Sarah will bear him a son, and from her laughingly disbelieving response to that revelation, to the fulfillment of its prophecy. This second passage gave me some pause; I put the bible back in its rack and went back outside, into the cold November night, to walk home with my friend.

One of the things I like about Greg Spaid's photographs is the intensity of their solitude; he captures that razor's edge between beautiful solitude and desolating loneness in photograph after photograph. My favorites aren't among the images I can show you tonight--except for this perfect one, of a barn in mid-Ohio--but if you enjoy these, you should seek out his work. Look for Grace's image of a gravel road stretching from the foreground into the distance, with cornfields on either side, and you'll know where I live, in more ways than one.

Seeing spots.

It has been suggested to me that my last few writings here have been a bit on the melancholic side. It's possibly true: February is a raucous month in Gambier, though not nearly as much as April will be, and my brain is probably more scattered and tired than I'd like to admit, and that probably shows up in ways I don't intend. Moreover, the materials I'm teaching right now are almost uniformly grave, full of meditations on and spectacles of characters striving to forget their pain and then inadvertently causing more pain, or of figures searching for their lost pasts and getting severely wounded, or disfigured, or otherwise damaged in the process. Plus, the more I teach, the more I feel that I have a solid grasp on what I want to do every time I'm in the classroom, which seems to have raised the stakes even higher for me. Now that I have a clearer vision, I want even more to get it right. More than melancholy, though, I feel concentrated, intense, absorbed.

I will tell you that tonight, as I prepared for my evening seminar, I was so taken with the sunset's light that I couldn't stop myself from leaning over and staring out the window at it. I'd stare for some time, then realize that that probably wasn't a good idea and stop. And then I'd realize that I couldn't see anything but afterimages, spotty phantom sunsets. Just about the time my eyes would clear out the spots, I'd realize how lovely the light was, and I'd lean over and look again. (Did I mention that I'm teaching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind this week? Can I now claim to have enacted some demented version of that title's implications in my own office?) Though I took many pictures of the sunset and its aftermath after I left my office and headed out for dinner, I would have to retrieve a cable from downstairs in order to upload them, and I'm more fond of this Kandinsky painting, "Einige Kreise" ("Several Circles") (January-February 1926), anyway. I found it on the Guggenheim's website the other morning and couldn't believe I'd never seen it before. What I love is its measured exuberance, which is something of the emotional combination I'm feeling a lot these days, in between meeting various obligations. "Einige Kreise" is a meticulous painting, you realize the longer you look at it, and yet the range and richness of its colors helps it feel less restrained than it might. It reminds me of an excellent sonnet. Or perhaps it reminds me of Glenn Gould playing the Goldberg Variations, a topic for another night. I imagine Kandinsky's singing along to his brushstrokes as he gets that orange just so, laps the blue over the blue over the black, creates the feeling of motion with his shading there at the left. I imagine him surveying the penumbra around his largest circle, after all was done, and approving of its eclipsical rightness.

The sun wasn't down until well after 6 tonight, and when my seminar pushed off from shore, we could still see the dying of the light over the western hills--both fit reminders that we're now only a month out from the equinox.

House that we used to live in, house where I left my heart.

In the ugly fall of 2001, right before I started only wanting to eat toasted fontina on bread, my OhioanIowan friend (then just Ohioan) flew to Ithaca for a long weekend in October. On the Saturday of her trip, we packed a gargantuan picnic lunch and headed westward to Buffalo and Niagara Falls. We took our passports along; we'd been warned that drivers' licenses, much less simple word of mouth, wouldn't be enough to get us in and out of Canada anymore. And she wasn't going to see the Falls only from the American side, not when the Horseshoe Falls are so very fine. Not when the overlooks on the Canadian side put you so close to the water falling over the rock ledge that you can actually imagine needing the warnings posted in pictures, that circled-and-cross-hatched stick man (universal symbol of someone about to do something hideously stupid) with one leg thrown over a railing, headed for the water. Every time I stand at that railing and watch the water, I lose myself, transfixed. Just before it plunges, becoming white and iconic, the water seems to pause at full speed, never to stop but always to become preternaturally calm, its bottle-green surface impossibly clear, impossibly shallow. It looks as though one could wade, could walk right out onto those rocks and feel the water rushing against one's ankles but never need to think about withstanding its force.

Given the weird persistence of my Falls-walking fantasy, it's no wonder that the first time I waded in the gorge north of Cornell's campus, I was worried I'd get swept over a cliff.

It's probably a good thing I'd never seen this image before tonight:


However.

This post is not about Niagara Falls.

Or at least it won't be anymore, after I show you this picture, which I really think is marvelous (not least because damn! it's cold at Niagara Falls most of the time, even when it's not winter, and the guy who took this picture not only visited the falls but even went on the tour under the falls--in February):

In a way, what I'm doing with this post replicates, in reverse, what I did to my friend on our way to the Falls. That day, we took a detour on the way to the Falls, instead of detouring at the Falls (which I'd highly recommend, if you ever have the chance--even if you just do a quick drive-by, it's worth the effort). When I was little--from about 13 months until about 7.5 years--I lived in suburban Buffalo. Upstate New York, you're starting to see, was my stomping ground several times. In fact--I should have mentioned this yesterday--I have photo documentation of the fact that my loyalty to Wegmans was well developed by the time I was four. (The picture: me, standing on a kitchen chair, beside a kitchen table covered in brown paper Wegmans bags. And a six-pack of Tab in glass bottles.)

And so, when my friend and I headed west to the Falls, we first swung a little ways north, to East Amherst. I had printed out directions from Mapquest; the last time I'd been in East Amherst, I wasn't yet old enough to drive, and I wasn't sure I'd remember my way. As we drove up Transit Road, though, something strange happened: I did remember. There was the Wilson Farms on the corner of Transit and New. There was the weird not-quite-right turn back onto Dodge Road, and then the left onto Old Oak Post. And then, I said, "There's our house." We were coming up to it from behind; it's a two-story yellow house on a corner. My friend said, "It looks like it's in pretty rough shape." And indeed it turned out to be in more than rough shape.

We found out part of the story about what was going on with the house when I saw my old babysitter--the one you know as the woman who introduced me to MTV and David Byrne, when I was six--come out of her old house, eighteen years on from the last time I'd seen her. Because I have a constitutionally low level of self-control, I parked the car and ran over to greet her. After the inevitable shock had passed (and I understand this shock better, now that one of my own babysitting charges has shown up as a full-grown adult here where I live and work), she explained the strange saga of the empty yellow house. Its owners had left town and the house had started to fall apart; the city persisted in posting notices (like the one we could see from across the street), detailing the repairs the house required, but the owners were equally persistent about ignoring those notices. The basement had, somehow it was known, flooded. The place was possibly not structurally sound. (Trying to find you a good image of this subdivision a few minutes ago, I instead came across a series of articles about East Amherst's sinking homes, many of which are in my old neighborhood. That structures are sinking in East Amherst comes as little surprise, really; one of the bowling alleys my mother and I frequented when I was small suffered a similar fate. As did the older Wegmans in Ithaca, come to think of it.)

After we left my no-doubt-relieved former babysitter to head off on her drive, my friend and I crossed the street and started prowling around the house. Peering in through the family room's front windows, I saw the American Eagle wood stove my parents had installed when I was three; now it was sitting in the middle of the otherwise empty family room. I craned my neck and pressed my face to the glass, but I couldn't see much more than that one room. We walked around the house, and I described the rooms that corresponded to each of the house's windows. I stared at the backyard willow tree, on whose lowest branch I repeatedly skinned my palms while trying to swing in my youth. I told the story about the time I left my red sled in the backyard for a few minutes during a snowstorm, only to lose it altogether until the snow melted a week later.

Finally, my friend pointed out that we needed to head toward the Falls if we wanted to have a decent amount of time there before nightfall. We didn't take any pictures; we just got into the car and drove away.

It wasn't until we were on our way back to Ithaca after the Falls excursion (which, I have to add, garnered me one of my favorite objects, a small plastic snowglobe reading "Niagra Falls," courtesy of my friend) that it occurred to me that we could probably have broken in to the house without much trouble. It was such a strange thought that my friend finally pointed out that I hadn't stopped talking about the abandoned house since we'd left it hours earlier. "It's really under your skin, isn't it?" she asked. I tried to explain why:

When you leave a house and others move in, that house becomes theirs. This particular house had become its next owners', back in 1983. I'd seen it in 1984, and it was no longer mine. I didn't belong there; I didn't even particularly want to be there. The place that had known me knew me no more.

But when subsequent owners, however far down the decades, leave a house behind, it can become yours again. My wandering memory slipped in at a crack at the side of a window, slithered around the wood shutters in the family room and up the little half-step into the kitchen hall, up the green-carpeted steps, past the dark blue-stripey-flowery-patterned wallpaper, past the nook where the old trunk used to sit--the trunk on which my mother and I are sitting in the picture my father took after we got home from my preschool graduation, while I was still wearing not only my Burger King crown mortarboard but also my new Timex digital watch--and it ended up back in my bedroom, back in my bed, back in a re-placed series of sounds and sights: the trees full of birds in the yard in the summer, my father shaking the trees in that darkening blue dusk, so that the birds would fly around the block before flocking back into the trees and starting all over; the sound of the bug zapper outside my bedroom window; the passage of headlight illuminations around the edge of my ceiling; the sound of a plane going by, far overhead, absolutely confirming my conviction that I'd be able to hear when my mother passed over us on her way to her first quilt retreat, in Nantucket.

In short, I had retaken imaginative ownership of the old house.

My parents swung past the house during their October excursion a few years ago, while I was living in Rochester. It was reoccupied and seemed to have been refurbished. My imagination still hasn't moved all the way back out.

This post wasn't meant to be about the house in East Amherst at all. It was meant to be about hinges. They'll wait for another night.

sources for tonight's images: 1) Daredevils of Niagara Falls: A History; 2) a Flickr photostream; 3) a site featuring vintage postcards of Buffalo and environs; 4) the site of an MIT student to whom I really have to hand it for having braved the cold and ice to see the falls in February; 5) an Illustrated History of the Missouri Botanical Garden.

Les morceaux de moi.

Tonight I wish my French were better, so that I could capture more exactly the line that gripped my heart and tied it in a knot, as I started watching Kings and Queen with my excellent friends last night. (To be sure, I was asleep within half an hour of the line, but that wasn't the movie's fault.) A dapper, self-assured gentleman writer goes into his bathroom just after his grown daughter arrives at his flat in Grenoble. Studying a picture of herself as a little girl, she realizes that he's sobbing in the other room. He confesses to having had blood in his stools for a week and chokes out to her, "Je vais perdre des morceaux de moi." I feel as though I'm losing bits of myself. (I'm thrown off by the fact that the subtitler's translation is obviously idiomatic, and the man's speech is broken by his sobs, so that it's all but impossible for my rudimentary skills to put the English back into French.)

I'm facing the first moment of real self-division since I started this project two months ago, because I want to write about something else, but tonight's topic is sitting beside me on the couch, needling me, poking me under the ribs, tweaking my ear, pulling at my toenails. I have pictures and notes, bits and pieces I've been picking up all day--a decidedly different collection of morceaux, to be sure--and yet I think I'm going to succumb to what obviously wants to be written, if only so that it will leave me the hell alone, let me get in the car and go to the grocery and then come back here and hunker down with Charles Dickens, my sweetheart tonight.

I have lost my appetite again.

Those of you who know me in real life know that I go in cycles when it comes to eating and not-eating. I'm roughly the same size I was in high school, sometimes five pounds heavier, sometimes five pounds lighter. Usually, my weight changes with the seasons and the rhythms of the academic year: I get skinny by Thanksgiving, and by Spring Break, I'm back wearing the jeans that started falling down in November. But every few years, something goes a little more haywire than usual. In fall 2001, I could only rouse myself to eat a particular kind of cheese, toasted on a particular kind of bread. In 2003, I went on my first weight-gain diet. I may need to initiate another one right now.

It feels absurd to be a grown person and have to attend so deliberately to a very basic bodily function, which is why the weight-gain diets have often been short-lived (though relatively successful) in the past, and why I've ended up here again. Particularly at busy times of my semesters, particularly when very exciting things are happening in my life, I lose my interest in food. I forget to seek it out. My ability to imagine meals that excite me starts to slip. If good food--particularly good-smelling food--ends up in front of me, I will eat heartily and happily. But if that good food is protein-packed, I may go a startlingly long amount of time before I take in another sizable meal.

I find all of this as bizarre as the next person, and the last thing I need right now is a food intervention or nutritional advice. I know the things to put before myself in order to get the maximum healthful benefit from a meal, and I know well the drawbacks of having an unfull stomach too much of the time. I keep a bag of walnuts in my desk at work and get my protein and my omega-3s on a regular basis. One of the things that has always frustrated me about this particular quirk of my being is that I have no language available to talk about it without risking pathologizing myself in a way that's utterly inappropriate to my experience--which is by no means to suggest that such mismatches of language and life don't happen in far more serious ways all over the place, all the time.

I think that what grabbed at me about Nora's father's line in Kings and Queen was the way he captures the strangenss of realizing how the body changes, how it can seem to discard itself without our participation or willingness. I remember putting on a pair of my jeans in spring 2003 and realizing that they were now two sizes too big. If you've ever put on clothes that are two sizes too big, you may have had this experience: you wonder, did I take up that space before? How is it that I have shrunk? Where did that mass go? I've had the same experience going in the other direction: how is it that I have grown so gradually that I didn't notice? How have I come to occupy so much more room?

When I lived in Rochester, I was as thin as I've been since junior high school, almost entirely because I simply didn't feel hungry, ever. I'd never had such a life: I was residing in a city (if a relatively small one) for the first time, seeing a skyline on my way home from work every day, taking two different interstates to reach the grocery store. My own possessions were packed away, tantalizingly close to where I was living my daily life, and I was emphatically in transition from my first moment there until my last, living in a borrowed dwelling and using borrowed things. I was also living with a virtual stranger whose sense of boundaries was far different from my own, particularly where kitchen stuffs were concerned. These things conspired to keep me edgy, at best, when it came to food and drink. (At exactly this time, my beloved Brooklynite was growing her lovely son; she grew and grew, so purposefully, while I shrank and shrank, so bereft of apparent purpose, and it was, overall, a strange, dislocating season, our bodies doing their own things while we looked out for each other from afar.)

By mid-winter--about this time, actually--I had figured out a fairly effective way to sabotage my gustatory apathy. The grocery store in Rochester was part of the same magnificent chain to which I'd become wedded in Ithaca, and the flagship store's floorplan was a near-exact mirror image of the Ithaca store's. And so the Pittsford Wegmans became my home away from home, my kitchen and dining room. Being there was medicinal in a way that I can now identify as neo-Proustian: I'd walk in the automatic doors, and the same rush of forced hot air that had welcomed me in Ithaca would carry me out of Rochester. The same smell of fresh bread would drift over from the same weirdly elaborate brick oven while I chose a bagel for breakfast or debated with myself about whether to buy a white or whole-grain baguette. I'd linger over the cheeses for an excessive amount of time, even though I always bought the same kind. I'd put together a plastic tub of olives; I'd smell the soup selection; I'd check to see what whole fish gaped forth from the butchers' cases. Sometimes I'd make a Tuesday evening Wegmans trip to buy three things last an hour before getting back on the interstate, and then the other interstate, to return to that place I called home.

I'm a little bit at loose ends, as far as this strategy goes, here in mid-Ohio. If I could swing it tonight, I'd hop in the car and drive to Whole Foods, but it's over an hour--and, again, two interstates--away. Generally, as soon as I'm within sight of the local Kroger, I'm clenching my jaw for reasons too puerile to elaborate upon, almost all involving driving and poor parking lot layouts (though some also involving magnetic ribbons bearing pseudopatriotic inanities). I know that I'm being a child, every single time. And feeling silly about being so uncontrollably petulant only makes me less excited to be heading for the food. By the time I'm inside, I might as well be five, insisting that I'm not tired. And so tonight I am going to be my own mother. Instead of lying down for ten minutes, I'm going to gather up the things that seem most appealing. It will undoubtedly be a weirdish mix: yogurt, bread, shredded wheat, cheese, shrimp, and pasta seem likely candidates. But even making this list reminds me of the strangest thing about these cycles: not that I put on a pair of jeans in the middle of a school week and realize that they've stopped fitting--that I might be able to pull them off without unbuttoning them, which is a nice trick but not a very practical one, most of the time--but that I can remember so clearly going to the grocery store and actually wanting the foods around me, whereas tonight I'm buying them for myself out of a firmly lodged sense of duty to this only body I've got.

sources for tonight's images: 1, 2, 5) Vintage Vending; 3) Fabunique Avenue; 4) the Cayuga Nature Center Compost Project's photo album site.

These fragments I am shoring, on a cloudy night.

Moon

Open the book of evening to the page
where the moon, always the moon, appears

between two clouds, moving so slowly that hours
will seem to have passed before you reach the next page

where the moon, now brighter, lowers a path
to lead you away from what you have known

into those places where what you had wished for happens,
its lone syllable like a sentence poised

at the edge of sense, waiting for you to say its name
once more as you lift your eyes from the page

and close the book, still feeling what it was like
to dwell in that light, that sudden paradise of sound.

-- Mark Strand

from The New Yorker (February 13 & 20, 2006)
source for tonight's image: Dark Horizons.

El primer de mil besos?

Edvard Munch's "The Kiss" (1892), part of the new Munch show at MOMA, from this evening's The New York Times on the Web. It's the color that moves me--moves me enough that I'm not even more than a twinge bothered, for now, that she's lost her head altogether to his kiss, that he's subsuming her completely. Instead, it's the blue I'm seeing, so much and so many.