Two Grandmothers

Of my two grandmothers, one was a white Southern confederate racist. I feel all sorts of ways for her. I loved her. Family, I can’t not. But love is huge and fractious. It’s not just the warm fuzzy. There’s ruthless compassion in love, as well. And love that doesn’t stand up to truth is not love. My recognition of my grandmother’s deep racism changes the love the I feel. Her racism doesn’t erase all the kindness she showed me, but it does soil it. There is no heritage there that I must value, even if I have kept and use all her doll making patterns. And you know I will make dolls she would not approve of.

My other grandmother was born the same year, 1910, in the the same South. I once found Malcolm X’s biography in her purse. She told me that “he went through a lot and had a lot of good thing to say”. She voted for Jesse Jackson twice, once even going, on her own, to a rally of his in Oakland when she was visiting from Texas. My love for her is a lot less fractious and a lot more inspiring. I find myself wanting to do a lot more than just sew like she did.

The Experience of Apraxia as a Moment of Wonder and/or Terror

There are all sorts of symptoms of autism – various language processing and production difficulties, coordination and executive function problems, social performance issues – that get medicalized as constant state experiences. Some symptoms can certainly be constant. Some autistic people have always and will always have trouble with vocal speech, for instance. But if you read the literature, you might come away with the idea that an autistic individual either has apraxia or doesn’t. That is, if they can speak here and now, they can simply speak.

But the experience of autism is also one that changes depending on many environmental and social cues. It changes depending on whether we are tired, or hungry, whether our clothes itch a bit or there’s too much noise. We may find our ability to talk suddenly taken away by someone’s comment. We may not even realize at first that our voices are gone as we try to formulate a response, noticing it’s taking a bit longer for the words to appear before trying to speak and finding our brains can’t find our mouths. The muscles of the tongue and the vocal chords don’t seem to be able to coordinate their efforts. And as we notice this, we may forget what the words we were even planning to day. The ideas that fill our brains, based suddenly on every sound and touch connected with multiple strands of memory and just remembered dreams, do that strange thing where they all arrange in impossibly beautiful patterns and our hearts break to think we even tried to route their infinity into neatly delineated boxes of words.

And in the next moment, the topic has changed, and we may find that we can speak again, with only a small slip of the social mask as any indication of what had occurred.

Century Plant

A simple study in light and shape. A set of curves, an intimation that there is something within.

Wake Up Call

This morning as I woke up, Pidget jumped onto the bed the way she used to. She stood with her front paws on the near wall’s chair railing, and looked back over her shoulder at me with a combination of pet me and get up. Both right now, because she can’t decide if she wants my love in the form of scritches or food. Wants both. Wants my love.

I am so overjoyed to see her here. She hasn’t been in to get me up for months, but this morning, unexpected, she is feeling good enough to jump onto my raised high mattress. She is here in this world to assert herself. And I am fillled with the need to see this image again. I shove aside my urge for camera and give my eyes a moment to soak in all the light rays that show her next to me.

I run my fingers down her back and feel the vertebrae. I can sense the tumor in her lungs pressing against her ribs. And also, the infinite softness of her cheek fur as she presses against my fingertips purring purring.

She gives me a sharp meow. Breakfast is overdue. She leaps down, breathing quick, and I follow.

Landscape

I’ve stumbled across the word “landscape” three times in the last 24 hours. Being a synchronicity expert, I immediately noticed the red flag this trifold occurrence had planted in my awareness.

1) In this review of The Secret Life of Words by Henry Hitchings, Ben Yagoda mentions in passing that the word “landscape” was one of a number of words borrowed in the 17th century from the Dutch by English admirers of artists such as Brueghel and Rembrandt. (One can also reasonably infer that “etch-a-sketch” is ultimately traceable to this very same period.)

2) I ran across an online copy of Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese and found that it had not been overplayed. It made me cry again. One of the lines that caught my eye this time was:

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes

The use of the plural made me think that a landscape is really the conjunction of a natural (or not) place and a viewer. Any place (and for some reason when I get to this point in Wild Geese I always imagine the badlands of South Dakota ) can hold within itself an infinity of landscapes. And because a landscape includes a particular vantage point, it necessarily separates us. We each see a slightly different landscape even though we are standing right next to each other. Landscapes exist because we are separate and sharing a world at the same time.

3) And finally, I found the word (landscape) in a John Ashbery poem, The Bungalows, in the provocative line:

the presumed landscape and the dream of home

Since I’ve only just read this Ashbery poem (and his poems require several readings for you to fully realize how much you don’t know what they mean) I’ll only point to the imagery of architecture in the landscape and the repeated juxtaposition of past and future, young and old, and the meaninglessness of staying still. The movement necessary for meaning also makes meaning impossible. To view a landscape, one must remain still, freeze the point of view in a frame. When you move (live) you become part of the landscape viewed by someone else (g*d?).

A Parliament, a Gulp, a Pitying, a Richness

Direct the eye and see more with each moment, listen and hear a multitude of unnamed birds calling for an introduction.

Apples & Pears

Eating a perfectly ripe apple, crisp and sweet and tangy.  A pear is more sensual, subtle in taste. It is a thing of porticos, colonnades, patios dripping with wisteria; pears belong to a subtle world where one pauses to taste because there is a reason to do so.  So much of the world is an apple that bursts on the tongue all sugar and tang, crunch crunch gone.  But a pear slips into the mouth, soft and a little gritty, the moment deep with meaning. It promises a world that will reveal its secrets if only we pay attention.

The Meaning In The Middle

I know far too much about the woman across the aisle.  I noticed her just a couple of days ago. She’s a student named Angela.  She was walking by my seat and the hand she used to hold onto the bar – right at my eye level so I wasn’t visually eavesdropping or anything – had her student id card.  Angela has really nice taste, I want to ask her where she got her tote.  It has soft, muted colors and big flower print and looks both young and mature at the same time, which is perfectly appropriate for Angela, a college student who is mature enough to want to go to Turkey.

Yesterday she was reading a travel guide to Turkey, today a Turkish language book.  It’s the book I used when I took Turkish years ago.  I took it because I studied linguistics in college and Turkish has a cool feature: infixes. These are like suffixes and prefixes, but they go inside the word.  In English we look for -ed and -ing at the ends of words and re- and un- and the beginning, adjusting our sense of time or direction accordingly.  In Turkish, you look for that modifying information in the center of a word.

I took the class with my friend Clare, another linguaphile because it was being offered at the Piedmont Adult School, lasted only a few weeks and cost less than $50.  This was before Clare got sick.  I would pick Clare up at the train station and we’d drive up the hill to the high school where the class was held.  One day, Clare didn’t show – that’s not when she got sick, she got sick many years later – and instead of going on to the class, I went home.

I hate it when people don’t show up for things we are supposed to do together.  It makes me wonder if I exist.  So I went home, but it turns out Clare was just kept late at work.  She managed to get to class, taking two buses and was shocked when I wasn’t there.  This was before cell phones, so she had to take three buses to get home to call me and asked where I was.  I felt so bad.  Even now, I wish I’d gone to class that day and trusted that my friend would have had a perfectly good reason for being late and would need a ride home.

Even with the infixes, I didn’t last with Turkish longer than the class.  I’ve never been all that interested in Turkey except for the Trojan war. For a long time I wanted to know what Turkish Delight was because Edmund in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe liked it so much he was seduced by the White Witch. That must be really good stuff, I thought.  But it isn’t all that good, certainly not good enough to betray Aslan for some.  Edmund was a chump.

Angela was on Lesson 2 and the day before she’d been reading a tourist guide to Turkey so it seemed like she was more interested in actually going to Turkey rather than just learning about the infixes. And as I was trying to see what Lesson 2 had been about, I noticed a small wound on her inner arm.  It wasn’t long, but it had been deep enough to need a stitch. What had Angela been doing that she got stabbed in the arm?  What wounds do we inflict on ourselves unknowingly? If I knew her, I’d email Anglela this link to photos of Turkey that someone posted just today on an email list. .

Battling The Daunt

Coming up against a thing after deciding to do something.

In that moment between the experience of a desire and the initiation of action to bring about that desire.

When in that moment, something rises up, billows into existence that is a pressing in, a threat that makes the desirous body flinch, pull in, retract. That which rises is the daunt.

Domptous beast that ranges between me and the world.

To press in, bear upon, constrain, obstruct. There is a bluntness to the effect as it comes from all points at once, distributed across the whole of being. It forces back against the desire.

Domare, dominate, tame. The ferocious desire is met with constraint. This is the Devil’s work. The one who rattles the chains we have bound ourselves with.

This daunt paces ready for my next desire.