Thursday, April 26, 2007

Other People, via Neil Gaiman


I am a fan of Neil Gaiman's arts, and came across this post from his blog that fits in with the Virginia Tech event follow-up. The Red/Gold/Blue is an image from Jamie's site - memory39. Rose photo is Dwain Ritchie's.

Thursday, April 19, 2007 http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/

Here is Neil G's post: Other People

My memories of Virginia Tech are of one perfect day in 1998, when I was wandering around the country for a couple of days with Tori on tour, spending the afternoon at her grandmother's farm and then driving up to Blacksburg for a wonderful evening of watching wonderful music and meeting nice people.

I haven't posted about the Virginia Tech shooting, and wasn't going to. But...

I'm in the UK right now, and it's a long way away, and I'm reading about what happened in newspapers (because I don't turn on TVs in hotel rooms. I don't know why this is, but I don't), still managing to think of this as something that happened, tragically, to Other People. And then I see this, and my heart sinks, because this is the Michael Bishop who I met in 1999 when we were Guests of Honour at World Horror, whose son was a Sandman fan and oh god, and then I click on this, and I get my nose rubbed hard and painfully in the fact that there are no Other People. It's just us.

Jamie Bishop memory39

Kathy Oddenino wrote a great piece on her blog about "Hidden Memories and Mind Control" to help understand events such as the shootings at Virginia Tech. I know this is a new way of thinking about "mental illness," or "memories," and the psychology of us as human beings, and will not make sense to many. For those who find it a gateway to relating to themselves and their own sensory life, and "bigger than life" experiences, this is a real addition to our human education and self-expression. Kathy Oddenino's blog post

I've been reading about Einstein some lately, and how he loved children. Einstein has been quoted as saying, his secret was to "be like a child." He took time to respond to children's letters. I think of how Kathy has explained the ways her parents, particularly her father, responded to her in her creative expressions as a child. I think of my parents and their loving ways of guiding each of us in our explorations of life. Without these memories, who are we?

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

David Halberstam is dead.

David Halberstam is dead. I note the difference in feeling, from “died yesterday,” to “is dead.” As I listened to a recorded “Fresh Air” interview with him, I heard his clarity of satisfaction as he described that watershed moment at Harvard, in college, of choosing journalism as his career. It is the satisfaction, almost the inevitability of finding something we’re good at and diving into for good, and such satisfaction it is, for someone reasonably good (as he said) at other things, socially awkward or shy, to fall forward, headlong, into such a living and stay there. His record is clear, and I’m glad for it.

I aim to acknowledge just such a passing, the record and ripples that live on. I will never again forget the way a voice sounds, making itself known.

And a footnote: to acknowledge my old college friend, brilliant historian even then, here’s his link: Paul Harvey

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Three Bits, with an Intro

Three opening windows I want to share, along with this quote from an article by Pz Myers (www.scienceblogs.com/pharyngula), or Seed Magazine (May/June 2007):

“There is a classic Three Stooges film in which they play bumbling plumbers trying to repair some leaky pipes, and, of course, everything goes wrong. Patching a leak in one place sends water spraying our elsewhere; tugging on a pipe sends the faucet in another room flying out of the wall. It’s classic slapstick. It wasn’t intended to be deep (and I didn’t watch it for a lesson in science!), but it does hold a message that applies to biology: In complex systems, everything is interconnected, and sometimes in surprising ways. Changes to one genetic module can cause effects to ripple throughout the entire organism.”

1 - Daisy Mae and Seth Bernard www.myspace.com/daisymayerlewine – “Shine On”

2 - Rachel Carson on CBS– A CBS video clip about Rachel Carson

3 - Johnny Burke & the Deltas http://www.myspace.com/johnnyburkeandthedeltas –I heard these guys at the Shakori Hills Festival on Saturday night, and what a treat it was. Here’s the write-up on the Shakori Hills site: Johnny Burke & The Deltas are a raw, stripped down powder keg of musical energy. Priding themselves on their diversity of styles, they fly through funk, blues, rockabilly, soul, bossa nova, psychedelic rock, rag and roots reggae dub. The Deltas are an instrumental band - always soulful and groovin', they focus exclusively on the music with no words to get in the way. The band was formed by the brothers Coppola: Clark (guitar) and Caleb (drums) along with friend Jon Baughman (bass).

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

The Sun At Noon




The Sun At Noon

“’I’m the strongest man in the world,’ said Heracles. ‘Except me,’ said Atlas. ‘And I’m not free.’ ‘There is no such thing as Freedom,’ said Atlas. ‘Freedom is a country that does not exist.’ ‘It’s home,’ said Heracles. ‘If home is where you want to be.’” Weight – J. Winterson


This is how fiction began. Once upon a time a mind began to lose its bearings in the sea of thought and the ocean of every response that seemed to be coming faster and faster, with every flit and flutter, like the butterfly’s wings and the spider web film over a face, faint but unmistakable. The mind was the mind of a mother, Caleb’s mother. Caleb’s father, Josh, had a mind firmly anchored in the ground of his thought, and he was sturdy as an old oak. Caleb’s mother, Angelina, was pretty and fragile and strong and sturdy all at once, and she had sensed this unbearing coming on for a while before it happened. She felt like a ship that had slipped from its mooring, slid silently from the piling, the dock, further into the dark water under cover of night while all were asleep and the waves rocked.

Fiction began when Angelina began to feel herself moving like this great ship in the dark water, soggy and full of the weight of old trees and the debris of all history, even as she felt occasionally light as a wisp of wind rippling through the water. Her imagination was born when she felt so many shifts and changes and related them to the nature of how all of life was, how the ghosts of her past and present joined into a future that involved all of time and even the end of time. She knew that this was how fiction began, because she thought of this as the way myth itself came to be, the great birthing of stories like children, words and stories and greater tales being born like the molecules of thought forming and joining and breaking open, the power of air building into a combustion that blew open and poured into molten fire, stars that blazed and persuaded everything inside to dance like a million fires without harm.

There were stories of great gods and goddesses – that all goddesses were still women remained in her mind – bending and bowing and flexing with the strength of vowels, consonants, airways, passages of time, and the great sinewy ropes of loyalty and lust that pulled and tightened even as the wind, water, and the force of will and open choice forged forward like the bow of a ship in a Mother Ocean.

Angelina was no stranger to drama – her life in Lima as a child was charged with dust, some danger, and a warm if chaotic thrill of life as a vibrant rush of laughter and frowns, songs, dances, as well as a yanked arm and the mark of a hand left stinging on a cheek. Her memories rush past, always, and she rushes to the place where she met Josh, at the University, and when they began to join together, he with his brown eyes and hair, that wave of curls at his collar, his freckled hands and chest, and everything about him so familiar and yet foreign at the same time, in a deliciously inviting way. This brought her laughter, and happy dreams. She saw them in dreams, later, with children, long before they had Caleb, and she rolled in her bed covers thinking of him, entwined with memories and dreams of her childhood and little bits like riding in buses in places she never knew she had been.

Her life did not feel poetic, only slow then, and happy, with a fullness that she could relate to armloads of clean, sweet-smelling clothes fresh from the clothesline, a burst of spices in her nose from the kitchen, and that ache from so deep inside her that came up like a flower bud in season. This was prose, more to her, the steady stream of rising and falling, the days and nights of life moving together, strolling, skipping.

Now long in America, near the Capital, her parents were still in Peru, and sometimes they faded from her mind, sometimes their faces loomed before her, smiling and warm and wishing for her. She had one brother, a pilot who spent more time in the air than on the ground, and who seemed to always be moving. Even when he visited he did not like to sit still. Caleb laughed at him always moving, even when he slept.

Fiction began even as Angelina stood in line and looked at the pictures of the magazines and newspapers while she waited to pay for her groceries. The lives of the people whose faces she saw took on the shapes of dough and dollars, of flowers, sunrises, sunsets, of buildings, towers, some of gun barrels, the swirl of clouds and leaves, bark and dirt, even dogs with tails wagging. Taxis moved in colorful strands, bits of newsprint blew against curbs. Monuments rose, water reflected everywhere into sky. Metro stations were grey and noisy, either loud of echoing with silence and leftover traffic. Even this entranced her at times, how shiny chrome was, a sudden surprise like a daffodil in a trampled park, that sweet-smelling breeze that blew in spring. The Cathedral. L’Enfant Plaza where once such a musician played while crowds passed that strains stayed in her memory that she wasn’t sure she even heard. She remembered children’s faces.

What was true, and what was false to her? War was everywhere. She no longer knew how to answer this question except as she felt the flow of the air on her skin, and this great star-spangled spread of lights twinkling to her as she saw the geometry of life itself forming and changing everywhere she looked. Josh’s loud laughter was like thunder sometimes, until she toned her ears and watched the sound waves move from within him, up his throat and out his mouth, molding his cheeks and nose, his eyes crinkling up, and his neck bending, moving, a dance in itself of weather ricocheting around a small canyon with all colors showing themselves.

There is no real way to know ourselves, each other, except this, she said to herself, beginning with this, again, and inside out, again, the motion and change of our thought and emotions forming the mountains and valleys, the crusts and canyons, your skin itself becoming my landscape when I love you as I love the moon, as I imagine it, as I love the Earth and its pebbles and mica and tendrils, as I love the rain, as I love my own secretions and skeleton. I am chewing my life, swallowing, savoring.

When other forms come, then, as ghosts and guides and shapes that help me to map my way, from the bedroom to the kitchen, from the bathroom to the deck beyond, to the grass outside, I know them and they are with me, tangible in the ways they want to be, and as I choose. We caress each other through the elements of who we are and who we will be, who we have been.

Fiction began when Angelina cried for her friend who had lost a child, for her mother who was dying, for her father who was forever a friend. Fiction continued when Josh was in the terrible car crash and came out alive, even well, now, and still laughing although not quite as loudly. The myth of all gods and goddesses, what we took on to be human in the turning and change of all elements that began as invisible specks and sparks and grew into monumental things as well as gracefully spinning sashes and globes, shiny reflectors, and honking horns, began to come alive, again, as the story never ends.

There was no single beginning that got her mind slipping away from its moorings, the dock of complacency, of comforts where she had begun to hope and pray and even hum a little in a way to distract her thinking stream that was ready to go further, into new frontiers. Caleb was part of it, as was every experience of her life. Caleb is 7 now, and as eager as firecrackers to light the sky. Caleb, with his dark eyes and freckles, his brown hair and honey-skin, lights up the world where he is, and his force of energy which she and Josh concentrated and formed, lit a slow fuse in her that burned. Every metaphor fits, mixed as ever, because this is how myth is, this is how fiction is, this is how life is lived. Losses add up to gains, gains add to losses, and the great sea of experience reveals its treasures to each mind that opens itself to the great water. The unfathomable water.

Today the news is full of students and professors shot and killed at a university, subtexts to broader news of war and dying around the world. Angelina watched in horror the way the scenes were repeated, the images that came and went, over and over, broken in by the voices and faces of students, parents, of friends, of buildings. These are to be halls of learning, storehouses where knowledge is revered, used, explored, shared. These were killed by a young man with a face impacted with anger, closed tight to the world as Caleb knows it, the joy of sparkling life.

As Angelina watched the news, she held her belly and wiped her tears. She held Caleb to her in my mind, in her arms when he was there, and she held Josh’s strong hand. With each thought, a child is born, at the height of noon-day sun- she heard these words within her mind, a clothes line, a spider-web of thread between her ears, winding around her skull inside. I am not only love, she said, but also sorrow and despair shared by such a mind. The love I find and share as seeds which grow, I plant in that mind which seeks and which wants to know.

This is how fiction began, with the myth that we are without hope, without the choice of life and love, impacted by death and the dark rattletrap of blood without knowing what makes the blood of life itself. The superstitions come from believing if we hold our breath, all will be alright, the wind will blow, we can close our eyes, and go. I know this old story. The myth we believe is our loss of memory, that our rage is real, and love is gone.

Slip from the moorings into dream, Angelina heard in her mind as she drifted to sleep next to Josh and his steady breathing. This dream is life. Wake well, children of noon. Caleb, my joy.

###

Friday, April 13, 2007

"Pearls Before Breakfast" - G. Weingarten, W. Post


Joshua Bell said something about playing the violin like a juggler – being a storyteller, capturing the emotion in the narrative. The mechanics are so familiar, the emotion is everything. G. Weingarten wrote a W. Post piece “Pearls Before Breakfast” (4/8) about an experiment at the L’Enfant Plaza metro in D.C. in which Joshua Bell, virtuoso violinist, played his 17th century Stradivarius for 45 minutes during morning rush hour.

Familiarity sparks response – a lilt, a rush, a lift of a note that sings, from tight strings, or a glance, a brush against an arm covered by old wool as it reaches forward, the flasth of reflected colors like a revered watercolor, “art without a frame.” Context matters, Mark Leithauser said. Leithauser is a senior curator at the National Gallery, overseeing the framing of the paintings.

A key observation in the article is “Every single time a child walked pat, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away.”

People engrossed in their lives of the moment, focused on sounds from elsewhere, or inside, thoughts that only coincide with the careening edges and shine, the rush of the morning push, transition, not enjoyment.

This coincides in my mind with what we were thinking further south on the same date as Weingarten’s article came out: “Hidden memories” as the chemical energy in the neurons of our brain, what we carry forth as we form ourselves from attractions, bonds, intertwining, dirt, seat, and tears. Like Kriesler’s violin, so pure in sounds and true to form, through centuries of love and reverence, we must open ourselves to the beauty of life itself as our form, not just the exalted idea or the clamoring of hungry, hands, eyes, mouths.

Call me crazy, but I’ve wanted to kiss granite, touch the polished smooth faces to acknowledge every step of the way. Familiarity breeds response – let it be known. Familiar implies known, not completely new, even comfortable, although these sensations do not always coincide.

What excited me about familiarity? Something out of the ordinary. I think when I began to feel depressed was when the spark of familiarity, the newness of surprise, like an old friend, passed on without a deeper recognition that there was a virtuoso violinist present. Or that what I thought was virtuoso, wasn’t. When you know something, it’s crystal clear.

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

A Poem by my brother, Skid Solo


(Son, Sumner)
MY SON SANG A SONG ONE EVENING,
VOICE OF MILK AND HONEY, MAKING ME SMILE,
A CARRY OVER FORM MUSIC CLASS,
HIS OWN VESPERS FILLING THE SPACE WITH AN AFTERGLOW,
THAT CLEAR YOUNG VOICE , “WE ARE MAAARCHING IN THE LIIIGHT OF GOD.”

THE BREAKS AND PAUSES SEEMED TO COME
WITH EASE, GENEROUSLY, CONFIDENTLY,
THE HOLDING OF CERTAIN NOTES,
THEN THE RELEASE TO GATHER THE FOLLOWING MELODY TO COME.
AN EXPANSION. AND THEN THEY WERE GONE., THE HINT OF THE SONG
ONLY A FLICKER. THE DISAPPEARANCE LIKE A SPARKLER, BURNED OUT,
COMPRESSED.

MY SON WHO KNOWS ABOUT ABOUT SHRINKING,
WHOSE DREAMS WAKE HIM IN TEARS,
THIS BOY WHO SPEAKS OF ROBBERS AND ALARM SYSTEMS,
WHO SLIPS HIS HAND INTO MINE, ASKING WITH HIS EYES
TO WALK HIM ONE MORE TIME TO THE SCHOOL DOOR.
HIS FEAR HE FEELS IMMENSELY, SPILLING OUT OVER THE EDGES,
AND THEN IT IS GONE.

MY SON DRAWS AND COLORS FIGURES,
COPYING HIS BROTHER,
WHO IS LARGER THAN LIFE TO HIM,
A BEACON, STRONG,
BUT HE HAS NOT WORDS FOR THAT SO HE DRAWS,
HIS MARKINGS AN EFFORT TO CREATE,
THOSE SIZES, SHAPES, NUMBERS, NUMBERS, TEAMS,
THE MINUTE EXPRESSIONS ON THOSE FACES HE IS ABLE TO CAPTURE.
I WATCH, AND MARVEL, HIS FORM BENT DOWN, HOLDING HIS PENCILS
TIGHTLY IN HIS HAND, USING HIS SHADER, TRYING TO GET THE SHAPES
JUST RIGHT, A CONDUCTER, IF YOU WELL, POPPING UP FOR AIR TO JOIN THE SONG, SLOWING GAINING MASTERY, A GLINT OF JOY IN HIS EYES.

I HAVE WATCHED HIM CLOSELY, HIS SHAPING AND SHADING,
AS I HAVE BOTH MY SONS, MY APPRENTICES, STRIVING TO BE THE MASTER OF MY HOUSE. NOT ANY HOUSE OR SPACE.

I HAVE WATCHED SO CLOSELY, CATCHING MY BREATH,
BECAUSE I KNOW. I WANT TO TEACH HIM ABOUT THE COMPRESSION
AND EXPANSION OF FAITH. I WANT TO TEACH HIM ABOUT TAKING A SECOND LOOK, OR THIRD, LOOKING SO CLOSELY THAT HE FEELS THE SONG NEVER DISAPPEARS, THAT HE KNOWS IN ALL HIS ACTIONS, WE ARE PLACE ON AN EVER WIDENING PATH, ONE THAT ALWAYS CALLS.
AND IF WE PAY ATTENTION TO THE GLINT/FLICKERS OF LOVE, THE AFTERGLOWS, THERE WILL BE MADE VISIBLE AN UNBANDED LIGHT SURROUNDING US, A LIGHT THAT OPENS OUR LIPS,
AND RELEASES OUR SONG