30 June 2005

My aunt liked this quote so much, she copied it by hand from a book on the group The Four Freshman. I like it so much, I typed it up here:

“Bob Flanigan and Don and Ross Barbour are cousins. Our mothers were sisters.
At family reunions they would all stand and sing. The way they sang made a different sound from playing those notes on a keyboard. I never understood why they were so different until I read an article in The Outline of Knowledge Encyclopedia entitled “Sound Physics.”
It seems that in about 1700, the musical scale was quite complicated. An octave had 20 or more notes in it. Between F and G, for instance, there was F sharp, G double flat and G flat.That was called “the perfect diatonic scale.”
Johann Sebastian Bach came along and changed all this. He formed what is known as “the tempered scale” by choosing 12 of the 20-plus notes, and having his piano tuned that way. It was a lot simpler, but the beautiful quarter tones were left out. People’s ears could still hear them and harmony singers knew how to use them to make what they called overtones, but they were just not on a keyboard anymore.
Bob, Don and I were hearing those overtones or harmonics as kids and we became addicted to them. In our early Four Freshman days, we rehearsed without instruments. If my note was a major seventh, I could sing it on top of the note--sing it sharp, you might say, so it and the tonic note became a little less than a half-step apart. That’s what makes it buzz in your ear.
It may be that we were the first modern vocal group the world noticed who put the emphasis on harmony and overtones. Other groups are bound to succeed in doing it because there is something in people’s ears that needs harmony. That thing can make your hair stand up when a chord rings. It can make you shout right out loud!
That article about “Sound Physics” goes on to say that Handel, the great composer, “could not stand to hear music played in the tempered scale.” He had an organ built that would play all the notes in the perfect diatonic scale. Boy! That would be a bear to play!”
(by Ross Barbour)

After I typed this, my aunt played a Four Freshman CD in the car during an 8-hour trip home. I have to say--I didn’t get it. My hair did not stand and shout. But I’m still intrigued by the notes we don’t hear so much any more, the unnamed notes. That just because the notes aren’t on the sheet music or don’t fit our convention, our framework for music, doesn’t mean that we don’t hear them. It doesn’t mean they do not exist.

I want to know the unacknowledged.

29 June 2005

My desktop background is a photo I took. Pale wood floor. The edge of a blue oval braided rug. On the right, the bottom pleats of the vertical blinds.

On top of that is a parallelogram of light and a triangle of light. Part of the parallelogram so bright, the lines of the floor cannot be seen.

As a photo, most people would call it a failure. Really, the light is harsh and illuminates no subject. The floor, rug and blinds are not that visually interesting.

I stare at it day after day. What is it a picture of? A floor and a bit of rug? Or a parallelogram and a triangle of light?

Or both? Why does the light look more real, more tangible than the solid floor?

Then I go among family and friends. I see what I see, the social furniture, the talk, and I see something else and I stare and I think, what am I seeing?

28 June 2005

This morning at 2 AM, a hand shook me. Three times. Either God calling Wake up! or my husband was tired of my snoring.

I got out of bed, drank water, talked with the son IMing in his room, pulled out a volume of the encyclopedia and sat in the big chair, one cat over my head, the other soon to be parked in my lap.

W and V and U. (I browse books backwards.) Read about wood, wood sculpture, wood warblers. Tennessee Williams. Vermeer. John Updike.

Wisconsin. Venezuela. United States of America. Grant Wood. Wisteria. Vegetables.

Did you know Uranus the husband of Gaia lost his genitals in the ocean and thus gave birth to Aphrodite? Uranus the blue blue planet has many rings and satellites? African wood carvings are stable, forthright, and treat the frailties of women?

The pictures were good too: scallions, spring onions, bulb onions. Samples of spruce, fir, mahoghany, pine, cherrywood. A Muench wood engraving. A Velazquez painting with him at work on a portrait of the king and queen, shown framed in a tiny mirror, while the princess, her maids, the dog, the “court dwarf”, a nun, all in the foreground, look on.

The king and queen so tiny and static. All the life in the onlookers and the painter himself.

My eyes watery with strain, I returned to bed at four. Neither God nor spouse disturbed me further.

26 June 2005

Life is easier if you make corrections as you sail, and that is how I ran my ship until my spouse became such an opposing wind and still I sailed bravely into the wind, fought and fought for each mile of progress, or even just stillness, to not lose ground, and it became exhausting the constant sailing against the wind so i stopped, thinking that without my fighting it, for lack of resistance, the wind would die down, but instead it grew to gale force—it took over and battered my ship and pushed and pushed me off course and I let my ship just spin, no longer knowing or caring.

Well now I am taking stock, and evaluating the direction I wish to head and it involves such a major change in course it is painful and stunning, but once I feel that breeze, and how happily my ship sails when it is going where it belongs to go, perhaps I shall feel right at last.

24 June 2005

The Beatles have flown!

18 June 2005

I am leaving town, and there are baby barn swallows outside our kitchen window, soon to fledge. I hate to miss their first flights. John, Paul, George and Ringo. Born June 3, they are much grown now, and look restless in their tight hot quarters (it’s 97 out), yeh, yeh happy for food from parents (and another helper adult) but now eyes more intent on what is outside the nest, how far is that drop below to the aloe vera plants, will I survive? Must I stay squashed with these yahoo siblings forever? Can I fly?

17 June 2005

I've been ostracized.
I sleep on the picnic table
Outside my own house.

There was a fan who slept with earphones
the big fat kind that cup the ear
"On parle français"

running through the night

If she could be permeated by
the language
she'd be that much closer
to
the extraordinary

12 June 2005

Once upon a time a long time ago in a far away land I had a sister who created Thanksgiving for our whole family in her lovely rambling house. There were children running up and down stairs, and there were pumpkin ravioli and tur-duck-en, and there was laughter over a book by Laszlo, and there was a walk down a big hill among fall leaves.

It was a rare Thanksgiving for our family, one with attention paid to the details, one that followed the cultural script only much less formal and a lot more happy.

I awoke thinking about that Thanksgiving this June morning, today the day after that sister's birthday, a day that sister is sitting in the rambling house with Arlene pouring a lot of water on top of her and her family. I hope that’s all Arlene throws at them, that they are safe and maybe even now still laughing over the coffee table Laszlo book.

11 June 2005

Last summer I hurt my hand--ripped the tendon from the top knuckle of the middle finger.

It was the end of a camping trip at Crater Lake National Park. I was bent over in the tent, stuffing my sleeping bag into its sack--giving one final push. The finger caught in a fold and bent too far forward and I heard the pop.

It has yet to regain fluid flexibility--it’s become the slow, swollen, red-headed, uncomprehending step-child of the right hand finger family.

A few years previously on April Fools Day I was using a paring knife to pop the ring off a plastic bottle before recycling it. The knife cut through the ring instead and the point jabbed the back of my left hand--a tiny wound really but it sprayed blood over the walls and completely severed a tendon to my thumb.

And the April Fools day after that I got shoved and fell--just out of the gate--at the 10K. Ran the 6 miles bleeding from an elbow and knee, sore at the hip, and didn’t realize till the subsequent week that the right shoulder was jammed and disabled.

Each of the three injuries required months of rehab. I was so ashamed--to be such an expense. Needing fixing. Thousands of dollars.

The first time seems like an accident. The second time feels like a wakeup call--an urgent wakeup call from an unknown place. One you can barely decipher: Look. Look and see what you are doing.

You get a roaring in the ears so you can’t hear it, a clouding of the eyes so you can’t see it. It was an accident! Everybody says so!

And the third time--no. no. Not hurt again--please.

No conscious intent to cripple myself. No conscious desire to be the masochist. Yet after this last accident: couldn’t finger-pick the guitar, couldn’t shoot baskets, could barely type my seditious literature and correspondence. What had I done?

How to be a very good girl: Pop a tendon and disable that stubborn uniqueness that keeps insisting on wanting out, on wanting life.

I understand what the Procrustean bed was all about. I am the hapless traveller strapped to the too-small bed. I am the determined Procrustes, using a knife instead of a hatchet to fix me.

If I could just chop myself to fit my assigned space so that the world would not notice me too much, not be angry that I am a far bigger, messier and more blasphemous person than I appear. Maybe if I cut this off, slump and bend, stay at home, don’t be too awake, stay numb stay dumb--maybe then I’ll fit and be the good girl like I read about in the obits: productive career, happily married 57 years, sincerely church-going. Maybe I’ll avoid my family’s disdain. Avoid my husband’s anger. My husband’s family’s disapproval. Maybe if I stay pretzeled over and silent enough, I’ll even hold on to their bit of love and won’t get hurt.

It doesn’t work--they all suspect, and punish me sorely anyway. My sincere inhabiting of the assigned role has not even kept me safe, much less loved. How can anyone love me if I don’t let them know me? Sacriligous psychic tortoise-lover that I am.

Well, I’m climbing out while I can still walk away, before I chop and trim myself to an early grave. (The coffin for sure will fit all when their times come anyway.)

I’m climbing out before I convince my sons and nieces and nephews that humble accomodation without dignity, without awareness, is the way to live.

I have a lot to learn about anger. I have a lot to learn about being honest. I have a lot to learn about coming out.

I’ve been so scared of losing my scraps of love. Maybe no one will love me. But it’s not me that they love now anyway.

10 June 2005

Much worn nighttime finger splint--

Newspaper--

Tabasco on just-fried catfish--

Water from the faucet exploding into a sun-hot steel pail--

A wine cork from last night (merlot) still on the corkscrew--

Dark chocolate laced with orange rind--

Must of the metal frame of the sliding glass door--

These the smells of my day, of this particular Friday in June.

09 June 2005

it’s like my brain has died. I watch Will&Grace and That 70s Show. not a creative thought left in me.

I was a volcano, material spewing faster than I could capture it.

now it’s dead and i fix rice a roni and chew Big Red gum

08 June 2005

At dusk yesterday a fox trotted alongside me as I walked up a hill on Sundown Ridge. He floated past at a silent gallop, veered left, and watched me. I stopped and watched him. A grey fox, rather larger than some, with the distinctive black ridge along the length of the tail. I expected him to sprint into the brush under the interpersonal pressure, but he maintained his gaze, and it was I who broke first, who moved on.

Perhaps his species is more composed than the red fox, who seems high strung, almost agitated, and recedes at a blink. Or maybe this individual grey fox just happened to interact with me in this way on this day.

07 June 2005

Is blogging the practice encouraged in zen Buddhism?

Or is it compulsive and obsessive avoidance of real life?

Perhaps it is the chronicling of history on the small and personal scale, to avoid repeating history in one's own small life.

06 June 2005

I read an article in the July/August issue of Monitor on Psychology. It's about Christopher Peterson's and Martin Seligman's identification of six character strengths and virtues. I quote as follows

"The six virtues and their component character strengths:
*Wisdom and Knowledge—creativity, curiosity, open-mindedness, love of learning and perspective.
*Courage—Bravery, persistence, integrity and vitality.
*Humanity—Love, kindness and social intelligence.
*Justice—Citizenship, fairness and leadership.
*Temperance—Forgiveness, humility, prudence and self-regulation.
*Transcendence—Appreciation of beauty and excellence, gratitude, hope, humor and spirituality."

The article (by Karen Kirsting) suggests psychologists have recognized a need to go beyond treating symptoms of depression, toward embrace of those attributes associated with well-being. (With depression, I would suspect vitality, hope and humor are the most difficult to dredge up.)

I can't argue with the validity of any of these virtues, but I must say I was struck by the absence of one attribute that is core to the American psyche: Productivity.

So. One can be virtuous without being productive? Quite the zen notion. Unamerican food for thought, and especially for the majority of us who punish ourselves for never accomplishing enough. Grounds for focus on some of these other virtues.

Or—do you think Peterson and Seligman just somehow missed that one? Assumed everyone would assume productivity as a necessary component to virtue and to mental health.

I have not been productive in terms of making money. I have loved my children, fixed nourishing food, been kind to my husband, cleaned bathrooms. I have fed and given rides to the neighbor kids, cared for the ill and written the isolated, fed injured animals. I have been gentle to those who hurt. I have walked and walked and walked. I have sat and stared out the window at how the breeze lifts the leaves, at how different birds touch down upon the earth differently. Some have hinted to me that I am a failure, or not as productive as my gifts, talents and education would warrant. That hurts. It confuses me. So I'm not rich. I'm not published. I don't work 40 hours a week in a challenging stressful job, with 7 hours a week of travel there and back, then come home and squeeze in something to eat, a hug for the kid, and laundry. I go slow and pay attention. Does that take something away from my critics' lives? Does that take something away from me?

Maybe it does because I can make myself crazy over this. Am I being brave, doing what I know is right? Or am I lazy and lacking courage? I do have regrets about what I have missed in the office: the human exchange, the regular paycheck, the health insurance. But this choice has produced its treasures as well. I go slow and pay attention.

My paycheck arrives less regularly, but is quite satisfying, the currency not monetary but spiritual.

But let's be straight, Sister. That time is coming to a close. Kids flying off one by one. I'm looking for a job. Right?