Farewell (part 2)

She set out due north, making her way through the narrow streets, past the village outskirts where lone houses lay scattered like forgotten toys, until at last she reached open country. The sky was darkening by the minute, and she knew she needed to make haste. It had been many years since she had journeyed this way, but her feet knew the route as though they had walked it but yesterday. She felt the old spring coming back into her step, a lithe energy she had last felt as a young girl, climbing rocks with her brother.

Her brother.

She still blamed him, even after all these many years. Blame had grown, become hardened with time, until it was the only thing between them. Yesterday the thought of him would have brought nothing but a bitter dry taste to her mouth. And yet here she was, traveling north, along the very road she had forbidden herself, even in her thoughts.

The entire sky was now a dark and ominous purple, all traces of sunlight gone. She glanced up with apprehension. In this eerie light the stars seemed somehow menacing. It was not enough that they had devoured the sun. The meal had merely awakened in them a fiercer appetite, perhaps a taste for any mortal souls foolish enough to fall within their hungry gaze. She hurried onward.

The landscape seemed transformed. Dark purple shadows licked and danced around once familiar terrain, like drunken creatures risen up from hell. “He will not want to see me, even now,” she thought bitterly. “I am a fool – a fool on a fool’s errand.” Perhaps the end of the world was not reason enough to breach the wall that had come between them. Perhaps some walls are higher than such trifles as the fate of planets.

She realized she would not come even close to her destination in the short time that was left – she was still just halfway there, and the wind had already started to blow, the dark wind that the poets had foretold. She pulled her cloak more tightly around her.

Suddenly she felt lost. In that moment she realized it was no use – even had he wanted to see her, there was simply no time. Wearily she sat down upon a rock by the side of the road, to wait for the end. For the first time in many a year she could feel a tear trickle down her face. “At least I have this,” she thought with a bitter satisfaction, “I had lost my tears, and now one has come after all this time, to keep me company in my foolishness.”

Lost in her thoughts, she did not even realize she was not alone, until she felt a hand brush against her cheek, wiping away the tear. It was a familiar gesture. How many times had he wiped away her foolish tears, all those years ago?

“You came,” she said.

“So did you,” he replied, and then he smiled. She felt the years of bitterness fall away, as if a dream. Looking at his face, she saw he was different than she remembered, more careworn, and yet the same, just exactly the same. The light in his eyes was as it had always been.

“Farewell,” she said softly.

He laughed. “You were always so serious. What could possibly be so serious?”

She stared at him, appalled. For a moment she felt a stirring of the old anger. He had not changed at all. She opened her mouth to speak, a bitter retort already on her lips. But instead she found herself starting to laugh. “Yes, you’re right,” she said with a giggle. “I am too serious. Much, much too serious. I’ll change from now on, I promise.”

Suddenly they were both giggling together, like children, far too lost in laughter and sheer delight to pay any heed when the dark wind, cold and furious, rose up at last to usher in the endless night and sweep the world away.

Farewell (part 1)

One fine summer afternoon the stars came out.

A cool breeze was floating through all the villages, down from the mountains. A purple haze had settled over the horizon, and there was a moon slung low in the sky, hovering just above the treetops.

The people came out to look at the stars. They stood in clumps of two and three, on hilltops and village squares. Children climbed the trees and laughed, making bird noises until their parents told them to be quiet.

She had been cooking when the light had started to change. With a sigh she put out the fire beneath the pot, wiped off her hands and ventured outside, where a crowd of sky watchers was already gathered.

The poets had written of this day long ago, but nobody had really believed. It was a story from the old tales, from the time before time, and these days nobody paid much attention to such things. Until now.

She thought of her brother. It had been a long time since she had let herself think of him. She realized that she still saw his face in her mind’s eye the way he had been then. Surely he must look different by now. But perhaps not.

She went back inside, turning away from the flaming stars arrayed against the eerie darkness of the afternoon sky. Briskly, efficiently, she packed a sandwich, a pear and a small flask of wine – something to keep her belly fed, and something to keep her belly warm. She grabbed a shawl – the green one, the one she used only for traveling – from its place behind the door, and set out on her journey.

A dream

A dream – I’m pretty sure that’s when it first entered my head.

Sometimes you wake up from a dream with a phrase or sequence of words still reverberating around in your brain. It might even take a while to realize it’s been nestled there for hours, lurking somewhere in the back of your thoughts. Today I realized that for the entire day a little snatch of dialog from a play by Shakespeare had been rattling around in my mind, just ever so slightly out of conscious awareness, apparently a last remnant from a dream of the night before.

Now, in the quiet of the evening, after the hubbub of the day has subsided, I realize what it was – one of my favorite speeches from “The Tempest”, spoken by Prospero in the first scene of Act IV. It’s an odd – and oddly beautiful – little monologue. Ostensibly he is speaking about the artifice of the play we are watching, observing that what we have seen here is nothing but illusion, papier-mâché and greasepaint. And so he starts out:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:

But then Prospero continues, and the impact of his words carry far beyond the stage proscenium:

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

This is so much lovelier and deeper than the famous monologue in Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” that begins “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players”. That passage speaks only to the tragicomic pageant of an individual life, whereas the speech from “The Tempest” is nearer to the Hindu concept of Maya – that this apparently solid world we perceive around us is in fact only an illusion. Shakespeare is suggesting that the very fabric of reality around us may itself be only a sort of fleeting and illusory performance. The sentiment reminds me quite a bit of this dourly playful excerpt from Fitzgerald’s translation of the “Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam” (the original was written in 1120 in Persia):

For in and out, above, about, below,
‘Tis nothing but a Magic Shadow-show,
Play’d in a Box whose Candle is the Sun,
Round which we Phantom Figures come and go.

It’s a profound idea, and yet one which many of us first encountered in early childhood:

Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily
Life is but a dream.

🙂

Troy and Barack

I’ve been giving some serious thought today to the points raised by Troy about achievement and personal responsibility. They were good points, even if he and I disagree on some of the particulars. As it happens, while I was thinking about this, the White House released a transcript of the speech the president will be giving to our nation’s school children in Virginia tomorrow morning, on the occasion of the first day of the new school year.

What strikes me about the speech is that President Obama makes exactly the same points that Troy does. The two of them are aligned on this issue to an eerily precise degree. Here is one excerpt from the President’s speech:

Where you are right now doesn’t have to determine where you’ll end up. No one’s written your destiny for you. Here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future.

One thing that people who succeed seem to have in common is an early belief – starting back in childhood – that diving in and getting good at things is going to pay off for them. I think this is a quality shared by Troy, Barack Obama, myself, and all of the high achievers I know. Somehow there is the confidence – the certainty, you might say – that one is up to the task of attaining the level of mastery required. For me, for as far back as I could remember, there has always been a joy in mastering certain kinds of things (mainly things connected with art and words and music – and only later with math and technology).

This is a joy that perpetuates itself. You get those first modest successes, and it gives you even more confidence to try more ambitious things – to put in even more time, if necessary. But I think somewhere in your soul there needs to be that kernel to start with, that fierce belief that you’ve got what it takes, even when those around you do not yet have much reason to agree.

It’s clear to me that Troy and Barack and I share a goal of wishing to plant into the minds of young people that seed of self-confidence – of finding their own unique way of expressing their true potential.

Given this common cause, I find it disheartening that a weirdly hostile (and, I suspect, cynically dissembling) group of people in this country are trying to prevent their kids from hearing the speech – ostensibly in defense of some sort of right wing principles. The irony of this particularly inane form of political gamesmanship is that this president is about to give a speech to our nation’s children that is the very model of good old fashioned conservative principles: A fervent exhortation toward individual responsibility, hard work, and self-betterment.

Unspeakable

This evening over dinner my friend Jon talked about the philosopher Jacques Rancière and his philosophy of the unspeakable. The essence is that in any particular society there are things that we do not and cannot talk about – they are literally unspeakable. These taboos limit our ability to discuss problems we might otherwise profitably discuss, such as the relations between rich and poor, parents and children, sexuality, domestic violence, and other topics that tear at the fabric of society.

This reminded me of my experience watching the 1983 Tony Scott film “The Hunger”. An early example of the now ubiquitous “glamorous vampire” genre, the film centered around a human/vampire romantic triangle, with the principals played by Catherine Deneuve, David Bowie and Susan Sarandon.

In movies there are things that happen not because they inherently make sense but because they need to happen, for reasons that have to do with plot advancement and character development. In the case of “The Hunger”, one such development centers around the character of Alice, played by the fourteen year old child actress Beth Ehlers. In the story, Alice is being groomed by the powerful vampire played by Deneuve to replace her current companion, played by Bowie, who is nearing the end of his useful lifetime and is beginning to rapidly age and degenerate.

As we learn about the ways of this film’s vampires, we discover that they indoctrinate their new minions through sexual seduction – the movie contains a number of erotic scenes centered around this concept. But this presents a problem – Alice is only fourteen. Rancière’s theory is quite applicable here. By definition, no American commercial film may contain an actual erotic encounter between an adult and a child. After all, the innocence of a young girl must be protected at all costs. Anything else would be, indeed, unspeakable.

The writers solve the dilemma in a simple and ingenious way. Bowie’s character, as part of his vampiric degeneration, is consumed by a powerful and uncontrollable hunger (hence the film’s title). Finding himself alone with the unsuspecting young Alice, he eats her.

Notice the simple brilliance of this plot twist. In order to protect this innocent child, to shield her from something as harmful as the pleasure of sexual awakening, the filmmakers opt to turn her into lunch. By being brutally murdered by a ravenous monster, horrifically butchered and summarily devoured, this young character is spared the unspeakable – enjoying a few moments of sexual pleasure on-screen.

You might not think that this makes logical sense. But as Rancière points out, when faced with any topic defined as “unspeakable” (in this case the threat of a potential sexual encounter between an adult woman and a fifteen year old girl), logic goes out the window. Perhaps it isn’t so surprising that our society has found no way to address some other uncomfortable topics, such as the plight of children guilty only of the unspeakable crime of being born into a poor American family.

Stopping by the Web on a Labor Day Weekend

Whose site this is I think I know.
His server’s overloaded though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch this download start to slow.

My browser’s cache must think it queer
To stop upon a page so clear
Of content, simply frozen here
The longest weekend of the year.

It’s been five minutes, give or take
I think there may be some mistake.
I hear my hard drive go to sleep
Whoever built this site’s a flake.

This page is lovely, blank and white.
But I don’t really have all night,
It’s time to find another site,
It’s time to find another site.

      with apologies to R.Frost

Tea ceremony 41

The afternoon light streams in through the kitchen window. As the hour passes, the light moves slowly across the counter, glinting brilliantly off the two champagne flutes that lay side by side where they have been left to dry. Then the light moves on, touching the petals of the red rose that lies wilting beside the drying rack.

When the man enters, carrying the empty cup and saucer in his large hands, his gaze first falls upon the rose, which is now bathed in sunlight. He puts the cup and saucer down upon the counter and reaches for the rose, lifts it to his lips, and plants a silent kiss upon its faded petals. At the moment the flower touches his lips, his gaze falls, for the first time, upon the two glasses laying side by side. He freezes, seemingly rooted to the spot, his lips still upon the rose.

Then he carefully places the rose down on the counter, in the exact position he had found it. He turns away, looks toward the hallway, his face now in shadow. For a moment he simply stands upon that spot, unmoving, silent. Then, with a resolute air, he walks from the kitchen back into the hall, looking neither right nor left, never once glancing at the woman who sits so quietly upon the drawing room couch. The man’s footsteps echo down the hallway, growing fainter with every step. He reaches the front entrance, and there is the sound of a door opening.

And then he is gone.

Cultural differences

Recently a friend told me about an experience a friend of his had had while visiting Sweden for work. While he was there, the company assigned a Swedish colleague to watch out for him. Every day the Swedish colleague would drive him to the office fairly early, while the parking lot was still pretty much empty.

The first day, he was puzzled to notice that in spite of the cold weather, his colleague parked the car at the far end of the parking lot, so that they needed to walk the entire length of the lot to get to the door. This happened day after day. Each day they arrived at a near empty lot, and each day they would park far away from the entrance and walk through the cold to get inside.

Finally my friend’s friend asked why they didn’t just park the car near the entrance. The Swedish colleague explained that some employees, for various reasons, could not arrive early. Those who could generally arrive early would park far away from the entrance. This made it possible for those who came later – who might be in danger of being late for a meeting unless they could get inside quickly – to find a spot close to the door.

I could be wrong, but somehow I suspect that this would never happen in the United States.

Gone

Yesterday a close friend of mine told me that a young woman, a friend of his, had telephoned to tell him that her brother had just been killed in action in Afghanistan. On hearing this, I felt an overwhelming sense of tragedy at a young life gone.

The war is so abstract for most of us, something we’ve been reading about in newspapers for so many years now that for many it has taken on a surreal quality. And yet people die. They die day after day after day, and every once in a while we have a personal connection to one of those people.

I know that we all have different politics, different opinions about the meaning of the war, its goals, its methods. But I think we all can agree that whatever other meanings there are here, that the loss of a young person – with their unique thoughts and hopes and dreams for the future, all now gone forever – is an event of overwhelming sadness.

Access

When I draw pictures – a pasttime I enjoy very much – I usually go into a kind of zone, very attentive to what I’m doing in the moment, but not at all self-conscious. The general feeling is that another part of my mind is taking over, one that is quite different from the part of me that has conversations over dinner, or participates in meetings at work.

Something similar – yet somehow different – happens when I improvise on the piano, solve a crossword puzzle, or develop computer programs. In each case I generally lose explicit awareness of conscious being, and instead go into a kind of flow state. Decisions are clearly being made each moment, but most of those decisions are not made by the conscious “me” that my friends have come to know. It seems that these pasttimes allow me to access some other part of myself, a part that doesn’t so much “think” of things, but simply “does” things.

Today I’ve just spent a very pleasant afternoon working on a computer drawing program, then spending some time making some drawings – going back and forth between these two activities, two different kinds of flow state. Which afforded me a rare opportunity to compare two such flow states, one beside the other.

And now the question comes up in my mind, am I accessing the same part of myself when I do all of these activities, or have I developed a separate inner self for each? Is the music-improvising part of my being connected to the drawing-pictures part? Do either of these relate to the computer-programming or puzzle-solving parts of me? Or are these all completely disconnected, separate selves developed independently over the years in response to separate challenges?

It would be great to get all of these aesthetic components of one’s self into a room together, introduce them to each other and get them talking, comparing notes on their likes and dislikes. Unfortunately that might be easier said than done. In my experience, none of these aspects of my self, for all of their expressiveness, is very big on conversation.