monoceros blogsSome of the best lines from Adrienne Shelley's "Waitress" are addressed to an unborn baby. In a journal she's planning to give her daughter, Jenna writes:
"Dear Baby, I hope someday somebody wants to hold you for 20 minutes straight and that's all they do. They don't pull away. They don't look at your face. They don't try to kiss you. All they do is wrap you up in their arms and hold on tight, without an ounce of selfishness to it."
When I heard those lines in the film, I thought immediately of tango. At a milonga, if a person holds you just right, it's a wonderful feeling for about 12 minutes, if not 20. As Jenna writes, he doesn't look at you or overwhelm you; he just holds you tenderly, protectively. And no one has to say a word. The sensation isn't about romance (though it could be for couples); rather, it's about connecting with another person, which is a rare event these days.
Last night, I listened to two pieces of music that reminded me of Jenna being held by Dr. Pomatter when she was particularly vulnerable. In the right embrace, a person can easily reach the state of forgetting, of oblivion. It's a good place to be, because sometimes we need to forget. And, sometimes, we just need to be held.
Oblivion, by Pablo Ziegler.
Magic Hour, by the Ahn Trio.
Two months ago, I listened to poet Li-Young Lee read a strange and wondrous poem called "Station." It would've been nice if it were a live reading, but it's a recorded one. Still, this makes it possible for repeated listenings.
Usually, I like reading poems more than listening to them, because I like to read at my own pace, stopping at a particular image or speeding up towards the end of a line to leap into the next, remembering and hearing echoes of metaphors from elsewhere, bringing my own memories or thoughts to the poem. Listening to a poem doesn't always give me time to digest and appreciate it fully so I tend to listen to poems only after I've read them first or am already well acquainted with every motif and metaphor. It's then that I'll let the poet's or reader's voice sweep me away.
"Station" was the first poem that I listened to before reading it. And I fell in love with it right away. It's so rich and full with images that I got lost in them, but it was a good kind of lost. There were strange names of trains and unexpected words completing phrases and images I thought were familiar but weren't - these make the poem seem as if it'd fallen out of the Mad Hatter's journal, if the Mad Hatter wrote poems, if the Mad Hatter were able to keep still and put a pen to paper. The poem makes little sense at first, but if you take the time to listen to it again, to read it again, it does. Among other things, what I took away from it was an elegiac musing on life and death approaching and departing, like trains pulling in and out of a station.
Station
by Li-Young Lee
Your attention please.
Train number 9, The Northern Zephyr,
destined for River’s End, is now boarding.
All ticketed passengers
please proceed to the gate marked Evening
Your attention please. Train number 7,
Leaves Blown By, bound for The Color of Thinking
and Renovated Time, is now departing.
All ticketed passengers may board
behind my eyes.
Your attention please. Train number 4, The Twentieth Century,
has joined The Wind Undisguised to become The Written Word.
Those who never heard their names
may inquire at the uneven margin of the story
or else consult the ivy
lying awake under our open window.
Your attention please, The Music,
arriving out of hidden ground
and endlessly beginning, is now the flower,
now the fruit, now our cup and cheer
under branches more ancient
than our grandmother’s hair.
Passengers with memories of the sea
may board leisurely at any unmarked gate.
Fateful members of the foam may proceed to azalea.
Your attention please.
Under falling petals, never think about home.
Seeing begins in the dark.
Listening stills us.
Yesterday has gone
ahead to meet you.
And the place in a book a man stops reading
is the place a girl escaped
through her mother’s garden.
And between paired notes of the owl,
a boy disappeared. Search for him
goes on in the growing shadow of the clock.
And the face behind the clock’s face
is not his father’s face.
And the hands behind the clock’s hands
are not his mother’s hands.
All light-bearing tears may be exchanged
for the accomplished wine.
Your attention please. Train number 66,
Unbidden Song, soon to be
the full heart’s quiet, takes no passengers.
Please leave your baggage with the attendant
at the window marked Your Name Sprung from Hiding.
An intrepid perfume is waging our rescue.
You may board at either end of Childhood.
On Saturday night, somewhere in Serangoon, I had a generous serving of bread and butter pudding, a favorite dessert of mine that I hadn't had in a while. Eating it again - tasting the warm and moist bread with raisins, polishing off the milk-and-egg sauce - reminded me of my desire to find the best bread and butter pudding in Singapore (my father recommends the pudding served in Carousel at Royal Plaza On Scotts). So enough of chocolate desserts for a while; I will shift my attention to bread and butter pudding.
As I was ate, I also mulled over the name of the dessert, the words "bread and butter." It's common knowledge that when we say "bread and butter issues," we mean matters related to survival or basic necessities in life. And I've certainly been thinking a lot about my bread and butter issues. I'm not starving but I have to be careful if I live the good life a little too well. (Fewer book and music purchases would be wise.) Late last year, there were certain unfavorable adjustments at the institution where I work as an adjunct, teaching English. I edit too, and while it's been steady work for some time, I can't always depend on that. Perhaps it's time to look for a more stable job, one with medical benefits too.
Finding a job I'd actually like in this city-state will be a challenge though. As a student in junior college and university, I knew I could only take classes I had considerable interest in. And so it is with work - I need a job I feel passionate about. I actually have in mind the kind of work I'd like to do, in a particular location in the world, and it's not here, nor can I find such work here easily. Not now anyway. It'll be a fair bit of a struggle to get where I want to be but at least I know where I'd like to go. And knowing is a start.
Some time back, I thought how nice it'd be if I were keen on finance and had a cushy job at a bank - because that's where most English graduates think money is to be made - but I know I'm just not cut out for that sort of work. So I've accepted the reality that I'll never earn the kind of money that lets me jet off to Italy on a whim or spend a week snorkeling in Bora Bora. Still, having my life this way makes me appreciate every thing that much more. When I purchased Salman Rusdie's The Enchantress of Florence today - after not having bought a book in what seems like ages - I felt as if I were toting home a small treasure. (Then again, anything with an illustration of Renaissance Florence is a treasure.) And every journey I get to take is that much more precious. I'm hoping for a long, grand one this December.
Now, in a wistful mood, I think back to a time when I felt I could do anything...summer, 1999. I'd just climbed up and down (getting down was the real triumph for me, since downward movements are more hazardous on my bum knee; I was the group's "Gimpy") Mount Washington, and I'd never felt stronger or freer. During that summer, I spent a lot of time sitting by myself on the edge of Lake Winnipesauke. I would stare out at the distant shoreline in the day, imagining families in their summer lodges, wondering about their happiness or lack of it; at night, before crawling into the warmth of my sleeping bag, I looked for the pale golden lights hovering against a dark sky, oddly moved by the knowledge that someone else across the lake could be awake, just as I was right then. I loved being in that rural setting; the world seemed large, the sky more open, and I felt a great peace whenever I sat by myself. Nature wasn't the only beauty around; I also had to read Walden by Henry David Thoreau, and now, more than ever, his closing words come back to me.
"I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings.
In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them." (Conclusion, Walden)
A change is gonna come, by Ben Sollee.
To be gone, by Anna Ternheim.
A little something extra from Wikipedia - "A couple is walking together, holding hands, and encounter an obstacle. Their hands separate, they say "bread and butter," pass the obstacle, and hold hands again...[the phrase] is spoken to prevent bad luck that might happen as a result of being separated."
I'm aware of the craze over Stephenie Meyer's Twilight saga, though I never thought to see what the fuss was about. Vampires aren't really my thing as far as genre fiction goes (I made the exception only for Elizabeth's novel, and her book doesn't quite count as genre fiction), though there is something very erotic about lips pressed against a neck. At any rate, I nearly changed my mind about vampires when the actor Robert Pattinson (famous for playing Cedric Diggory) appeared in the trailer, because the first words that popped into my head were "Byronic hero." Byronic heroes aren't exactly my thing either, though I've noticed a number of appealing traits, and they certainly are interesting to observe. Heathcliff and Rochester, anyone?
It feels like a decade since it last rained. I can't even remember the last time it actually rained. These past weeks, the weather has been very suggestive, sending out signs and hints, luring everyone to believe it will rain - dark clouds, rumblings of thunder - but it never happens. The unpredictable and unseen wind almost always sneaks up on those gray clouds and blows whatever chance of rain there is right out of the sky.
The only form of precipitation I'm encountering is my own tears. Tears over a book, no less. I've been reading The Kite Runner again. I bought the novel a week before I left Ann Arbor in 2005, something I shouldn't have done as I'd already packed and shipped off most of my books and really didn't need another one to carry home. But I'm glad I did. Reading and crying over the absorbing and affecting novel was a convenient cover-up for my own sadness over leaving a town I'd grown to love and where I'd grown intellectually and spiritually. I wandered and dreamed a lot when I lived in Ann Arbor as an undergraduate and a graduate student, and my time there also led me to places far beyond the town itself.
It was watching part of the film adaptation of The Kite Runner on a recent flight home that made me want to read the novel again. Once more, over two days and nights, I smiled at the depth of friendship between young Hassan and Amir, the love Hassan bore Amir, and how profoundly Hassan knew Amir that it amazed Amir himself. My heart clenched as Amir later avoided Hassan, rejected and eventually drove him away. I thought long about the characters who kept running from their mistakes, running from the people they hurt, running from themselves. All except Hassan, who ran only for love of his friend, ran to retrieve kites for Amir and always returned to him. I think every person wishes they had someone who would offer to run the kite for them, who would say, "For you, a thousand times over."
On the last page of the novel, when I came across that line again, I cried, not for the first time in the night. I shouldn't have, because over the years, I've been steeling myself, telling myself to be less sensitive, less affected by things around me. So I'm confounded that even now, all it takes is a story to undo me. But after everything, I'm glad I'm able to cry; some part of the person I am is still the girl I used to be.
"Rain," by Priscilla Ahn.
"Kite Song," by Rosie Thomas.
This is what I learned in music theory a long time ago: the passacaglia is an Italian music form. It can be quick and lively; it can be slow and grave. Either way, its hallmark is a repetitive pattern, line, or melody, that is, a melody that repeats almost unchangingly throughout the length of the piece while other lines vary freely. The passacaglia is also an ancient triple-time Spanish or Italian court dance based on this type of music. Listening to various pieces with passacaglia elements, I can imagine solemn dances held in grand, kingly halls; straight-backed men moving amongst bejeweled women in elaborate gowns, the sound of cloth and feet sweeping in time with the music.
The music, though, was allegedly played by musicians who belonged to the street and not in grand courts. They were wandering musicians; passacaglia originates from the Spanish words pasear (to walk) and calle (street). Musicians throughout history have often been wanderers, taking their music and instruments across lands and countries, enriching their repertoire with strange and stirring notes they hear from peers who look and dress differently, but who possess the same secret nerve that awakens when chords and phrases weave stories and pictures. Today, musicians and poets still embark on journeys to find new material, to widen their horizons and experiences in the hopes that doing so will make them better artists.
If the passacaglia marks the work of a wandering musician, I like to imagine the varying lines as the new and unfamiliar experiences the musician collects on his journeys, and the unchanging melody or bass line as the core within him, the self that remains true and unshaken while everything else is in flux. Similarly, we have a unique, constant rhythm within our minds, even if around us everything is topsy turvy, helter skelter - unpredictable. That rhythm can occasionally build with urgency or delight, or tumble with disappointment - just as heartbeats that quicken or slow - but it seldom varies beyond recognition, and sometimes that's all we can ever depend upon.
Here are three samples of the passacaglia. The first is by Handel, or rather, inspired by a theme of his and attributed to Norwegian Johan Halvorsen (this is arguably the most famous piece of music in the form of a passacaglia). The next is a composition by Luigi Boccherini, the fourth movement ("Passacalle") in a work titled "Musica notturna delle strade di Madrid." I saved my favorite for the last, "Passacaglia" by Bear McCreary. Boccherini's piece appeared at the end of the film "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World" and McCreary wrote "Passacaglia" for the TV series, "Battlestar Galactica." It comes as no surprise that both the film and series are about characters and their journeys, whether they are taken across oceans or galaxies.
"Passacaglia," performed by Quartetto Gelato (Handel/Halvorsen).
"Passacalle," performed by Richard Erdoes, Michael Fisher, Simon Oswell, Timothy Landauer, Bruce Dukov (Boccherini).
"Passacaglia," performed by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra (McCreary).