Wit's End

A poem by Robert Desnos in my translation from the French

2011-10-06T16:19:00.000-07:00

L'anneau de Moebius  

Le chemin sur lequel je cours 

Ne sera pas le même quand je ferai demi-tour 

J'ai beau le suivre tout droit 

Il me ramène à un autre endroit 

Je tourne en rond mais le ciel change 

Hier j'étais un enfant  

Je suis un homme maintenent 

Le monde est une drôle de chose 

Et la rose parmi les roses 

Ne ressemble pas à une autre rose.

Mobius Ring

The road I run along

today is not the same one

I set out upon, and went straight on

it takes me back beyond where I’d begun

I've come round but the sky

is not the same. Yesterday I

was a child now I am a man

the world grows, a shifting design

and every single rose, you’ll find

is different than the rose in mind.

Translated by Holly Woodward

Adapted fromWikipedia:

Robert Desnos was a French surrealist poet who fought in the Résistance during the Nazi occupation. The Gestapo arrested and deported him to Auschwitz, then Buchenwald, Flossenburg, and Terezin.

One day, Desnos and other prisoners were taken in the back of a flatbed truck; they knew the truck was going to the gas chamber; no one spoke. Soon the truck stopped and the guards ordered them off. When they began to move toward the gas chamber, suddenly Desnos jumped out of line and grabbed the hand of the woman in front of him. He was animated and he began to read her palm. He told her that she would have a long life, many grandchildren, abundant joy. A person nearby offered his palm to Desnos. Here, too, Desnos foresaw a long life filled with happiness and success. The other prisoners came to life, eagerly thrusting their palms toward Desnos and, in each case, he foresaw long and joyous lives.

The guards became visibly disoriented. Minutes before, they were on a routine mission the outcome of which seemed inevitable, but now they became tentative. Desnos was so effective in creating a new reality that the guards were unable to go through with the executions. They ordered the prisoners back onto the truck and took them back to the barracks. Desnos never was executed.

Desnos died in "Malá pevnost", which was an inner part of Terezín used only for political prisoners, from typhoid, only weeks after the camp's liberation. The poems he wrote during his imprisonment were accidentally destroyed after his death.

In memory of my father

2011-09-18T15:49:00.000-07:00

Blue Hunter

On his birthday, three decades after his death,

my father’s soul feels so far off—lost.

I wrote his other child, though we rarely met.

She said she thought of him too, on Ayers Rock—

his memory still encircled the earth

a hundred years after his birth.

The one gift I know his two daughters share,

the one light that reaches from here to there,

he taught me at night on our back lawn,

great Orion, killed by his own love.

Dad showed me the nova where new stars form,

his blue knee, Rigel, and Betelgeuse above—

it’s dying, but the emptiness is so vast

we will feel nothing of its shattering blast.

If I could grasp the distance of that star,

would the dark years between us feel so far?

In Memory of My Mother, ten years after.

2011-08-02T12:52:00.000-07:00

My mother died ten years ago, but she still comes to my dreams.

Hovering

The white ibis glides overhead

to the far side of Turnball Bay—

the distance between what was said

and all I wished I could say.

Before me, the muscled tides flow,

and sharp winds cut back at the waves

so I can’t see what lies below—

those secrets the dark water saves.

The sea grass curves in question marks

around my searching, submerged hand.

Blue, broken shells like heaven shards

lie on the narrow strip of sand.

Whichever shoreline I walk to,

the wild birds fly to the other.

This morning divides me from you,

but the birdcalls echo over.

In Memory of September 11th, 2001

2011-08-02T12:44:00.001-07:00

This was written in September 2002, in NYC,

when there was a sense of waiting for the next catastrophe.

But nothing happened, not even the leaves fell that month.

There’s a little homage to Philippe Petit, who walked a wire between the twin towers.

September, 2002, NYC

What Memory Leaves

They quiver in the breeze

and cling, and try to stall—

this year the city leaves

do not want to fall.

They cannot join the rest,

the ones who fell last year—

all trace of them is swept.

The hard concrete lies clear.

Like walkers on a wire,

they shiver in the wind—

where are the cloaks of fire

we look to see them in?

Can the green leaves recall

what passed before their birth?

Don’t they know all must fall?

The sole rest lies in earth.

Melville on Growing Old

2011-04-27T13:13:00.000-07:00

"Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death."

Happy Valentine's Day

2011-02-14T07:35:00.001-08:00

Slim Chants

The heart makes a fickle grave,

always letting ghosts crawl out.

The mind makes a flighty cage—

often fledgling hopes fall out.

The soul is a nest of fire,

time is a deepening spark.

The world is a net of wire,

love is a leap in the dark.

Happy Halloween

2010-10-31T06:44:00.001-07:00

Memoirs from Beyond the Grave

When I woke, my tomb was full of ghosts

rattling the locked door, pounding the walls,

and each shade spoke fears twisted with hopes.

Press your ear to the ground—hear their calls?

“Earth turns on the hinge of heaven’s gates,

birth burns through the dark of the womb,

we’re cloths of flame woven by the fates,

our hearts yearn through the scar of the tomb.

The black fires of memory burn slow,

the waters of forgetting run deep,

even blood in the dirt yearns to flow—

you know only the dead never sleep.”

On Emily Dickinson's Birthday

2009-12-10T14:19:00.000-08:00

This short verse is based on a fragment Emily Dickinson left in her notebooks

Love is like life, only longer—

Love is like death, only stronger—

Love is like Zion, only farther—

Love is like iron, only harder—

But prone to rust—

Love is the Holy Ghost telling dust—

Live, because you must.

Kaylie Jones Lies My Mother Never Told Me

2009-08-17T16:46:00.000-07:00

Kaylie Jones’s new memoir , “Lies My Mother Never Told Me,” comes out this month.

The book is a brilliant gem. I read it twice, it was so filled with humor, insight and courage.

There are so many amazing stories that one immediately wants to tell someone else.

Her mother’s exploits will top most every “You won’t believe what my mother did” story. Once, Kaylie’s mother smashed her car through a truck that blocked her into a parking spot. She totaled her car, but drove on. Jones also shares intimate moments with many of the writers she knew, from her father, James Jones, to Kurt Vonnegut and Ron Kovic, author of “Born on the Fourth of July.”

Every storyteller’s child struggles to put together their own version. But James Jones gave his daughter the wisdom to see beyond anyone’s truth, to see both sides of a story. The encounters she chronicles can be divided into two kinds: someone fights to be right, or someone gives unconditionally. Those who fight to be right always end up losing more.

The title, “Lies My Mother Never Told Me” captures the way stories people tell sometime cover darker truths. And one can lie with silence.

The book shows that the only way to speak the truth is to speak with love. As James Baldwin says, “Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”

Ms. Jones found the courage to face her own secrets and deal with her fears, to work to become stronger. It struck me, in reading this, that it takes so much courage to make peace, and we must start with our own battles—lost or won. As the daughter of a writer who sought to chronicle the story of the common soldiers of WWII, she has taken his lessons and worked to speak out for peace.

The story of Kaylie’s well-lived life, her father, whom she lost as a child, and her troubled, brilliant mother reminds me of these lines from Roethke’s notebook, “Straw for the Fire.”

I live in a country

The land of the free—

Did I eat my mother

Or did she eat me?

Or was the devouring done mutually?

I cherish her image

When I look in the glass,

I was a true son:

Of the middle class.

But now shapes and shadows

Throng the stair and the hall

And I lie thinking

Nothing at all, nothing at all.

Outside, the slow winds

Move through the long grass,

Where my father keeps moaning

Alas, alas.

We Can Change the World

2009-07-23T15:09:00.000-07:00

I heard that these lines are inscribed on a tombstone in Westminster Abbey:

“When I was a young man, I wanted to change the world. I found it was difficult to change the world, so I tried to change my nation. When I found I couldn't change the nation, I began to focus on my town. I couldn't change the town and as an older man, I tried to change my family. Now, as an old man, I realize the only thing I can change is myself, and suddenly I realize that if long ago I had changed myself, I could have made an impact on my family. My family and I could have made an impact on our town. Their impact could have changed the nation and I could indeed have changed the world.” ~Unknown monk, 1100 AD

Melville on God

2009-05-13T10:52:00.000-07:00

Through the lacings of the leaves, the great sun seemed a flying shuttle weaving the unwearied verdure. Oh, busy weaver! unseen weaver!—pause!—one word!—whither flows the fabric? what palace may it deck?

wherefore all these ceaseless toilings? Speak, weaver!—stay thy hand!—but one single word with thee! Nay—the shuttle flies—the figures float from forth the loom; the fresher-rushing carpet for ever slides away. The weaver-god, he weaves; and by that weaving is he deafened, that he hears no mortal voice; and by that humming, we, too, who look on the loom are deafened; and only when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that speak through it.

Earth Day

2009-04-28T04:43:00.000-07:00

Happy Earth Day!

I say this in a whisper,

for the time has not yet come—

only with long, hard labor

may obscure heaven be won.

Our sky is temporary,

and never forget this fact:

heaven’s a house you carry

forever on your back.

Osip Mandelstam—translated by Holly Woodward

A Single Shoot

2009-04-17T19:53:00.001-07:00

Manet painted one small asparagus stem on a miniature canvas and sent it to a collector who had paid two hundred francs more than the painter had asked for his picture of a bunch of the stems.

If you look closely, this one shoot, pale, plump, lying across the canvas like a nude, holds every color of the rainbow: purple, blue, green, yellow, orange and rose. All his life Manet wanted to be accepted and couldn’t understand why such an apparently simple aim proved beyond his grasp. But this tentative stem that appears after the first spring rains, stretches, a frail rainbow of hope over the edge of a marble (cutting?) slab, reaches out to us like the innocent, hopeful finger of Michelangelo’s Adam.

Manet's Painting of the Folies Bergeres

2009-04-17T18:55:00.000-07:00

Manet at the Folies-Bergère

You realize as you look at the serving girl’s face that you have just asked for something she doesn’t sell—at least to you—though it is on display. Intoxication. Everything glitters as if glazed: the fruits, the liquor, her eyes. That marble slab that looks like the lid of a sarcophagus—is she holding it up or down? It seems that she is pressing down with all the weariness she can muster. Nevertheless you will never get over it. Beyond her you see the ugly face of a man in need and realized with a shock it’s your own reflection. Under his lips are two blood-red spots; his raised fist grips a dark stick. Now you understand the expression on her face. And that all these people must also see it. This is a theater, and through some terrible mix-up, one of those extravagant rearrangements the dream director is never too tired to manage, the theater has been completely rearranged so you are at the center. The acrobat’s death-defying feats in the far left corner are a lame attempt to distract the audience from its own self-denying death.

Bernard Madoff and a current bestseller

2009-03-23T06:16:00.000-07:00

“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” was written by the Swedish writer, Stieg Larsson, who died shortly after completing the book in 2004. It is a thriller with a powerful financial criminal and the crisis he brings to the financial markets. The resemblance to our current crisis, and Bernard Madoff’s role is eerie. Near the book's close, Larsson speaks of the stock crash:
The Stockholm Stock exchange found itself in freefall and a handful of financial yuppies were threatening to throw themselves out of windows.
And the hero says:
“The idea that Sweden’s economy is headed for a crash is nonsense,” Bloomkvist said.
“We are experiencing the largest single drop in the history of the Swedish stock exchange—and you think that’s nonsense?”
“You have to distinguish between two things—the Swedish economy and the Swedish stock market. The Swedish economy is the sum of all the goods and services that are produced in this country every day . . .. That’s the Swedish economy and it’s just as strong or weak today as it was a week ago. . . . The Swedish Stock Exchange is something very different. There is no economy and no production of goods and services. There are only fantasies in which people from one hour to the next decide that this or that company is worth so many billions. It doesn’t have a thing to do with reality or with the Swedish economy . . .. It only means that a bunch of heavy speculators are now moving their shareholdings from Swedish companies . . . systematically and perhaps deliberately damaging the Swedish economy in order to satisfy profit interests. For at least twenty years, many financial reporters have refrained from scrutinizing [the greatest perpetrator of fraud]. On the contrary, they have actually helped to build up his prestige by publishing brainless, idolatrous portraits. If they had been doing their work properly, we would not find ourselves in this situation today.”

What Really Matters

2009-03-12T15:14:00.000-07:00

Malcolm Gladwell's new book, "Outliers" is, like all his books, clear, concise and innovative in its perspectives.
He focuses on getting to the facts under the accepted illusions. What characteristics are crucial for success in life, and which hinder it? As a teacher, I found it required reading, for its gimlet-eyed view of what does and doesn't work in our schools today.

One thing: he says that one test question seemed impossible:

Teeth are to hens as nests are to ?

That's easy. There's an old expression that something is as rare as hen's teeth. So what bird rarely has nests? The cuckoo lays its eggs in the nests of other species, so I think the answer is:

Teeth are to hens as nests are to cuckoos.
Check out his website for more info.

A Life Well Lived

2009-03-11T06:33:00.000-07:00

WAGNER--Rubin, 89. It is with profound sorrow that we announce the
passing of Rubin Wagner, for over 66 years the proud husband of the late
Sima Wagner, patriarch of our family and mentor to so many. Ruby lived a
life devoted to his wife, his children, Harry and Leon, his daughters in
law, Myra and Marsha, and his grandchildren Elliot, Lauren, Gabriel and
Daniel. For his dedication to his family, to his friends, to those in
need; for his jokes, "have you heard my latest?", for his good humor and
love of Judaism and Israel, and for the respect with which he treated
his fellow man, rich or poor, Ruby was widely loved by the countless
people whose lives he had touched. Born Ruvke Wajner (pronounced Viner)
in Vilna, Lithuania, Ruby was the older son of Aron and Sore Chana, both
of whom perished in the Holocaust, and brother of Mendel who disappeared
into the Ponary forest. At the outbreak of World War II Soviet Russia
invaded Vilna and ceded it to Lithuania. On February 20, 1940 at the age
of 20, Ruby eloped with the love of his life, Sima Benosher. In June
1941, Soviet Russia annexed Lithuania and closed Jewish institutions.
Sima, Ruby and baby daughter, Sheyna, lived together with his parents in
a life of relative comfort where their baby's 'feet never touched the
ground' from the constant love and attention she received from her
grandparents. A year later the Germans entered Vilna. Ruby cared for his
family in the ghetto. He survived the war in concentration camps often
working as a barber, a skill he had learned in his mother's thriving
beauty salon. Ruby was liberated in 1945 unaware that his daughter had
perished or that his wife survived. Sima and Ruby were reunited to begin
life again, lived in Heidenheim, Germany among many friends, had their
first son, Aron (Harry) and in May 1949 set sail for America. Beginning
in a railroad flat apartment at 1958 Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn,
Ruby did what he had to do to support his family eventually becoming a
barber in a shop in the basement of the famous Hearst Building near
Columbus Circle. A few years later he had the opportunity to go into
partnership to build one single-family house in what was then the
farmland of Huntington, New York. He asked the advice of one of his
successful clients who told him, 'the barber chair will be here if it
doesn't work out.' Founding Ripley Associates and Forest Green Ruby and
his longtime business partner, Victor Cynamon, built many homes,
developed much property, at one time becoming a large landowner in
Huntington. Moving to Roslyn, New York then Aventura, Florida Ruby was
always active in his community whether planning cantorial concerts,
doing what was needed at his synagogues, or participating in Holocaust
remembrance. Throughout his life Ruby was a proud 'Vilner', to him a
very special identity. Vilna was an important center of Jewish life, a
center of Jewish learning, a nexus of Yiddishkeit. Ruby was one of the
publishers of 'Vilna in Pictures' a highly regarded pictorial history by
Lazar Ran, the longtime editor of 'The Daily Forward', a project on
which he and his colleagues worked for many years. From his youth an
aficionado of soccer, Ruby came to love the Brooklyn Dodgers and New
York Mets. He loved his weekly poker games, vacations in the Catskills;
he loved happy occasions, Chivas, and any food that starts with the
letter 'a' (as in 'a shtikkele cake, a drink', etc.). Finally, Ruby
deeply loved the country that gave him and his extended family the
opportunity to rebuild their lives and flourish from the horrors that
they had survived. Funeral service will be held on Sunday, March 8th at
12:00pm at Gutterman's, 8000 Jericho Turnpike, Woodbury, NY 11797 P:
516-921-5757. Shiva will be held on Sunday through Wednesday: Sunday and
Monday at the home of Harry Wagner 23 Tamara Court, Melville, NY 11747
Sunday: all day, Monday: beginning at 6pm, Tuesday at the home of Leon
Wagner, 8 Lincoln Woods Purchase, NY 10577, beginning at 6:00pm,
Wednesday at the apartment of Elissa and Great Neck Richman 860 United
Nations Plaza, #35A New York, NY 10017, beginning at 6pm. In lieu of
food, the Wagners would appreciate a contribution in memory of Rubin
Wagner to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 15 West 16th Street,
NY 10011.

Notes on the Neighborhood

2009-01-12T12:46:00.000-08:00

Our solar system was formed 4.6 billion years ago.
If the sun were hollow, it would take a million moons to fill it up. The sun is average in temperature: 10,000 F. The energy of nuclear reactions at its core takes 30,000 years to reach the surface.
Mercury’s temperature varies between 800 by day and -300 at night. One day lasts 1400 hours; it spins slow and orbits fast.
Venus is the hottest planet at 900 F. Venus’ day is longer than its year, 225 earth days.
Mars has no intrinsic magnetic field. It has two small moons, Phobos and Deimos, the Latin words fear and panic.
Saturn’s rings are thousands of braided, differently colored rings of gas. It takes 29 earth years to revolve around the sun. The main rings of Saturn span 165,000 miles, but the bands are on average only 150 feet thick.
Saturn is seven hundred times Earth’s size, but so light that if one could drop it in a pool, it would float.
Saturn spins so fast that its day last less than eleven earth hours.
The planet is still molten, mostly gas, but the force of the planet’s mass turned hydrogen into liquid metal that creates a great magnetism. So its wide atmosphere is wracked by updrafts and storms. Winds blast at supersonic speeds, thousands of miles an hour.
Saturn has thirty-five named moons. Its moon, Iapetus, is half black, half white—one side of its icy surface may have been bombarded.
The largest moon, Titan, more massive than Mercury, is like the surface of crème brulée, a thin burned cover on molten stone. Rain may fall every century or so.
Jupiter is so large (a failed star) that it’s shrinking and that produces great heat; its core is hotter than the sun’s surface. Jupiter’s surface is covered with clouds hundreds of miles thick. Jupiter’s spot is two to three earths across; it’s a storm that has changed pattern but has never been known to move. Under the clouds, Jupiter is covered with volcanoes; it is entirely resurfaced every few years. It has at least sixteen moons; one, Io, is unique among moons for having volcanoes, too.
Uranus is on its side and half is in a 42-year night.
Neptune has the fastest winds, up to 700 mph. Neptune’s largest moon, Triton, orbits in the opposite direction of the other large moons in our solar system. It orbits the sun every 60,000 days or 164.7 years.
Astronomers argue about whether Pluto is a planet or a sad piece of flotsam; it has not cleared an orbit for itself; its moon, Charon, is the biggest moon proportionally, jerks Pluto around. Its orbit is the only one on a different plane from the others, and it’s elliptical. Pluto is closer to the sun than Neptune 20 of every 250 earth years (it takes 250 earth years for Pluto to orbit the sun, at a speed of 10,000 mph.) It has hardly enough mass to keep an atmosphere.
Ceres, the largest asteroid, is about the size of Texas, six hundred miles across.
There are at least 64 moons in our solar system.
Our moon always shows us the same face.
Earth speeds eight times faster than a bullet.
The earth is smoother than a billiard ball.

Van Gogh's Oleanders

2009-01-07T11:53:00.001-08:00

Beside the vase of flowers lies a much-read copy of Emile Zola’s Joie de vivre. Van Gogh clearly knows that the novel’s title has an ironic edge. The heroine’s life is a long tale of woe. But after all her trials, when her maid commits suicide, the heroine doesn’t understand how anyone could voluntarily renounce life.
If one looks closely at the oleanders, Van Gogh’s emblem of love—or at any of his subjects—one finds tortured ebullience. The leaves are twisting like a crown of thorns and the boughs seem about to break under the weight of their heavy blooms. Van Gogh paints the difficulty of beauty and the beauty of difficulty.
Even when he tries to be pessimistic, as in the “The Night Café,” he can’t manage the horror and despair of Munch, for instance. Van Gogh wrote of the café painting, “I have tried to show that the café is a place where a man can ruin himself, become mad, commit a crime . . . I have tried to express the terrible human passion . . ..” But the lights billow gold against the vivid red walls, the billiard table that dominates the room like a coffin is a lively green, and on it lie a few balls yet to be sunk into the holes.
And when Van Gogh is most optimistic, there is still a tinge of sadness. Though covered with blossoms, the limbs of his trees are permanently twisted. The oleanders that offer themselves so wholly still have an element of lonely isolation and a sense of the their own impending fall.

About Face

2009-01-07T11:41:00.000-08:00

Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait, Aged 51
The Ellesmere Self-Portrait
National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh.
In 1657, the year Rembrandt painted this self-portrait, he had gone bankrupt and his possessions, including his art collection, were auctioned. The canvas has been trimmed on the top and right sides, as if reality were closing in—or to make the painting less important-looking? In the picture, Rembrandt stands stripped of all ornament; even the light seems more miserly than usual.
But if Vermeer is the master of light, Rembrandt is the shadow master. What little light falls from above manages to illuminate all his blemishes and wrinkles. Still, the face strikes me as painfully beautiful. The lack of adornment helps one see that flesh is exquisitely complex. His skin seems at once enduring and delicate, rough and vulnerable. He seems to look out at us with hope and fear. His face marks time like an open watch, but more eloquently—on the human face, traces of the past are not erased.
Rembrandt’s brush dipped in black fate still illuminates love and pride behind shy modesty. The canvases hanging around this painting seem petty, busy and silly in comparison. Rembrandt seems to look out from a deep, dark box, as if gazing through a vat of inky water. He feels miraculously present yet sadly trapped in the past.
I sense in Rembrandt as in Van Gogh a wonder at the strangeness of having a face. At fifty, Rembrandt still seems surprised at being seen—and at what he sees in his mirror and canvases. How there is flesh from which come words. How our faces see and are meant to be seen, carved by millennia of scrutiny and desire so that they may give and receive.

riddle

2008-10-15T05:57:00.001-07:00

Black sheep of golden birth, I try to smother my mother. I bring tears to all I embrace. I thirst but water chokes me. I’m called holy though I come from hell.

riddle answer

2008-10-15T05:53:00.001-07:00

Smoke, born of golden flames, which it smothers, causes eyes to water. Sometimes called "holy," smoke is also said to come from the flames of hell.

This picture is of a trail of smoke from a meteor in the Leonid shower. Thanks to our insomniac friends in Ireland for the shot.

Totally useless Treasure riddle

2008-10-15T05:50:00.000-07:00

What is the most useless item of its kind but the most sought-after?
And of all the examples of this thing, the most painful and worthless is the most treasured of all.

Totally useless Treasure riddle answer

2008-10-15T03:59:00.000-07:00

A crown.
Of all hats, the crown is the most ineffective for keeping warm and dry.
and Christ’s crown of thorns is the most highly valued of all, though it is made not of gems but dry, thorny twigs.

The photo of Reese Witherspoon as Marie Antoinette has a point: the crown she wore as queen did not protect her from the mob rule that cut off her head.

"Uneasy likes the head that wears a crown," Shakespeare has King Henry IV say.

The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb

2008-10-13T06:56:00.000-07:00

Nassim Taleb's "The Black Swan" is that rare book that can change the course of one's life, and, if enough people use its insights, the course of history.

Summaries are inadequate--one needs to study the book, as the shifts in thinking the author shows us how to make are so great, we need to invest time and attention. Stick with it despite the resistance that deeply ingrained ways may raise (even unconsciously) against it.

This is the only book I've ever found that prepared me to deal with uncertainty, and the future.

Check out his website:

Black Swan website

In the book, he warned years ago that our current banking system could lead to worldwide financial problems, and he quotes that on passage on the site.

Pink Slip

2008-10-07T16:33:00.000-07:00

Saturday afternoon, at a pocket park in Chelsea, I waited for my last boyfriend. (OK, so he was also my first and so-far only one.) I’d agreed to meet for coffee, a year after dumping him.
At a nearby café table, a group of young men chatted. One of them wore pink hot pants, pink tiger-striped sneakers and his uncombed, harshly dyed hair knotted and held by a gold plastic comb. An orchid fell from his hairdo each time he turned to yell at his dog. “Don’t embarrass me,” he scolded. The meek bitch looked nervously up from under a thick, cheap pink bow tied over her ears. The ribbon looped twice around her head and fell in her eyes. I think she was a mix of boxer and pit bull. She also wore a pink leather collar and leash.
The man entertained his friends with stories. “I was dragging this stuffed dog around, tying it up outside shops . . ..”
The boxer crept quietly over to me.
My ex arrived and looked at me, then the dog. She looked back at him, and then hopefully at me.
“I have a dog now,” I told Marc. “She’s named Precious.”
He raised his eyes sideways to the sky with a plaintive look that said, “Since she lost me, she’s gone barking mad.”

Keira Knightley in The Duchess

2008-10-07T15:52:00.000-07:00

In the new film, The Duchess, Keira Knightley gives a mesmerizing performance as Genevieve Spencer, an ancestor of Princess Diana, who was Lady Spencer before her marriage to Prince Charles. Jeremy Irons brilliantly brings to life the rich old duke who arranges to marry her. It reminded me of his brilliant performance in "Reversal of Fortune." Both actors create characters who have layers of complexity. I felt that Keira was "channeling" Princess Diana--I saw in her the same paradoxical shyness and social brilliance, that strange mix of intimacy and mystery. And the story of this duchess bears eerie similarities the Diana's own.
Don't read a synopsis before you see it. Let the story surprise you.

Wisdom from the Best Investors

2008-09-24T05:42:00.000-07:00

Warren Buffet said this morning, the economy is like a bathtub--it can't be full in one place, and empty in another. If one part is in hot water, we all are. He's a capitalist who sees the socialist dimension of economics. That's rich.

Go see the bull on Wall Street. You'll see that if it looks dangerous being in front of the bull, with its lowered horns, you really don't want to be behind the bull, either.

The Sunday New York Times business section listed Richard Fuld, the CEO of Lehman Brothers, as worth in January at 827 million, and his assets this week at a measly two million. As a taxi driver said, "That's gotta hurt."
Warren Buffet has a disinterest in money that allows him to invest dispassionately, and that perversely has made him so wealthy. Money is fickle like that. It doesn't come to those who want it, it comes to those who can see through the illusions of the market to what has enduring value. Warren says that the market is a voting machine in the short run, and a weighing machine in the long run. Even greater than the power of his money is the power of his wisdom, which has such power to influence others in government and Wall Street.
Sir John Templeton said that the time to buy is when blood is running in the streets, and that's what Buffett did this week, investing five billion in banking while others were dumping their plummeting shares.
"No one knows who's swimming naked until the tide goes out," he said.
The tabloid headline of Richard Fuld's testimony in Washington was "Fuld on the Hill."
In this week's New York Times magazine, Christian Oth asked Edgar Bronfman, the"billionaire philanthropist," if Forbes assessed his net worth accurately at three and a half billion; the interviewer also asked how much money he'd lost recently, and Bronfman said he paid no attention.
"You don't get ulcers?"
"My father said, "I don't get ulcers, I give ulcers."

The only thing we have to do to make money is to buy low and sell high, which is so hard that the great investing houses have designed computer systems to do that--still, they trip up.

Going against the opinions of the majority is tough. Warren Buffett said, "Don't ask the barber if you need a haircut."
Money magazine’s editor, Eric Shurenberg asked George Soros, “Growing up in Nazi-occupied Hungary must help you keep today’s risky markets in perspective.”
“The prospect of extermination was a formative experience for me.” He laughed. “The Nazis taught me that the abnormal can become normal.”
“And the lesson in that?”
“It’s important in life and investing always to question yourself. Understand that you may be wrong especially when you believe too firmly that you’re right.”
“Have your billions (over nine) made you happy?”
“I’m reasonably happy, but the money’s not the point. It’s an indication that I’ve succeeded in the grand adventure of understanding reality.”

Go see the bull on Wall Street. You'll understand that while you don't want to be in front of the bull, you don't want to be behind it, either.

In Vino Veritas

2008-09-23T18:26:00.000-07:00

On the subway back from the Orpheus & Dionysus conference, I found a book on the remaining seat.
Pointing to “Olympus.” I asked the well-dressed man two seats away, “Is this yours?”
“You stole it,” he said, snatching it and leafing through the thick paperback. “This is where I left off,” he said, finding a page at the end folded down at the corner.
“Be honest,” he said to me. “How far did you get?”
He read a line, then mockingly called it “brilliant.” He dropped the book, distracted.
“Are those real Dolce and Gabbanas?” he asked a big blonde with earbuds in, listening to her Ipod.
“Yes.”
“Your pants are ruined,” he said of her white bell-bottoms.
She shrugged.
“What the heck is Ilium?” he asked me, leafing through the book again. “Because it appears in every chapter.”
“Ilium is where the Trojan War started,” I guessed wildly.
“No it’s not. That’s the Iliad.”
“The Iliad is about Ilium, dum dum.”
He pulled back his chin, cowed by my confidence.
A breathless man entered the car, saw me holding the book and eagerly grabbed it.
“I jumped the turnstiles to get this.” He ran back off the train just before the doors closed.
“You stole it,” my neighbor lowered his head accusingly. “I should have asked him what Ilium was.”
“Look, I’m coming home late Friday night from a conference on Greek myth. Anything else you want to know about ancient Greece, just ask.”
He opened his umbrella and closed it quickly from a strange angle on his lap.
“So what brokerage house are you from, Merrill Lynch?” I asked.
He blushed.
“Did you know,” I said, “that Hera and Zeus didn’t have any children?”
“I bet he had some fun with his thunderbolt.” He flapped his black umbrella open and closed again.
“Is he from Merrill Lynch?” I asked his friend.
“Yeah.”
“Let’s just call me Loser and you Never gonna Happen.”
He fluttered the black silk collapsing umbrella.
As we pulled into Hoboken, he held up a fist until I knocked mine against it.
“Ow,” he said. “Softer.”
I tried again, lightly.
“Owww. I bet you could beat up that guy who came back for his book.”
As the train door opened, he left ahead of me and didn’t look back. I gazed wistfully after him.
That was Dionysus, I saw now.

Wisdom is the wage of Experience, and its price

2008-09-23T15:19:00.000-07:00

An Anglican bishop from 1100 AD has written on his tomb in Westminster Abbey:
When I was young a free and my imagination had no limits, I dreamed of changing the world. As I grew older and wiser, I discovered the world would not change, so I shortened my sights somewhat and decided to change only my country.
But it, too, seemed immovable.
As I grew into my twilight years, in one last desperate attempt, I settled for changing only my family and those closest to me, but alas, they would have none of it.
And now as I lie on my deathbed, I suddenly realize: If I had only changed my self first, then by example I would have changed my family.
From their inspiration and encouragement, I would then have been able to better my country and, who knows, I may have even changed the world.

Turnover

2008-09-23T14:59:00.000-07:00

"People think that when they get to heaven they will turn over a new leaf," Thoreeau said. As if, once we’re dead, we’ll have the energy to retrace all our steps backwards, like a spiritual Ginger Rogers—in our gown and gold slippers. I grow tired trying to retrace an hour’s steps when I lose something. I usually decide that what’s lost is not worth the time to search.
The church down the street decided to hold a rummage sale and donations filled their entire community room. They sent out a plea for help.
We tried to sort through the drifts of cast-off clothing.
On the news, an old woman was discovered after weeks trapped in her house by her clutter with her husband’s corpse. The firemen dug for hours in protective masks to reach her.
In the debris scattered outside lay a large wooden spoon, the kind sold to tourists on tropical islands.
It reminded me of a Jewish story. A man visited hell, and the people there complained they were tortured by hunger. Banquets of food lay spread out, and long spoons.
“You see how they make us suffer, with these spoons that are too long for us to hold to our own mouths,” the damned wailed.
Then the man went to heaven, and found the same banquet spread. People there laughed and fed each other with the same great spoons.
This morning, instead of rolling feet first out of bed, I slid my head down the edge of the bed and looked upside-down through the window. The tips of the pines bowed with the wind that brought gold-rose clouds swirling. Is that how God sees the world, mostly heaven? For us, our interior life so overwhelms, that we hardly notice sky—is heaven as distracting to God? We think we would be happier if we knew that God paid more attention to us. But maybe the only way to true happiness is to be more like God, and see as he sees.

Money

2008-09-23T14:49:00.001-07:00

Ever notice how the faces on coins never look you in the eye? Hades, god of death, is the god of wealth, as well. The only faces that look straight out of coins aren’t human: animals and mythic figures like Victory and Justice. The animals are all conservative in their use of energy, predatory and long-lived: snakes, owls and eagles. No mice or ants need apply, despite their industry.
One tribe had money so large it became symbolic: even when one huge stone sunk in deep water and couldn’t be retrieved, the people still granted its owner the full value.
American money is so ugly that it’s hard to desire it for itself. One wants to exchange it as quickly as possible. With its pale cast, our money reminds me of ice, precarious, able to survive only in the cold, melts through one’s hand.
The gambler struggles with the unreality of money, its lack of satisfaction. How fitting that one of the main Vegas institutions is called “The Mirage.”
Money changes nothing but itself.
Songs have never been designated as money, nor mouths, nor things that have a will of their own, or a fate that may cause them to die unexpectedly.
With money as with words, more doesn’t equal better.
Money can’t hold wisdom, nor can it buy any.

A Brief History of Fools

2008-09-23T13:40:00.000-07:00

There were natural or dimwitted fools and artificial ones. Natural fools were more valuable and were sold at monster auctions; the more foolish they were, the more they cost.
Fool was one of the few positions open to women in Medieval times. However, it seems that more men had a gift for it.
Master Henry was King Henry III’s fool; he was also poet laureate.
Maître Jehain was the fool of King John II of France; when the king was imprisoned, the fool went with him.
In 1461, the kings of Bohemia and Hungary grew tired of war and sent their fools to fight each other, agreeing to abide by the results; the Hungarian fool won.

Medical Alert

2008-09-18T08:47:00.003-07:00

MEDICAL ALERT from Francine Prozac
Imagine a disease that afflicts nearly every single person on earth, with the possible exception of the hermit—
And absolutely no one is working on a cure!
Shocking?
Well, it’s sad but true.

Lovesickness strikes millions each year, especially this time of year. No one knows how it happens. Some say it’s the close quarters of dry, poorly ventilated rooms.

NO ONE IS IMMUNE!
Rich and poor, young and old, men and women—the malady can befall all. That hermit is probably hiding in the cave because he’s a severe case.
Look around, you’ll see the tell-tale symptoms of the afflicted: the twitching fingers of someone itching to check for messages that never come fast enough to assuage the pain, zombie women popping Good ‘n Plentys like self-prescribing addicts under cover of the dark movie theater, and hapless bodies scattered across the park lawn like victims of some secret weapon that blows out the brain but leaves the body behind.

FACT: An 89 year-old billionaire from Texas came down with the love sickness after a night in a pole-dancing bar, and in fourteen months, he was dead.

FACT: You might be the next victim.
(Don’t laugh—that’s one way the disease is thought to be passed from person to person.)

Many try home remedies: cold showers, garlic, writing poems. Guess what? They don’t help much.

WHAT CAN YOU DO?
Help support my campaign to find a cure. Cash, checks and chocolates are welcome. Every little bit of chocolate helps.

A Child's Christmas

2008-09-18T08:47:00.002-07:00

At a Christmas service, a young child stood clueless in the crowded pew, wondering what was going on. She couldn’t see past the coats on all sides. The elder sister explained it all for her:
"Christmas was the day God died in a stable manger."
What a shining example of reasoning things out for oneself, from parental warnings about the dangers of really filthy places.
But in a way, the girl is right: the old idea of a lone, distant God died in the incarnation, and in becoming flesh, God also accepted his eventual death. Incarnation and Passion are inextricable, as Bill Tully says. And each event requires us to give up something. The nativity requires us to give up our aloofness, the old faith that God doesn't need us—from the moment he was born, he was in grave danger.
At Easter, the girl must have taught her sister about how God was born out of an egg. Because at Easter the resurrection shatters the hardened, hollow world. If the graves were broken open and the saints walked, we have to give up our belief that anything spiritual is ever laid to rest.

Bottoms Up

2008-09-18T08:47:00.001-07:00

The earth weighs six sextillion tons, yet it does not plummet to the bottom of the universe.
Why?
Because the universe has no bottom.
We create riddles by starting with the answer, but the world creates riddles first, with no answer in sight.
Dostoevsky writes in Brothers Karamazov, “Absurdities are all too necessary on earth. The world stands on absurdities, and without them perhaps nothing at all would happen.”

Don't Look Now

2008-09-18T08:47:00.000-07:00

This is a computer image with the black holes that riddle the universe highlighted.

At the center of most galaxies lie black holes. While the universe is expanding and forming new things, the black hole is compressing and making things one again, as they were at the Big Bang.

Black holes are like little round rear view mirrors, so while we’re flying down the highway to nowhere, we can see where we’ve come from, oblivion, and whether it’s catching up to us.

Plan Ahead

2008-09-11T07:25:00.000-07:00

After Legg Mason Opportunity fund tumbled 20%--two times more than the benchmark index, Bill Miller wrote about the Nobel-Prize winner Ken Arrow, who was enlisted to make long-range weather forecasts for the military during WW II. He said his forecasts were worse than useless. The general said that he knew the forecasts were of no use, but needed them anyway for planning purposes.

Shrek

2008-09-11T07:21:00.000-07:00

Shrek in the movie strikes a chord in all of us, the part that wants to be left alone, to be ourselves, uncurtailed by social norms. He resists pressure to try to get along with others, to brush his teeth. The ogre is the ego with an “r.” as in Ogrrre.
“Ogres are like onions,” Shrek says.
“They stink?” Donkey asks.
“Yes. No,” Shrek says.
“Oh, they make you cry.”
“No. Onions have layers. Ogres have layers.”
“You know, not everybody likes onions.”
Ogre comes from the ancient Latin word for Hades.
Shrek comes from the Yiddish word for fear.
Donkey is the id, the animal self. He says,
“Remember when you said that ogres have layers?”
“Aye?”
“Donkeys don’t have layers.”
Maybe we love both characters so much, because we’re pressured to suppress both ego and id in daily life, in favor of the superego.

Atonement

2008-09-09T09:00:00.000-07:00

In the film, Atonement, the costumes and sets remind one how much was lost in the war, and how much the English sacrificed to win.
I loved how water divides and united the characters. The lovers Cecilia and Robbie die in different tunnels—the soldier stands at the shore he thinks divides him from his love, but she is floating in the same water, when the London tunnel she’s come to as a bomb shelter floods.
As a young girl, Briony wants to know that Robbie will save her from drowning. Later, she wishes she could save him or her sister. Briony atones by making them live on in her head.
Robbie saves Briony from drowning, then yells at her. He rescues the twins lost at night in the wild and is arrested on his return for child abuse, because of Briony’s confused accusation. Robbie makes mistakes, too: his passion for Briony’s sister causes her to break the vase, and he mails the obscene letter, wrongly choosing to entrust it to the child Briony.
The one act of lovemaking in the book also breaks things—Briony’s faith and the barriers between class. Is love selfish and violent? In youth, yes, but the war is a purifying fire. Perhaps Cecilia should have tested Robbie, to see if he could save her. But no one can save loved ones in the war; one can only try to save anyone one comes upon. The scene of the sisters in the hospital is echoed in the slaughtered girls that Robbie stumbles upon. The characters put aside selfish desire and devote themselves to selfless service.

Riddles and Dreams

2008-09-09T08:39:00.000-07:00

The octopus has three hearts. One only lives six months; after sex, it involuntarily self-destructs. It is so adept at learning tricks, running mazes and solving problems that scientists list it as exempt from experiments that cause pain. They call it an honorary vertebrate.
The octopus changes color to match the reef and stones it passes. The mimic octopus imitates the poisonous lionfish and sea snake. It can slip down a one=inch hole. The creature not only takes on the color of the rock, but the bits of algae clinging to it—and it transforms its skin into the texture of the object around it. The Riddler of the ocean.
The octopus is like one’s dream life, where things change quickly, and are not always what they seem.
Falling asleep, one dives into a lake where time pools. One finds oneself back in torn-down homes, old schools, and one can’t seem to graduate.
One scientist said that we think the world is made of solid objects, but there are none—there isn’t even something remotely resembling solid in this world.
Every night in my dreams, I wander so far off that I have no idea how to get back to reality. But there is no going back in time.

Truth and Immortality

2008-09-09T08:17:00.000-07:00

In Richard Price’s new novel, Lush Life, everyone is acting except the victim’s father, and the central character, Eric. Eric gives up trying to be someone other than himself, and the father fails to make anything of his son’s death—it undoes him, so both men free-fall through the novel. Eric doesn’t fit into anyone’s scenario—that flummoxes the cops, who construct a crime line in which he, the victim, becomes the killer.

There are so many scenes happening on the same stage of the Lower East Side—the ghosts Eric sees from the past, the hipster scene in which young people try to construct a scene in which they make a difference. . The Chinese lie to protect themselves from retributions and extradition. The kids from the projects trying to play tough, taking street names like stage names. The cop, Yolanda, makes up stories of her own youth to get young boys to open up and tell their stories. Manny, her partner, tries to teach the hapless father to play act, to save his son, but Manny no longer has faith that he can play the father to his own drug-dealing sons. The tragedies of the sons break through the illusions of paternal power.

“If you speak the truth,” Oscar Wilde said, “sooner or later you will be found out.” Odds are, you’ll be found dead.

The Veil

2008-09-09T08:09:00.000-07:00

Rick Moody’s memoir, The Black Veil, draws on Hawthorne’s story, “The Minister’s Black Veil.” We want to see what we feel will disturb us, what others hide. But it’s the veil that disturbs, not what lies beneath it. Under the veil likes a perfectly ordinary face. The veil haunts, and people beg for the minister to remove it. But who doesn’t veil their true nature, the face they see in the mirror, from others? And who is bold enough to lift the veil from another’s face. In Hawthorne’s story, and in Moody’s memoir, no one dares.
Are there things that can only be seen through a veil?

Poe defines art as the reproduction of what the senses perceive in nature through the veil of the soul.

2008-09-09T08:05:00.000-07:00

Anne Truitt’s last book, Prospect, is an interesting title for a final volume, with its suggestion of beginnings. Maybe only in this book of looking back can she see the plan. Or maybe she realizes she is about to become a field, like the color fields she worked in. And we are going to mine her. I am so grateful for her generosity.
“Heraclitus postulated that two great laws order the universe: the Logos, the law that nothing changes, and the Flux, the law that everything is always changing. He conceived of these laws as at once opposite and identical, as the convex and concave sides of a curving line are at once opposite and identical.”
She speaks of finding a sense of distance in moments of complete absorption in her work, as if she hovered in the space between these two forces.
Honesty is generosity.
“Purity of aspiration seems necessary to inspiration,” Truitt says in Daybook, which I’m reading now.
Some artists wallow in bad behavior, with the excuse that they need the depths from which to create art. Others philander, pursuing one trend after another. But Truitt works to refine her personal life through thoughtfulness. Her columns stand for her finely honed vision of the essence of life and art.
Truitt writes,
“The work of others may suggest techniques or even solutions. But the essential struggle [of the artist] is private . . . It is of necessity a solitary and lonely endeavor to explore one’s own sensibility, to discover how it works and to implement honestly its manifestations.”
That last phrase alone presents an endless task. Creating art that delivers the experience of our epiphanies is like translating from a language no one knows. One has to decipher the unvoiced language of one’s soul and then find a way to convey it in paint or words.
Truitt also offers her experience of looking for her lost children in a garden that’s closing—a scene that reminds one of the loss of paradise. She finds her lost children have been returned home by a policeman. She takes from this the idea of looking outside of the problem for the solution. When she loses her art studio, she decides to see it as a new freedom, and turns from sculpture to painting. She calls it the principle of reverse solution. Loss and separation give us the freedom to move beyond former limits, to find new material, ideas and life.

Vanishing Point

2008-09-09T07:56:00.000-07:00

I’m reading the Dictionary of Imaginary Places, gathered from world literature and myth.
One entry is Ibansk, a town invented by the modern Russian writer Zinoviev. All its inhabitants are named Ivan. The great monument to the leader has keeled over and will soon fall into the river—the artist “has been dealt with appropriately.”
This passage describes the conundrums of the soviet state, in which figures disappeared from historical photographs, and towns and regions disappeared from state maps:
“The history of Ibansk is made up of events which almost failed to happen, which almost happened but at the last moment somehow did not, which were expected but never happened, which were not expected but did happen, which happened in the wrong way at the wrong time in the wrong place, which happened but are not acknowledged to have happened, which happened but are not accepted as having happened.”
I'm reminded of a haunting book, "The Commissar Vanishes," which shows how soviet archivists removed those Stalin executed or exiled as enemies. Sometimes historical photographs are published repeatedly, but with more and more figures removed each time, until Stalin stands alone with Lenin. Sometimes these overworked retouchers failed to remove the shadows of the dead, or a hand placed on another figure's shoulder. Then in the next version, that person with the shoulder disappears, though the hand of the first condemned man may remain, suspended in empty air.

Here is a website with examples of the photos:

The Commissar Vanishes

Van Gogh gives critics a finger

2008-09-09T07:52:00.000-07:00

Van Gogh wrote to his brother,
“It is fiendishly difficult not to feel anything, not to be affected when those bloody idiots say ‘does he paint for money?’ . . . One doesn’t really care a rap, but it gets one one’s nerves all the same, just like listening to off-key singing or being pursued by a malicious barrel organ. Don’t you find that to be true of the barrel organ, and that it always seems to have picked on you in particular? For wherever it goes, it’s the same old tune . . . .
When people say something or other to me, I shall finish their sentences even before they are out—in the same way as I treat someone I know to be in the habit of extending his finger to me instead of his hand (I tried the trick on a venerable colleague of my father’s yesterday)—I too have a single finger ready and, with an absolutely straight face, carefully touch his with it . . . in such a way that the man cannot take exception, yet realizes that I am giving as good as I damned well got.”

Never Grow Up, Never, Never Die

2008-09-09T07:29:00.000-07:00

After mother's death, I spent years sorting through business. After sorting through a nine-foot stack of papers, I finally read a book she'd saved from her childhood Peter and Wendy, the novel Barrie wrote after the play, Peter Pan.
“All children, except one, grow up,” Barrie begins his story of Peter Pan. Of course that one person is oneself.
Peter’s last name, Pan, comes from the ancient Greek god whose name means “all.” We all have a childlike spirit, but as in the story, all of us age and lose touch with that spirit.
Out of the stiff, old pages fell a thin slip on which my mother had penciled elaborate scores for a game between sisters some rainy afternoon in the 1920s. My mother kept meticulous score of her weekly bridge game until her last illness. No one grows old to their own mind, though it may seem they are old to everyone else.
Barrie writes, “They soon know that they will grow up, and the way Wendy knew was this. One day when she was two years old she was playing in a garden, and she plucked another flower and ran with it to her mother. I suppose she must have looked rather delightful, for Mrs. Darling put her hand to her heart and cried, ‘Oh, why can’t you remain like this for ever!” This was all that passed between them on the subject, but henceforth Wendy knew that she must grow up. You always know after you are two. Two is the beginning of the end.’”
My cousin Tom and his wife Patricia sent me silent films his father took in the 1920s. No one ever mentioned them—they must have been untouched for almost a hundred years. I watched with a sense of recognition my mother as a young child. She jumped from a rock I’ve walked down myself, near our homes. She sat next to her mother, then reached up to embrace and kiss. And as clearly as if she were sitting before me, I felt her spirit, her love that strove always to share happiness, or, lacking fortune, to create it by sharing the gesture.
I was surprised at the surreal whimsy of Barrie’s writing, which seems so contemporary. He says that one’s mother goes through one’s thoughts when one sleeps like someone going through drawers.
“I don’t know whether you have ever seen a map of a person’s mind . . .. A map of a child’s mind is confused, and keeps going around all the time.” Inside it is Neverland.”

Monument Proposal for New York City

2008-09-09T07:13:00.001-07:00

In his poem,“The Monument,” Joseph Brodsky writes an argument for the erection of a monument, revealing only in the last word what it shall honor: the lie. All the monuments built in Brodsky’s Soviet town were lies to liars.
What monument would I propose for NYC?
A statue to the street people, who are always to be found around monuments, but never on them. The sight of the ragged drunk keeps many of us in our uncomfortable dress, running to the office after getting pressed into the train, while the homeless lounge on the benches, drinking vodka at 9 AM. We endure tough, tedious jobs that are beneath us so we won’t have to sit beneath monuments to dead men.

What would Leonardo Do?

2008-09-09T07:08:00.000-07:00

Leonardo da Vinci said to students seeking inspiration, “Look at the crack in the wall.”
The line that the shifting earth inscribes, the short line written over a long time. Is the path our life inscribes like that, determined by the slight shifts we make in the world. We’re distracted by the wallpaper patterns that people keep slapping up, but the cracks underneath are the pattern of real things. Leonardo conveyed the depths of a persona. I suspect it’s not the depths of Mona Lisa we see, but the depths of Leonardo da Vinci.
Dick Davis writes in his poem, “Leonardo” of how the painting began to crack in the artist’s lifetime:

The wrinkles growAs if paint too
Partook of sin.

Fools and the Wise

2008-09-09T06:58:00.000-07:00

I read Grace Paley's interview in the Paris Review, where she says,
“The longest review I’ve ever had was an attack in Commentary magazine. Kind of virulent. My publisher doesn’t send me terrible things that people have said. I’m not the kind of a writer who gets into literary fights. I prefer political ones. As for my attitude towards other writers, I’m kind of short on disdain or contempt. That is, I don’t belong to the school of “I can only live if you die.” I tend to be interested in writers whose work is different from mine. Of course I’m saddened and angered equally by work made of contempt, hatred, misogyny, and too many adjectives.”
The interviewer says people describe her as wise. She responds,
“That’s because I’m old. When people get old they seem wise, but it’s only because they’ve got a little more experience, that’s all. I’m not so wise. Two things happen when you get older. You have more experience, so you either seem wiser, or you get totally foolish. There are only those two options. You choose one, probably the wrong one.”
I think one is both foolish and wise continually. We all choose to lapse into idiocy in vast areas of life. The best we can do is to choose wisely. Not to be an idiot about health, welfare, spiritual and love life, friends. While focused on those I fall behind in keeping up with technology, society, and clutter, checking the car, magazines, chores, cleaning, moisturizing, answering emails.

Grace Paley said in one essay on writing, “Directive:”
“Choose some mystery about your parents.
If you feel before you start that you understand everything—he’s a sadist and she’s a masochist, drop the subject.”
You don’t understand how little you understand.

What are we waiting for?

2008-09-09T06:52:00.000-07:00

“Eternal life does not make sense if we do not love our life. Eternal life makes no sense if we don’t live now. Eternal life is living here and now with all that we have,” Mark Bozzutti-Jones said in sermon yesterday.
I keep thinking, “As soon as I get through these problems, I can start really living my life.” But the problems never end. They’re like the sea I swim in. How I move through them defines my life. When the problems run dry, I’ll just be washed up.

Milky Way

2008-09-08T15:07:00.000-07:00

Walking home last night with Christine Reick-Sonntag, I looked up at the Costa Rica mountain sky. “The Milky Way,” I cried, and she started, saying, “Oh, it’s the same in German, Milch Strasse.” The word in Ancient Greek also comes from milk, “Galactica.”

The stars are a river—you cannot step into the same sky twice. The stars brush past us—the light is part of them, and is passing each instant over our skin. The fragile light has traveled millions of years to reach us.

Stars travel in all directions at once. The stream of the Milky Way is made of stones flowing in waves like water everywhere.