Tuesday, February 27, 2007
9:11 PM
Say hello to my new friend!
This is the midget snowman Ben and I built outside our house yesterday afternoon, with red kidney beans for eyes, a green pepper for a nose, four red chili peppers for a mouth, my maroon scarf wrapped around its head and neck, and Maita's fluffy green gloves on sticks for hands. We've baptized him Bobby. Look at Bobby lounging on the plastic lawn chair. Notice that he's naked where it matters. See him snicker while giving the world the finger. That's our Bobby.
* * *
by Wallace Stevens
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
Labels: house, poetry, winter
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
2:53 PM
1. Along with his copy of Von Trier's Five Obstructions, Daniel lent me his DVD of Chris Marker's 1982 film, Sans Soleil (Sunless), saying it reminded him of what I've been trying to do with my poetry. A compliment, really -- unless we emphasize the word "trying."But it's true, I LOVE this film that looks like a travelogue and reads like a letter and feels like watching a stone skipping across a pond, sending multiple, overlapping ripples to the edge. I'm not even talking about the seamless marriage of the images with the script -- even just the script itself is gorgeous. From the perspective (an unseen woman reading the letters and observations of an itinerant filmmaker) to the concerns (memory, history, survival in both the city and the wilderness, the function of cinema) to the lyrical language ("Tokyo is a city crisscrossed by trains; tied together with electric wire, she shows her veins"), to its obsession with people's faces looking back at the camera, the film, like the list of Sei Shonagon mentioned in it, "quickens the heart." I WISH I HAD WRITTEN IT."When spring came, when every crow announced its arrival by raising his cry half a tone, I took the green train of the Yamanote line and got off at Tokyo station, near the central post office. Even if the street was empty I waited at the red light—Japanese style—so as to leave space for the spirits of the broken cars. Even if I was expecting no letter I stopped at the general delivery window, for one must honor the spirits of torn-up letters, and at the airmail counter to salute the spirits of unmailed letters. I took the measure of the unbearable vanity of the West, that has never ceased to privilege being over non-being, what is spoken to what is left unsaid."
2. A Lesson in Other-ness:Last Tuesday, the class workshopped 5 poems from my "Lost and Found" series. One poem mentions the common street sign: Bawal magtapon ng basura dito. Despite the footnote with the English translation, Prof R asked me to read the Tagalog phrase and explain its context. So I did, and said there would almost always be a mound of garbage thrown defiantly under or near those signs. She stared at me with a hand against her cheek, fascinated. "Say it again," she said. So I did, more reluctantly this time. "One more time, please. Your language is so beautiful. Humor me." My classmates and I exchanged looks. She must've been high on something again. But I did anyway.And THEN, after a thorough discussion of the poems, she turned to me and said, "Can you say something about the weather in Tagalog?" I raised my eyebrows, and said, with exaggerated shoulder shivers: Oo, malamig ang panahon. Sawa na ako sa snow. Pero tutal, hindi mo naman naiintindihan ang sinasabi ko ngayon -- pwede kitang tawaging tanga o mataba o ... ewan, basta, nawiwirduhan ako sa yo. Ba't ang kulit mo? "Wow," she says, "your language is so melodic. Why not, one of these days, write an erotic poem to your language?" Anobayaaan...
3. I bought myself a small pot of ivy with Summer last week after our Valentine lunch at Thai Basil and last-minute shoe-shopping. The potted plant perches on my window sill, leaves happily outlined in a spring green lighter than the color of their hearts. I want to keep it alive at least until spring thaws all the ice and I see sprouts instead of snow in gardens. Spring better hurry -- a few leaves are already beginning to brown, despite all my efforts and lambing. I've taken to calling the ivy by name. Violan. Haha.Someone asked me how being in this country, away from family and most friends, has "improved" (oh, I hate that word) me lately. I could reply by talking about my apparently stubborn streak of optimism, the resilience (again, maybe just another form of stubborness), the willingness to be patient and find delight in the present even when disappearing seems easier. Or I could just say, I have a plant now.
4. The past week was horribly taxing, from Papa's hospital scare and other emotional events that felt like more than one rug was being pulled out from under me. The fantastic news is that Papa is recovering quicker and better than anybody expected, with the only complication being a manageable diabetes -- which means he won't be seeing ice cream over crepes anytime soon (this picture was taken at Cafe Breton, where my family celebrated my birthday last year without me). Otherwise, the doctors are saying he could be released as early as this Friday!I found myself saying Thank God a lot, wondering how empty that expression really is to me. I found myself saying I love you to family and friends, and meaning it. Again, I'm amazed by the generosity of people who came over to hold me and buy phone cards to call home with, who sent their e-mails of support, who let me finish their wine and sleep in their beds with other friends, who let me cry and talk myself out at the kitchen table one morning. You are all awesome.
5. Please, Spring, come soon. Let me write an erotic poem to you, bwahaha -- though nothing I write will surpass Cummings' spring poems:
since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
--the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says
we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis
Labels: family, love, movies, poetry, school, spring
Friday, February 16, 2007
3:07 PM
"I am not being trivial. Your separateness could kill you unless I take it from you as a sickness. What if you get stranded in the town where pears and winter are variants for one another? Can you eat winter? No. Can you live six months inside a frozen pear? No. But there is a place, I know the place, where you will stand and see pear and winter side by side as walls stand by silence. Can you punctuate yourself into silence? You will see the edges cut away from you, back into a world of another kind—back into real emptiness, some would say. Well, we are objects in a wind that stopped, is my view. There are regular towns and irregular towns, there are wounded towns and sober towns and fiercely remembered towns, there are useless but passionate towns that battle on, there are towns where the snow slides from the roofs of the houses with such force that the victims are killed, but there are no empty towns (just empty scholars) and there is no regret. Now move along."* * *
My dad had a stroke last Wednesday night, Valentine's Day. He was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance, with skyrocketing blood pressure levels and a clot in his cerebellum. He's still in the ICU, but is lucid and getting better and wondering when/if he can still drink beer. Prayers and positive thoughts for a full and speedy recovery would be greatly appreciated.Labels: family, poetry, winter
Monday, February 12, 2007
11:16 PM
_image.jpg)
Last night I bumped into my housemate Ben on the way home. He had a look that could best be described as gleeful. In his hands was a pair of white ice skates."Guess what?" he asked."You bought yourself some skates?""No," he replied, "I FOUND them on the sidewalk. I love this city!""Wow! Why'd someone throw them away? Do they fit you?""No way, but they look like they might fit you, actually."
"Uh, are you sure you want to see me back on the ice?"I tried them on anyway, and they seemed a half size bigger than my feet, but if I wore them with thick socks (as I should) they'd fit perfectly. The tips are a bit gasgas, and the inside fluff is more scruffy than fluffy, and the blades need to be sharpened -- but otherwise they're a perfectly fine pair of skates! Orbit, their front flaps say in fading gold font. We will let you glide in circles around the ice, they promise, winking at each other.I have a vague memory of this children's story about a pair of ice skates stolen by a boy named Peter (?). He wears them and suddenly they have a life of their own, taking him away from the other children on the frozen lake and into the forest and beyond. I don't remember what else happens, only that he turns out safe in the end, if a little shaken. Unlike the gruesome Andersen fairy tale about the adopted girl who puts on a pair of red shoes that make her keep on dancing, across ballrooms and roads and graveyards until she asks a woodcutter to chop off her feet. At which point the red shoes and dismembered feet in them keep dancing and bar her way to the church. She dies of a literal broken heart.I dreamt I died last night, shot in the chest in my high school by a man with a bow and arrow. I had been flying, then I sank to the ground in slow motion, and crumpled up. Richard said dreams about death are good, that they signal transformation. Sure, but what of dreams about being murdered? Jess said I didn't really die, that it was Cupid reminding me of Valentine's Day. Oh brother.
Labels: dreams, house
Friday, February 09, 2007
8:16 PM
Today I stayed at home and forced myself to work on this "Lost and Found" poem series I promised my supervisor tomorrow. I'm stumped, after four semi-complete pieces and two fragments and still no coherent direction or vision. I reread a couple of poems written 3-4 years ago that would've fit thematically into this sequence but that make me cringe now -- such closed all-knowingness and privilege! such appropriation of other people's pain to pound a metaphysical insight onto the reader! I wish I had a piano to pound on right now while I think. I wish Papa were around in one of his lugubrious (HIS word!) moods, playing one of his "putangina" pieces. So thanks to Limewire I'm now listening to mp3s of: Lizst's "Hungarian Rhapsody," Beethoven's "Sonata Pathetique," Rachmaninoff's "Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini," and Chopin's "Minute Waltz," "Funeral March," and "Heroic Polonaise" -- music I used to hear as a child on wet Sunday nights, when I'd hear him over the curtain of rain, and I'd go down the stairs of our old house for a glass of water and see him at the piano, beads of sweat on his brow, torso leaning forward, harmonic thunderstorms bursting from his wrists. That was the picture of the artist I grew up with, that dedication, that erratic fumbling and practicing for a perfection that was elusive, for a phrasing that was his own, and was unapplauded, except in the mind of an admiring daughter.
(The painting is Salvador Dali's "Necrophilic Fountain Flowing From a Grand Piano," 1933.)* * *
Here's an inspiring (if pompous-looking) 84-year old Vladimir Horowitz playing the Polonaise in A-flat major, also called the "Heroic Polonaise." My father's favorite section, I could tell, was that marchy movement beginning at 3:15 with that gong-like chord repeated six times, and later with the left hand moving in a downward four-key wheel. My favorite is that lyrical respite right after, starting at 4:35 and lasting more than a minute -- such a contrast and complement to the majestic torrents of tones earlier. Let the purists disagree, but I prefer Horowitz's imperfect pathos to Arthur Rubinstein's technical elegance in this 1968 recording (the same lyrical passage happens at 4:25 with Rubinstein).
I've also just learned that this was the last piece of music broadcast over Warsaw radio before the city surrendered to the Nazis, almost a hundred years after Chopin composed it in 1842. Wow. Can you listen to it now and put yourself in the shoes of those about to be herded off to face that unspeakable silencing? It's unfathomable.
Labels: creativity, family, music
Monday, February 05, 2007
2:19 PM
The Windchill Factor
I'm pretty sure I posted this poem in one of my blogs years ago (with so many under my belt, it's hard to remember which blog and which February) -- but it's only this year that I've come to REALLY understand it's less about Valentine-less moping and more about wintry despair and sluggishness. This year, I've learned about windchill, how the strength and speed of winds blowing from the lake turn the already awful chill (today at -15 Celsius) into something more frigid (-24). I've learned that "flurries" are not delicious, "cold feet" are not something to be taken lightly, and that "ice-breakers" aren't fun songs or games you do to "warm up" a group. That ice is not my element, that I can't skate and glide across the ice to save my life. That wearing powder blush on my cheeks is unnecessary, as my entire face gets red anyway every time I step outside. I've been fighting this almost instinctive urge to store heat by eating (and getting) fat. I've had to deal with territory wars in the kitchen, over the freezer and Ziploc containers and utensils (one housemate and her ever-present boyfriend have taken to hiding her pans and knives in her third-floor room). I've started apartment-searching again, and today had to walk out into a snowy world -- I felt like I was a character in a TV with really bad reception, bad white static. I miss my black fur sausage sleeping on a pillow beside me.February
Margaret Atwood
Winter. Time to eat fat
and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,
a black fur sausage with yellow
Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries
to get onto my head. It’s his
way of telling whether or not I’m dead.
If I’m not, he wants to be scratched; if I am
he’ll think of something. He settles
on my chest, breathing his breath
of burped-up meat and musty sofas,
purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat,
not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door,
declaring war. It’s all about sex and territory,
which are what will finish us off
in the long run. Some cat owners around here
should snip a few testicles. If we wise
hominids were sensible, we’d do that too,
or eat our young, like sharks.
But it’s love that does us in. Over and over
again, He shoots, he scores! and famine
crouches in the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing
eiderdown, and the windchill factor hits
thirty below, and pollution pours
out of our chimneys to keep us warm.
February, month of despair,
with a skewered heart in the centre.
I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries
with a splash of vinegar.
Cat, enough of your greedy whining
and your small pink bumhole.
Off my face! You’re the life principle,
more or less, so get going
on a little optimism around here.
Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.
Labels: house, poetry, winter
_image.jpg)
