It’s a shadow, and it glows! A glowing shadow. Kids, this isn’t just a crush, this is love.
It had snowed all of the night and most of the day before. The snow lay in thick layers, mostly lovely and untouched. And the shadows were BLUE. Glowing, gorgeous, blue. I must have seen this before in my 51 years, but I feel like I didn’t really notice it until this morning. It’s such a ridiculously pretty color. Is there a light inside that giant snowdrift? Is it glowing from within? I could easily believe there is a glowing world under all this snow, and it’s shining through. And it’s the paw prints, the paw prints lead us into it! If there is a magical glowing world under the snow, of course it’s the dogs who will take us there.
It put me in mind of Tintin falling into the Crevasse in Tintin in Tibet, and discovering a world underground.
And it put me in mind of Windsor McCay’s Little Nemo in the Palace of Ice.
But mostly it made me happy. I get paid by the hour. If I don’t work, I don’t get paid. I spent more time than was practical wandering around town trying to capture photos of blue snow shadows. And here they are:
Glowing blues: Reverend Gary Davis with I am the Light of this World
We’ve got snow, snow, snow upon snow. And more to come for days to come.
When I was in high school, during a piano lesson, my remarkable teacher stopped me playing and said, “What color is the light outside the window?” I said, “Blue?” and she said yes, and seemed so happy that I’d noticed. It was a snow day, like today. I still love warm inside light and cool outside light, and that’s never more beautiful than on a snow day. I love the quiet when the snow starts falling, I love the streets with no cars on them, I love snow when it’s new and clean and quiet (yes, again, quiet). In my little city I love neighbors helping each other, when they emerge from their houses looking confused and brand new. I love the feeling, ingrained from the days we’d listen to school closings on the radio, that this is a gift of an in-between day and you could do anything, but it’s probably better to do nothing–in your pajamas.
This is not now. A few years ago. My phone is broken and I can’t post a picture of today.
Long time long time crush:
“A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” – James Joyce
I tried to record the Podcast in which I discussed Out of the Ordinary, and here it is. I recorded it while it was playing on my computer, and the sound is a bit off, and you can hear Clio ringing her collar bells, and Isaac giggling, and David sneezing, and me typing. But there’s some good music and nonsense talking there as well. In case you missed it!
In which I annoy everyone by describing my dreams.
Thornton Wilder said ‘The dreaming soul of the human race believes life will come out right.’ I think it has; I think it always has and always does.You can’t be a stupid dreamer. You don’t have to face the facts that you look odd or that you’re voice isn’t right: Make them like the face you’ve got and improve your voice. …Here are the facts you have to face: If you don’t show up and do the work well; if you lack concentration; if you lack kindness and patience; if you don’t keep believing in the dreaming soul of the human race. Those are facts you have to face, and you may have to get out of the scene and fix yourself, or find a new scene. –Ruth Gordon. Ruth motherflippin’ Gordon.
When you don’t do things you believe you need to do in waking life, you do them in your dreams. This might manifest itself as an anxiety dream (my mom has a recurring dream that she has a stable full of neglected starving horses when she doesn’t practice her cello enough).
Or, delightfully, it might manifest itself as a dream where you do the thing you need to do, but with the beautiful lack of logic and wealth of possibilities that dreamworld provides. I need to write and make movies, and I rarely do one and never do the other. But in my dreams (which are after all so closely connected to films) I do make movies. I make beautiful movies, and I have all the footage (beautiful footage) shot, just waiting for me to edit it together. Such a dream leaves you with a pang of regret upon waking.
Here’s one in particular I think about all the time lately. Every day. I can see it. I want to make this film, but with my Malcolm as the star: “In my dream I was watching a movie from the late 60s starring Lawrence Harvey. It was a beautiful movie – all chrome and green. I wrote a review of it that said, ‘I liked the scene with the crows and the scene with the owls – all the bird scenes, in fact. I liked the humor and warm human heart beneath the stylish chilliness.’ “
And here are some others that are just funny or weird, but I love them all. If you don’t like having dreams described to you, stop here!
I had a dream that David and I were hanging out with Jackson Pollack and Lee Krasner. It was March, but they had a fresh Christmas tree with beautiful metal-vine-pinecorns on it. Jackson Pollack was making everybody write letters about horses.
In my dream I was in my childhood bedroom, and The Best Soccer Player in the World was doing that thing where they kick the ball into the air over and over. And there was an older couple, and someone said the phrase, “The time between them is not greater than the time before them.” And it seemed sad, because I knew they didn’t have much time before them, but they were happy anyway.
In my dream they’d just found Henry IV’s grave. And (in my dream) at the end of his life he’d gone through a horrible existential crisis: is there a God or not? Finally, he’d carved into his huge stone casket, “After all, it is better not to lead a life of sin.”
I had a dream that I found an old movie camera, and I could use it to shoot film or FLY ABOVE THE ROOFTOPS!!
Had a dream that my novel was printed out…a giant pile of paper, and someone who had rejected it had also written all over it in green ink. I’d written, “…rain-slick street” and they crossed it out, in green ink, and wrote, just say “It was raining.”
I had a dream about a donut shop called House of the Holey. (This is one I would like to realize, with a coffee shop that just serves donuts and bagels. But I’m not an early riser)
I had a vivid dream that EM Forster and a German Philosopher named Schille had both written treatises about the rights of animals and men. They aren’t real, which means that I wrote them, I wrote the treatises! They were good, too. If only I could remember them.
In my dream we had a restaurant. It was a nice space, and it was ours, but this really was a waitressing anxiety dream in all the usual ways. And then Hulk Hogan was sprawled out on his back, in some space between the bathroom and the kitchen, repeating over and over again, “I kick ass for a living.”
“Look at the sea. What does it care about offenses?” – James Joyce
…Rain is no respecter of persons the snow doesn’t give a soft white damn Whom it touches -ee cummings
This is a followup on yesterday’s post. (I think.) I have long held the belief that if there is a deity or higher power (of course there is, have you seen a baby tapir? HAVE YOU SEEN A BABY TAPIR?) if there is such a force, he is not human, he is not a he, humans were not made in his not-a-he image. The workings of the universe and our earth are so much bigger, busier and more important than anything we can comprehend. We are a spanner in the works. We have screwed some stuff up, but eventually we will be shrugged off.
I thought about this a lot last spring, at the beginning of quarantine, when we couldn’t talk to our neighbors, but the birds were still chatting and quarreling and singing to each other and making nests. We’re just a nuisance. And I think about it this spring, grateful for the hope that the leaf-buds and the birds and the light and the ferns give to us, despite everything we have done. Despite everything we have done. And they neither know nor care about any of it!
If you have ever stood on a beach, and watched the great beautiful beast that is the ocean washing closer and farther from your toes, to its own schedule, with an actually awesome strength, I think you will recognize that part of the sea’s strange comfort is that it makes you realize how little we matter, how little our offenses and grievances matter.
Here’s the rest of the ridiculously beautiful ee Cummings poem:
XIX
i will cultivate within me scrupulously the Inimitable which is loneliness, these unique dreams never shall soil their raiment
with phenomena: such being a conduct worthy of
more ponderous wishes or hopes less tall than mine” (opening the windows)
“and there is a philosophy” strictly at which instant(leaped into the
street)this deep immediate mask and expressing “as for myself, because i am slender and fragile i borrow contact from that you and from
this you sensations, imitating a few fatally
exquisite”(pulling Its shawl carefully around it)”things i mean the Rain is no respecter of persons the snow doesn’t give a soft white damn Whom it touches
And here’s Charles Trenet with La Mer, because I love it.
Not a lot of words in this crush-of-the day, but it is a heartfelt one. As in actually felt as a lift in my actual heart.
Like many people (if not most) I used to get depressed in the winter. Bleak light, short days, feeble sunsets and too much time inside all take their toll. January can be a rough month, and February even crueler. But in the last few years I’ve been ok with it. Partly, I suspect, because I am actually turning into Moley from Mole End. But much of it has to do with walking on the towpath every day. If you walk the same path every day, you’re alive to the differences each season. Of course in spring you hear birds and smell flowers and feel hopeful waves of warmth and light. But what I have come to learn is that winter has its fair share of beauty as well. The colors of decaying leaves and moss and lichen are richer by far than many of the bright colors you find in spring. And even as early as January, there is a hopeful light. Even as early as January the plants in my backyard are forming buds to make the leaves that will make me so happy when they’re bright and glowing in the springtime. Everything is already waking up, if you know where to look. And the birds are planning something…
If I’m being honest, yesterday was a challenge for someone trying to be hopeful about winter. A snow day with no snow. I did feel down, I did feel Under the Weather. But this morning there was a light asserting itself against a heavy slatey sky, and that’s one of my favorite things ever. And though I felt too tired for a run on the towpath, Clio decided we should forge on, and she is my boss, and I felt such a swelling of hope and joy, just seeing the light and the colors. I felt it in my heart.
Here is a selection of images from our walk. I hope the hopeful light makes you hopeful too.
Forgot the song! Here is l’hiver est la. Which I think means Winter is Here (or there) by my absolute favorite favorite.
In which a lifelong crush is awakened by a present to Isaac.
One of Isaac’s Christmas presents was a blank book that had a little loop to hold a pencil. And it is a special pencil. My whole life I have had a reverent love for blank books. The hardcover ones especially. I had to save them for the absolute perfect words or pictures, and I never had the perfect words or pictures, so I never used the books. The soft-cover moleskines, also an object of great passion–well, I’ve filled so many of them with words it’s like an overgrown field of tall weeds and grasses, with the very occasional wild flower or butterfly, but plenty of ticks and thorns as well.
One small green book, which my brother brought back from a trip to visit his friend in Paris when we were fairly young, I held onto it for ages because it was too perfect and full of possibilities (pictured above, left). Until I met David, and we decided to draw all the birds we’d seen in it, and the date we saw them (as we were falling in love). Which is possibly the most perfect use for a blank book.
And I love a perfect pencil or pen, too. I always have. The actual physical pleasure of writing with a good pen or pencil, the sound it makes, or the way it feels, is occasionally more important than the words it writes or the picture it draws. I was reminded of this story, which I swear is from an interview with Tom Waits, though I can’t find it anywhere on the web (maybe I dreamed it?)
This kid made a drawing, which he worked on for about two hours. And when he got to the very end, you could see him flagging and he sort of trailed off and he said, “And thanks to the pencil.” Oh, gratitude. Isn’t that beautiful? At that age, you’re not thinking about making art. You’re just responding. Where there are no sidewalks and no cops.
Well, I am glad to say that though I have beautiful blank books still sitting and waiting from decades ago, Isaac opened his, brandished his new special pencil, and started drawing.
And here’s another long-time crush, in which Tom Waits turns the beautiful words of a lost stranger into a beautiful song.
That moment in Cooking Videos When they Taste the Food They Have Created.
There’s an obligatory moment in every cooking or baking video in which the narrator has to taste the food they’ve made. I love this moment. It’s so lovely and awkward. They have to keep talking, but they have food in their mouths. Their own food! They can’t NOT like it. I’ve never seen a spit-take and an OH MY GOD, WHAT HAVE I WROUGHT!! There’s a bit of common language. The closed eyes, the tilted head, the repeated nod. Stalling till they can speak again. But I also love that most times they genuinely do look surprised and delighted by what they’ve made. “Damn, I made that.” Cooking or baking, as an act of creation, is like no other. No ambiguities about what’s in style or what is sophisticated. It makes you happy or it doesn’t. It reminds you of childish happiness, maybe, or a trip abroad with a loved one, I’m not saying there’s no poetry in tasting food. But you want to eat more or you don’t. I’d love to compile a video of just this moment in every cooking video.
One of my favorite such moment is off-camera. Everything this person posts is quiet and beautiful. Their mixer makes no sound (mine is loud enough to wake people in the attached house.) The whole point of most of these videos is how quiet and precise they are. There is no way in hell this person is a noisy eater. But in this ridiculously pretty off-camera tasting of a ridiculously pretty food, it’s just a loud odd crunch and chew. And I love it. (in case I can’t figure out how to do this, forward to 7:55 in the video)
When I was little, I used to become very taken with certain things. I didn’t just like them, I loved them. It made me happy to think about them, and in a way, the very liking of them defined me. Sometimes, admittedly, my affection took on an acquisitive nature. How I coveted the soft soft stuffed rabbit in the store around the corner, or the chocolates that looked exactly like birds’ eggs and came in a little straw nest! But as often as not it wasn’t something I wanted to own. It was a song or a picture or a color or an idea. This little drawing of a cat, a twig with red bark that I’d worn smooth at both ends, Mozart’s letters, the book After Man a Zoology of the Future, a periwinkle ribbon at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Tintin, Tintin’s blue sweater, Tintin’s shoes, the way Snowy eats crackers and Tintin eats mashed potatoes, my Maid Marian (the Fox) playing card, and on and on it goes.
And as I got older that feeling became somewhat muted, or so it seems. I still loved plenty of songs and movies and colors and ideas (I’m a fan by nature) but never really with that glow of specialness. That crush-y feeling. Maybe because there’s always a sense of outside judgement, maybe just the result of a grinding-down of my enthusiasm with the sandpaper of adult worries and responsibilities.
Last spring, after a month or so of lockdown and all of the fairly-constant stream of worries and cares that brought about, I walked Clio along the towpath, as I do nearly every day. A mulberry tree stretched out across the canal, trapping the light in its pretty leaves. Each time a mulberry fell into the water an excited armada of geese and ducks hurried over to gobble up the berry. Well, I LOVED everything about this. I love the graceful way a mulberry tree’s roots cling to the bank but the branches stretch out, strong but still vulnerable. I love the shape of mulberry leaves. I love the light in the water, the ducks’ flashing feet and smacking beaks. I like to shake the branches to make the berries fall faster. I recognized it as a return to that old feeling, the feeling that just liking a thing is a source of joy. Since then there have been so many other things. Just recently I love the Basque word for Squirrel (urtxintxa); I have a crush on an American black duck and her mate (they hang out with all the weird whistling mallards in our town); I can’t stop listening to this song and watching this video, though it is far from my usual taste in music; I like when football players pray with their palms up before stepping on the pitch; I love a dream I had about a blue deer on the towpath at night; I love the towpath at night; I love the Go Saddle the Sea Trilogy; I love the bluejay who took a peanut from the table I was sitting at; I like this unintentional poem, “I fancy/in this qualifying campaign/Peru will play worse than this/ and win.”; I like fruit bats eating bananas; I love the little wooden bird David made that fits perfectly into my hand and is a comfort in stressful times, as is the pipe cleaner man Isaac hung to the drawer handle on my desk, whom I also love.
In thinking about this, I have decided to post one thing that has taken my fancy every day. (Well, almost every day, probably, taking into account blue moods and work hours). It won’t be a whole post every time, it might just be a link. It won’t always have a recipe, though sometimes it might. It’s a way to find beautiful things in stressful times–to spread delight instead of worry . We’ll see how long we can keep it up! I’d love to hear about anything you have a crush on as well!
There’s a phrase the kids use these days that I like a lot, and that phrase is “for a minute.”
The Urban Dictionary, that irreverent testimony to the liveliness of language, defines it thus: “A vague reference of time, which could be a few days or a few weeks. The majority of the users either don’t actually know that a minute is a measurement of time or have dumbed down their own brains to the point of not caring that they sound like morons.”
I’m sure they know that a minute is a measurement of time, and I admire the deftness with which they capture the absurdity of its passing. A minute is a devalued thing, like a penny; but I believe it deserves better, it deserves to be held in higher regard. How contrary a minute is! How long when you’re waiting for work to end, how quickly-passing when you’re late. How agonizingly long the last minute of extra time feels when your team is up 1-0 and down to ten men, but how cruelly short when the situation is reversed. Time has always passed strangely, of course, but something about these quarantine days–staying in one place, seeing fewer people, not marking all the usual holidays in the usual ways–brings it all into stark focus.
It’s become a new old joke that during quarantine we can’t keep track of the day, the week, the month, even the season of the year. Though the big spaces go slowly, the small moments seem to crawl. We don’t have all the old users-up-of the day. The drive from here to there, the commute to work, time spent chatting with a neighbor, time spent wandering around a store. But weirdly I’m more protective of my time than ever. People, I do NOTHING on weekend days. I’m too discouraged and distracted to write, though I do think about it. What I do every weekend day is I watch Spanish football, walk the dog, and bake. THAT’S IT! and yet the few times we’ve driven anywhere in the last 9 months I thought, I don’t have time for that! I know I’m not using it wisely, but I find I value the time more.
I’ve written about this before, but it seems so apt at the moment, and it’s so beautiful it’s worth repeating. It’s from Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. He’s talking about a man condemned to die, waiting to be killed. “He said that nothing was more oppressive for him at that moment than the constant thought: ‘What if I were not to die! What if life were given back to me–what infinity! And it would all be mine! Then I’d turn each minute into a whole age, I’d lose nothing, I’d reckon up every minute separately, I’d let nothing be wasted!’” And what happened to the condemned man after his punishment was changed at the last minute, and he was granted “infinite life.” Did he live reckoning up every minute? “Oh, no, he told me himself–I asked him about it–he didn’t live that way at all and lost many, many minutes.”
I don’t think it’s overly dramatic to say that we’ve been surrounded by death the last 9 months, wherever we live in the world. I think it’s important to remember that fact, because in America, at least, we have the sorry skill of glossing it over, making it less important, dwelling on shiny trivial things. We are living through a pandemic. We are living through a pandemic. It’s such a strange contradiction that quarantine makes time pass slowly but the reason for it makes every minute more precious than ever.
So I’d like to reckon every minute up separately, in the new sense of the word, in which a minute could be weeks or days or years. And I’d like to value the time, value every minute, even if we’re just sitting in a darkening room at twilight, with a blue snow-light out the window, and we’re typing away at some nonsense, while our teenage son plays beautiful wandering video games talking to friends on the same voyage, though they’re each in their own houses, and the other teenage but adult son is buzzing on his new haircut and wandering around our actual town with a friend from college, and Clio is grumbling in her sleep, and we’re watching French football narrated in Arabic on an illegal stream, and the house smells like roasting garlic and newly baked bagels, and David is in the kitchen helping with the cooking. It’s not much, but it’s everything. And I will reckon up every minute of it.
This is our new way of making lasagna. It doesn’t use lasagne noodles, so in fact, I suppose it’s not lasagna, but we call it after the idea of the dish rather than the noodle used. We use thick papardelle noodles, or even a mixture of papardelle and Fettuccini, and we just tangle them in a thin layer. It makes everything lighter and more interesting. Nothing is carefully arranged, everything is a bit of a lovely mess. This was our take on a Margherita pizza. We actually made the sauce in the summer with tomatoes from our garden and from the farm we belong to, and we put it up in bottles. This would be probably best to eat in summer, but in winter it’s like a beautiful memory of summer.
Here’s Mama, Won’t You Keep Them Castles in the Air and Burning by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. One of my favorite songs of all time, and it contains the line, “Time does not cut deep but cuts most absurdly.”
Out of the Ordinary 