Monday, June 14, 2010

secession

so today i read in the news that the flemish belgians are trying to secede from the country. it makes me sad, because i've had lovely times in both flemish and francophone belgium. on the other hand, i have heard for years, from belgians and dutch people who spend time there that these 2 populations have always hated each other. if the separation occurs, i feel bad mostly for people who haven't hated the country, who have always thought of themselves as 'belgian.' i think of a friend of mine who now lives in nederland. when i first asked where she was from, she said, 'from yugoslavia. there is no yugoslavia, but it's where i come from.' she said it not bitterly but with some sadness. since then, i've read similar comments by writers from the former country.

still, i'm not knowledgeable enough to know whether in the long run---or even short run--the breaking apart of these particular countries (and countries like Czechoslovakia) is good or bad. what i do know is that 'country' is an artificial construct, having less to do with geography or with natural community than it does with whoever was the last group to successfully invade, annex, or enforce its power on a given body of people. history, from the trojan war on, has shown this.

in the US, children are forced each morning to swear their allegiance to 'one country, indivisible...' i understand those who object to God being tossed into this pledge in the 1950s, but the pledge itself is what i find most appalling, though i suppose historically inevitable. actually 'god' is almost gratuitous: the country itself has become god.

i remember as a child being told that the civil war was about freeing the slaves. i liked lincoln for that. then one year i read that though lincoln indeed did oppose slavery, it wasn't why he declared war. he declared war to keep the south from seceding. i liked him less after that--though i think that he was probably, as obama is now, the best we could hope for. he seems an engaging person as well,does lincoln, from the little i've read, and i suppose as heads of state go, he was a 'good man.'

but i've thought a lot over the years about that great god 'country,' and i've read a smattering of history about various countries, and i've lived through some of the best and the worst things done by the country i was born and live in. i want to do a piece here about 'patritoism' and i'll hold off on some of my thoughts about 'country,' and 'my country' and the very limiting conflation with 'my country' and 'my land.' [with apologies to woody guthrie].

but what belgium brings to mind is the idea of secession and its role in US history. if keeping the south from seceding all those years ago is the only way they could have ended slavery, i suppose it was a good thing. if history had turned out differently--if the south had seceded and the northern country had invaded it to free its slave--i think that would have been fine too [as fine as anything involving people killing each other could be].

i've lived all my life in new york and boston. most of my relatives are in cincinnati and i barely knew them growing up. in recent years i've gotten to know them, and am glad; they're very decent, very good people. i've been to cincinnati to visit them several times. i can't say that i 'know' cincinnati, b/c i've never traveled past my relatives' pleasant suburban neighborhood.

at the same time, i've gone to a small village in the netherlands every year for over 20 years, staying 3 months each time. i've traveled around other parts of nederland with dutch friends. i've studied dutch but i'm not good at it, and when i walk around town i don't understand much of what the people around me are saying. in cincinnati, of course, i understand the words perfectly.

but cincinnati to me is a foreign country. holland isn't. my little village is truly my 'second home,' and i miss it when i'm not there, though it's not a sad sort of missing. and it's not that i couldn't come to love cincinnati if i lived there or stayed for months--maybe i could, maybe not. would i object if it was in land known as a foreign country? not at all. it would be inconvenient because i'd have to use my passport, but in europe you get used to that.

how then can i be expected to love or feel loyalty to all the places in the US i've never seen? if events in my life had taken me for long stayes in chicago or philadelphia or for that matter upstate new york, i might love those places. i don't dislike them now. but they are part of "my country" in only a geographical way, and i suppose in a political way, since their politics, like the politics of boston or new york, influence who makes laws for me, who i pay taxes to. but that has nothing to do with love or loyalty. if a block of them seceded, i'd care about the practical consequences, certainly. but i wouldn't feel as if i'd personally lost something by losing a part of 'my country.'i would hope it was a 'velvet revolution,' with no one dying for it. i would mourn for all the victims if people did die, as i mourn each time i hear of people who die in violence anywhere. i don't think being not-a-country is any more worth killing for than being a country is.

it will be interesting to see what happens with belgium, because people there--people, not particularly flemish or francophone people--will be affected: some well, some less well, some,probably, terribly. a few very rich people will profit, as the very rich always do, and that's sad. it will be nice when some of them are so publicly horrible that the rest sacrifice them to the image of decency, like christians to the lions, but it won't matter all that much tothe lives of most ordinary people. flags will change, which will give work to factories that make flags, and that will be good for some workers, for a while. and maybe after a century or two, the flemish and francophiles can grow out of hating each other, since each has its own nice country to itself. or maybe not. like i said, it will be interesting.

Sunday, June 13, 2010

The Woman who Invented Macaroni Salad

The Woman Who Invented Macaroni Salad
Or
What Business Do I Have Writing about Shakespeare?


For some reason, I seem less able to settle in and write my thoughts around the plays than to think about writing about my thoughts. It suddenly intimidates me. I teach in college; I even get to teach the occasional Shakespeare play (I’ve taught Twelfth Night numerous times: Othello two or three times, Much Ado two or three times). For those works I have at least done some googling and read a bunch of articles. Over the years, I’ve read various books and articles about all the works; seen all the major plays many times, and most of the minor ones at least once.
The thing that seems to intimidate me now is that I haven’t done deep studies of any of them, and I suddenly fear I’m going to be presenting as original ideas I have come up with, never knowing that they’ve been said often by many people, and that my brilliant insight is in fact well known and even banal. I think of the woman I met in the 1960s who invented macaroni salad.
This was a sophisticated woman in her 30s, an artist who had moved to New York from a small town a few years earlier. When she first arrived, she got interested in food, and made various and possibly exotic pasta dishes. One afternoon, as she was about to heat up some leftover macaroni, a brilliant idea came to her: this might be good cold. The more she thought of it, the more excited she got. She put some mayonnaise on it, tasted it, decided onion would add a lot to the flavor, and chopped up the onion, along with a bit of celery. She added some spices. Then she settled down to lunch. The macaroni thing was delicious. She had invented a wonderful and simple dish. She was exhilarated.
The thrill lasted a few days, maybe a week. Then, wandering down a Village street, she stopped into a delicatessen for a few cold cuts. And there, through the glass behind which lived the salami and baloney and sliced ham—there was a sign that said “macaroni salad,” and behind it, a great mound of...her invention.
So here I am, about to commit to cyberland my profound realizations about Shakespeare’s plays. And I’m fairly sure that I’ll present some new idea that has come to me, and feel very clever indeed, and my readers (if indeed I have any readers) will look at it and say, “Nice idea—I liked it the first time I read it, when Lionel Abel explored it. Of course, he later realized he had been wrong when The Shakespeare Review showed that Hamlet couldn’t have meant that, because ....” And I’ll feel like an idiot.
So why bother? Well, it’s just possible I’ll come up with something original, or at least original to a reader who, like myself, loves Shakespeare but doesn’t have a PhD in Shakespeare studies. And even if my idea turns out to be unoriginal....well, I think again of that woman long ago who invented macaroni salad. She was, after all, right about one thing. Macaroni salad really is terrific.

Friday, June 11, 2010

shakespeare

My Shakespeare

One of the things I love most in the world is Shakespeare. So from time to time I want to talk about him here. Well, not about him. We don’t know much about him, as a person. Certainly he left no record of political beliefs, social concerns, or even personal tastes. So whenever I speak of Shakespeare ‘saying’ or ‘believing’ or whatever, I am talking purely about the writer, the things his plays say or don’t say. I can’t, for example, say whether he, the person, believed women were inferior and Jews were evil and declarations of war was noble. I can say, however, that whatever his own beliefs were, he was willing to present certain, socially comfortable, ideas to the public in his plays. I suspect that, being a man in 16th-17th century England, he largely accepted the general convictions of his time and place, including the assumption that monarchy was a reasonable political system, including the notion that Jews were greedy and nasty, including the idea that women could be intelligent and brave but were nonetheless lower than men, creatures for whom “honor” was synonymous with “chastity” and obedience to one’s husband a given. I suspect it because absent some indication that he felt otherwise (as for example, we know of Christine de Pizan a few centuries earlier that she came awfully close to believing in the equality of women, because she presented her writings as her beliefs), the default assumption would be that he believed, as most of us do, in the dominant ideas of his own age. But again, we don’t know that. I emphasize this because in our era it is easy to fall into trap of taking as a given that self-expression is core to artistic work. It was not an assumption an Elizabethan actor/playwright would have made.

On the other hand, some of us get too tied into the notion that Shakespeare is universal and thus transcends utterly his own or anyone else’s era. No one transcends their era. Shakespeare’s ‘universality’ is something else, much more complex and much more possible. First of all, he was a brilliant wordsmith, the most brilliant wordsmith in the English language. Second, he understood—perhaps not always consciously—the human mind; he seems to me enthralled with our complexity, contradictions, limits, self-delusions, all those things wired into the human brain that do transcend time, but that express themselves within the context of their era and their culture. He was a genius in a society that didn’t necessarily respond to the brilliance of playwriting; theatre was, after all, a fairly disreputable way to earn one’s living; it was certainly not ‘an art.’ Probably he didn’t see himself as an artist.

There are flaws in some of his plays. I think, given the theatre of the day, he probably had to suddenly change lines, even characters, in mid-writing, or at least between the version he had written and the version he had to rework as changes in casts, in laws, and maybe in his own mind occurred. One can debate endlessly whether a particular bit of confusion or apparent sloppiness was really deliberate in a way his own audience would know and accept, or that is simply too deep for most readers/audiences to understand. These debates can be fun: personally, I like the idea of a genius that transcends its possessor’s limits; I find Saint Shakespeare too much of a schoolmaster’s dream, too boringly pedestalled.

Anyway, I always find new things in plays I think I know fairly well—enchanting things, annoying things, inconsistent things, and things that are so staggeringly magnificent that it would take a wordsmith of Shakespeare’s own power to express their glory.

I love also reading works about him—agreeing, disagreeing, suddenly seeing an aspect I’ve never seen before. If reincarnation exists, I’d like to spend at least one lifetime utterly emerged in his works and in works about them.

So, it’s my blog and that means I get to do something I don’t often get to do. I get to analyze aspects of the plays that intrigue me, offend me, thrill me, and all of the above. I have absolutely nothing definitive to offer. I reserve the right to read the plays from any angle that strikes me—feminist, socialist, romantic, stunned schoolgirl who has just discovered a line in “Hamlet” as if the play were new to her. My standards for myself are few but strong. I wish not to read a play as though it were what I would like it to be, not what the text tells me. This means I can read lines like ‘were she ugly as a moor’ without ignoring their racism, while recognizing that as a Renaissance Englishman Shakespeare could not be anything but racist. It also means keeping both facts firmly in context. A playwright writing today, giving words like that to a character we’re expected to respect and without racism being an issue in the play, deserves contempt (and probably a serious boycott.) S/he should know better. S/he has been offered a context of democracy, of liberation philosophies. It’s a funny line to try and draw, a very squiggly line, and requires the line-drawer to distinguish between blame and recognition.

Once many many years ago, I was talking with Caroline Clay, the Boston Phoenix theatre critic, and I called Shakespeare misogynist. She took me to task for it, as she should have. Many of the plays, especially the comedies, are around shrewd, intelligent, loving and lovable women. He was certainly not misogynist; he certainly was sexist.

So this is what I plan to do—talk seriously and I hope intelligently about aspects the plays. They won’t all be political aspects. They’ll be whatever I’m thinking about at the time. I may as I go on explore the same play, twice, or even more. There’s a lot of stuff to say about the plays......Anyway, when or how often I’ll blog about the bard, I don’t know. I’m pretty new to blogging, but it feels to me like writing my columns for the Phoenix and the Herald used to feel, only without the confinement of a particular subject area. That is so cool!

Thursday, June 10, 2010

the wrong right women

Tuesday's primaries in various parts of the country garnered a lot of attention, in part because so many women entered, and so many won.

Ah, yes--this is what we fought for back in the '70s and '80s. more women in power! more women controlling the wealth! with our people running the country, women's traditional values would marry male strength, and change the world forever.

uh huh.

so what we have is a bunch of very conservative and very rich Republican women. Very very rich. Very very conservative. and very very rich combined with very very conservative means, among other things, being the enemies of social change. the enemies of all we fought against, way back when.

in the '60s, as the civil rights movement garnered headlines and President Johnson signed the civil rights bill, a shrewd, conservative mystery writer named Emily Lathem [actually, she was two shrewd conservative mystery writers; i always imagined her on double dates with Ellery queen] wrote a mystery called "Death Shall Overcome," which revolved around the entrance into the stock market [i can't remember if you get elected or appointed or what to the stock market, but anyway this guy was newly there as the novel began]. the series' hero, aging and cynical banker john putnam thatcher, is confronted by the curious righteous anger of his colleague, charlie, a wealthy playboy capitalist who has never, to thatcher's knowledge, had a socially relevant thought in his life. yet here he is, blazing fury at the bigotry that has emerged in the face of this black man's entry into the hallowed and hitherto white-only world of big finance. thatcher is amazed; what, he asks charlie, has occasioned this eloquent outburst? charlie, still furious, replies, 'the way i look at it, if a man has a million dollars it doesn't matter what color his skin is!'

class, in this novel, has trumped race.

it appears now that today, class also trumps gender. sarah palen has begotten a whole slew of rightwing female politicians who are billionaires, and as ready to destroy poor and working class women as dick cheney ever was. to be fair, they're equal opportunity slashers: they are as anxious to cut programs that help poor men [and boys] as those geared to help poor women.' allies and indeed members of of big business( Carly Florina was ceo of hewlett-packard and mary whitman of ebay) will help BP destroy the environment for all of us, male or female, rich or poor. out of work men will stand on the breadlines with their female counterparts. male and female children will die of malnutrition. and these upper class women will use the women's movement to help them do their dirty work. whitman is quoted in the new york times: "career politicians in sacramento and washington, dc, be warned: you now face your worst nightmare--two businesswomen from the real world who know how to create jobs, balanced budgets, and get things done."

Whitman and her ilk are unlikely to be "the worst nightmare" of the men whose ranks they so proudly join. But they are the worst nightmare of feminists who have fought for a sisterhood of equality, as they are the worst nightmare of anyone who cares about human beings and their rights on any level. i think it would be appropriate for BP now to appoint a new ceo from among the billionaire women. we deserve a chance to destroy the world as much as the men do. we can even have women working on the ships, so when the ships explode the next rash of oil into whatever part of the ocean is left, women too can die on board.

it's so nice to know that we too are overcoming....

Sunday, June 6, 2010

A Day in the Life

6 june ’10, 8 -45 pm



It has been an amazing and of-a-piece day, but nothing that would seem out of the ordinary. But a day I need to record, to hold on to.So, a day worth writing about.
These struggles with mortality, the pull of the only-rational, that are always a part of me. The meaninglessness of everything if this life is all there is; the craziness of whatever must be if there’s more—‘intelligent design?: more like god-as-a-mad-scientist. The sheer, precise naturalness of terror, where each living thing depends on mercilessly killing something else, shark and spider equally murderous, and what else should any of us be? The idiot explanation that god didn’t create evil; he just let us do it for him. But then ‘nature’ is built on evil. Beneath the equal reality of the tranquil leaves blowing in the breeze, and literally beneath the soporifically beautiful waters of a still lake, creatures killing each other. Endlessly chasing around in my head. The baby, that unbelievably real miracle, the tiny fingernails, will grow into the 20 year old, the kids I love at the castle and even in classes here, then will, with luck, grow into old age and die, and be then as dead as if they never lived. Or maybe not, but we live too much in the body to grasp immortality, the brain can’t do it, any more than the brain can grasp the nothingness that death creates if we, if everything, are not immortal. I have always perceived the difference between mind and body. I have always believed the equation of mind with soul. If there is an ‘I’ at all, it isn’t in the body—when you go crazy you are indeed ‘out of your mind.’ The brain is the link, the body part through which mind links us to our bodies, and equally cages us in our bodies, unable to grasp more than what the body’s brain can process. I’m always amused when science comes up with a brain explanation of any larger mind understanding, and rationalists use that to discredit visions, the psychic, the ‘out-of-body’ experience. The body can experience only what the body’s structure allows—but sometimes the body expands in some way for however briefly to embrace something beyond itself, and how else would it do so except for the brain’s accommodation? Woefully inept in anything scientific, I have always understood that there had to be something in the physical brain to explain how the clinically ‘dead’ can see the light, the dead loved ones, the god one believes in. the dead person is ‘dead’ only because science hasn’t caught up to the subtle continuation of the patient’s life, or they’d never wake up to tell about it. however dead the person might appear, they’re not dead. And alive, they remain brain-locked, and can see only as much as the brain can encompass.
Philosophy 101, with smatterings of psychology 101 and new age 101 and even religion 101. and worse, off topic, which was my amazing day. But on topic as well, the back story of a day ordinary, even banal, and also I think transformative.

The morning, as I recall it, was pretty ordinary—sleep in, breakfast, email, nap, lunch. Then I left for the concert, a double bill of ‘carmina burana,’ which I have loved for years, though never more than today, and a shorter, contemporary piece I’d never heard of. Outside my door as I began to walk to the T, a familiar face—a castle kid from 2 years ago. Any time I see one of these kids is a blessing from whatever force doles out blessings while spilling oil in the gulf of Mexico and zapping people with AIDS or cancer or Parkinson’s. so we chatted awhile, and I went on my way happy. I had worn my raincoat but now stuffed it into my purse b/c it was muggy outside. I got off the T at Hines convention center to get the bus toward symphony hall, which I hate doing. I prefer to take the t on to government center-- takes longer, but fewer stairs to deal with—and waited for my bus, feeling at first nothing but mildly anxious about maybe being late anyway, too antsy to read as I waited. So I looked around at the random assortment of people walking past. And then was seeing them---really hard to explain, I’ll have to try it in a poem later, prose can’t begin to handle it----but anyway, seeing them very clearly and specifically, each separate person, very distinctly and at the same time the total unity of all of us into that big incomprehensible mass of all-being that we’re infinitesimal bits of and still totally separate. And the bus came and I got to the concert on time.

I had a great seat, 3rd row orchestra, aisle. The thought of carmina burana brought to mind a woman I met once, at a similar concert, a woman who was my colleague’s mother in law and who was in terrible pain from the cancer which would soon kill her. They had brought her there, wanting to give her something she loved, and she was in pain, too much pain my friend had told me at intermission, to remain sitting, and they were going to leave, sadly b/c she loved the music. The row I was in was nearly empty, and I suggested she could lie down across it, which she did, and got to experience the music. This was a year or more ago, and hedda died a few months later, and has remained in my version of prayers ever since. There are lots of people there.
As I was thinking about her I was aware of the feeling in my fingers. For some reason whenever anything ‘psychic’ happens to me, I feel it in my fingertips, a slight not-exactly-tingling. It’s there when I try to pick tarot cards for a specific question i’m asked to look at, and if I can’t feel the tingling the answer won’t make sense and if I can it usually does. And it happens when someone who is dead makes their presence clear to me. If that sounds like a bad scene from ‘ghost whisperer,’ well, that’s what it sounds like. Hedda was there, almost as though I was ‘channeling’ her---I can’t stop using those quotation marks; too aware of how this stuff sounds—and anyway it wasn’t really channeling as i’ve understood it, which suggests the disappearance or at least the diminution of the self who’s the channel. But my self was absolutely there; engrossed in the music, fascinated by the variety of percussion instruments being used, all that stuff. Even chatting with the nice man next to me, and totally enjoying the conversation.
The first piece was lovely, by a composer I later realized I had heard before and liked then. Dominick argento. It was short, a sort of curtain raiser for carmina burana. CB was brilliant, intense, and though it’s always sexy, this interpretation was way sexy; I remember long ago being told that one of Beethoven’s sonatas was a depiction of the female orgasm; I could never see that. But at least as this amazing soprano interpreted it, the woman’s ecstatic response to the man and to her own horniness really did sound like an orgasm. The whole performance radiated sexuality, even more than the others I’ve been to. And so I was in that space that incredible music or ballet can get you in. that kind of nearly stoned feeling. So there that was, on top of the presence of hedda, on top of the bus stop experience.

When I came out, I saw it had poured heavily while the performance was going, a sort of synergistic connection of its energy. And on the train, when it pulled into one of the stops a college age guy rushed to it, forcing the door to stay open as his 2 friends ran to it. As he walked passed me I grinned at him and said that was cool. Then one of his friends looked at me and gasped—‘Karen?’ another castle kid, from 3 years ago. So my day was framed with castle kids, in itself already a high.

When I got home I turned on the TV and channel surfed for something to watch while I heated and then ate my frozen dinner. Everything bored me, up to channel 200; I usually give up before then. And then the info said in 5 minutes would start one of my favorite movies, one which rarely turns up and is one of the few modern movies I like, let alone love. So cool, I’d watch it. then it struck me: the movie was ‘heart and souls,’ about 4 people killed in a bus crash at the moment a boy is being born, and they have some mysterious destiny with him that holds them there until that works itself out, years later. Great fantasy film, and totally right for the day, and I think my fingers were tingling.

So I haven’t worked out the whole being-nonbeing thing [sorry, Sartre, you wouldn’t approve of your phrase being used this way]. All the stuff I didn’t understand, I don’t understand. But I do understand that this day was a gift to me from whatever force giveth and taketh away. And from whatever part of my brain controls the gratitude impulse, i’m very grateful.

a day in the life


6 june ’10, 8 -45 pm

It has been an amazing and of-a-piece day, but nothing that would seem out of the ordinary. But a day I need to record, to hold on to.So, a day worth writing about.
These struggles with mortality, the pull of the only-rational, that are always a part of me. The meaninglessness of everything if this life is all there is; the craziness of whatever must be if there’s more—‘intelligent design?: more like god-as-a-mad-scientist. The sheer, precise naturalness of terror, where each living thing depends on mercilessly killing something else, shark and spider equally murderous, and what else should any of us be? The idiot explanation that god didn’t create evil; he just let us do it for him. But then ‘nature’ is built on evil. Beneath the equal reality of the tranquil leaves blowing in the breeze, and literally beneath the soporifically beautiful waters of a still lake, creatures killing each other. Endlessly chasing around in my head. The baby, that unbelievably real miracle, the tiny fingernails, will grow into the 20 year old, the kids I love at the castle and even in classes here, then will, with luck, grow into old age and die, and be then as dead as if they never lived. Or maybe not, but we live too much in the body to grasp immortality, the brain can’t do it, any more than the brain can grasp the nothingness that death creates if we, if everything, are not immortal. I have always perceived the difference between mind and body. I have always believed the equation of mind with soul. If there is an ‘I’ at all, it isn’t in the body—when you go crazy you are indeed ‘out of your mind.’ The brain is the link, the body part through which mind links us to our bodies, and equally cages us in our bodies, unable to grasp more than what the body’s brain can process. I’m always amused when science comes up with a brain explanation of any larger mind understanding, and rationalists use that to discredit visions, the psychic, the ‘out-of-body’ experience. The body can experience only what the body’s structure allows—but sometimes the body expands in some way for however briefly to embrace something beyond itself, and how else would it do so except for the brain’s accommodation? Woefully inept in anything scientific, I have always understood that there had to be something in the physical brain to explain how the clinically ‘dead’ can see the light, the dead loved ones, the god one believes in. the dead person is ‘dead’ only because science hasn’t caught up to the subtle continuation of the patient’s life, or they’d never wake up to tell about it. however dead the person might appear, they’re not dead. And alive, they remain brain-locked, and can see only as much as the brain can encompass.
Philosophy 101, with smatterings of psychology 101 and new age 101 and even religion 101. and worse, off topic, which was my amazing day. But on topic as well, the back story of a day ordinary, even banal, and also I think transformative.
The morning, as I recall it, was pretty ordinary—sleep in, breakfast, email, nap, lunch. Then I left for the concert, a double bill of ‘carmina burana,’ which I have loved for years, though never more than today, and a shorter, contemporary piece I’d never heard of. Outside my door as I began to walk to the T, a familiar face—a castle kid from 2 years ago. Any time I see one of these kids is a blessing from whatever force doles out blessings while spilling oil in the gulf of Mexico and zapping people with AIDS or cancer or Parkinson’s. so we chatted awhile, and I went on my way happy. I had worn my raincoat but now stuffed it into my purse b/c it was muggy outside. I got off the T at Hines convention center to get the bus toward symphony hall, which I hate doing. I prefer to take the t on to government center-- takes longer, but fewer stairs to deal with—and waited for my bus, feeling at first nothing but mildly anxious about maybe being late anyway, too antsy to read as I waited. So I looked around at the random assortment of people walking past. And then was seeing them---really hard to explain, I’ll have to try it in a poem later, prose can’t begin to handle it----but anyway, seeing them very clearly and specifically, each separate person, very distinctly and at the same time the total unity of all of us into that big incomprehensible mass of all-being that we’re infinitesimal bits of and still totally separate. And the bus came and I got to the concert on time.
I had a great seat, 3rd row orchestra, aisle. The thought of carmina burana brought to mind a woman I met once, at a similar concert, a woman who was my colleague’s mother in law and who was in terrible pain from the cancer which would soon kill her. They had brought her there, wanting to give her something she loved, and she was in pain, too much pain my friend had told me at intermission, to remain sitting, and they were going to leave, sadly b/c she loved the music. The row I was in was nearly empty, and I suggested she could lie down across it, which she did, and got to experience the music. This was a year or more ago, and hedda died a few months later, and has remained in my version of prayers ever since. There are lots of people there.
As I was thinking about her I was aware of the feeling in my fingers. For some reason whenever anything ‘psychic’ happens to me, I feel it in my fingertips, a slight not-exactly-tingling. It’s there when I try to pick tarot cards for a specific question i’m asked to look at, and if I can’t feel the tingling the answer won’t make sense and if I can it usually does. And it happens when someone who is dead makes their presence clear to me. If that sounds like a bad scene from ‘ghost whisperer,’ well, that’s what it sounds like. Hedda was there, almost as though I was ‘channeling’ her---I can’t stop using those quotation marks; too aware of how this stuff sounds—and anyway it wasn’t really channeling as i’ve understood it, which suggests the disappearance or at least the diminution of the self who’s the channel. But my self was absolutely there; engrossed in the music, fascinated by the variety of percussion instruments being used, all that stuff. Even chatting with the nice man next to me, and totally enjoying the conversation.
The first piece was lovely, by a composer I later realized I had heard before and liked then. Dominick argento. It was short, a sort of curtain raiser for carmina burana. CB was brilliant, intense, and though it’s always sexy, this interpretation was way sexy; I remember long ago being told that one of Beethoven’s sonatas was a depiction of the female orgasm; I could never see that. But at least as this amazing soprano interpreted it, the woman’s ecstatic response to the man and to her own horniness really did sound like an orgasm. The whole performance radiated sexuality, even more than the others I’ve been to. And so I was in that space that incredible music or ballet can get you in. that kind of nearly stoned feeling. So there that was, on top of the presence of hedda, on top of the bus stop experience.
When I came out, I saw it had poured heavily while the performance was going, a sort of synergistic connection of its energy. And on the train, when it pulled into one of the stops a college age guy rushed to it, forcing the door to stay open as his 2 friends ran to it. As he walked passed me I grinned at him and said that was cool. Then one of his friends looked at me and gasped—‘Karen?’ another castle kid, from 3 years ago. So my day was framed with castle kids, in itself already a high.
When I got home I turned on the TV and channel surfed for something to watch while I heated and then ate my frozen dinner. Everything bored me, up to channel 200; I usually give up before then. And then the info said in 5 minutes would start one of my favorite movies, one which rarely turns up and is one of the few modern movies I like, let alone love. So cool, I’d watch it. then it struck me: the movie was ‘heart and souls,’ about 4 people killed in a bus crash at the moment a boy is being born, and they have some mysterious destiny with him that holds them there until that works itself out, years later. Great fantasy film, and totally right for the day, and I think my fingers were tingling.
So I haven’t worked out the whole being-nonbeing thing [sorry, Sartre, you wouldn’t approve of your phrase being used this way]. All the stuff I didn’t understand, I don’t understand. But I do understand that this day was a gift to me from whatever force giveth and taketh away. And from whatever part of my brain controls the gratitude impulse, i’m very grateful.