Lessons

The temp was just below freezing but the sun was bright and you were full of energy, so off we went for a walk in the cemetery. There are lots of things for an energetic and inquisitive little boy to do there. So bundled about as wide as you are tall, grandson, and holding hands we waved goodbye and walked to Mt. Hope and the entrance to the city cemetery.

Do you remember there was a branching oak stick with residual leaves that waved in front of you. You told me to stop: too scary, like a dinosaur. Then there were the white sitting lions in front of the Chinese shrine. You pointed out the ears, eyes, nose, toes, and we reviewed 'teeth'.

Then, after sitting a spell and looking at each other, we followed a flock of grazing geese who saw us coming and moved slowly away. So doing, we found ourselves in the midst of row upon row of  headstones, all about the height of a two-and-a-half year old..

Then you did what fascinated me: you acted me to name the letters carved into the stones, and repeated what I said (though consistently calling T, P). You even pointed to the carved flowers or leaves and repeated after me. What is going on, I wondered. 'M--E--A...' Was I teaching you your letters?  You know the first two-thirds of the alphabet song. Had you chosen these headstones to see again what the sounds of the letters represented?

Your mind in action is so exciting to watch. On occasion after occasion, I see networks of connection snap into place. Something new is presented and quickly you learn how it work. But this was conceptual; no physical cause and effect. Where did the impulse come from? Where does your eagerness to engage and learn ever come from? Normal innate development? Still seems wonderful to me.

Then, perhaps since the rows of stones were parallel, you felt confident telling me to stay behind while you went on ahead. 'Gong away' was the name of the game. Perhaps the stones structured the place enough so you felt sure you could find me. So off you went, a little ball with legs, through row after row, busy leaving. I watched as you went farther and farther with no sign of hesitation. I could have seen you if you'd gone longer but I lost my nerve and called, 'Hey'. You turned and toddled toward me, saying as you approached, 'Coming back.'

Again and again we played this game, and I marveled at your readiness to alone and exploring. That self-driven spirit of adventure is the key to all great human achievement, and I was seeing your allotment of it in action.

All this week as you've been with us, the next stages of your development, especially intellectual, have been so evident, so much fun to watch and work with. You're just a normal boy but, wow, what human beings are programmed to do! We are learning machines, especially when your age.

Talking to a friend this evening about teaching and he spoke ruefully of the regular necessity of persuading his students that being in school is not just something their parents or their society think is good for them, but what they can see as valuable for themselves. Perhaps, we concluded, we haven't done a great job of selling the excitement and satisfaction of simply knowing stuff and know how to do things with thatknowledgse to kids in school.

But you don't need arguments, grandson. You and all kids your age are voracious about expanding your  knowledge and your mastery. I can see it in your bright eyes and definite ideas. Let me be a model for you of that same eagerness. In fact, there's ever so much for me, your granpere, to learn. Let's together...

Clogs and leaks

The first thing on my birthday morning was realizing I had a bathroom drainage problem. Last night's last shower water was still grey in the bottom of the tub. I thought I'd fixed it the afternoon before but clearly I'd have to spend some serious time on the problem, a recurrent one but suddenly very pressing with four adults who regularly want to wash.

So my son in law and I got to work.  First, he upstairs and I down, we worked the snake. Trap closed. Water on!  Draining? No. Coat hanger from above. No obstruction, but why not draining?

The problem was perplexing, potentially expensive. This is when you, son in law. took the lead and suggested removing a spliced section of the drainpipe and flushing it out with water. So, after our excursion downtown to show grandson the new statue of E.A. Poe, and the perennial favorite 'Make Way for Ducklings' statues, son in law and I went to the plumbing store where the pros shopped to get new gaskets. You were great; ready with the right names, the right sizes. I look like a greenhorn, but you with your hoodie, full black beard, and confident, professional manner, got us exactly what we needed.

Down in the basement, we started to pull things apart, poke around and pull stuff out of the bathtub drain pipe, orange, fibrous chunks and slurries, not nasty but certainly awful looking. This is when you suggested that we can hook the garden hose up to the washing machine inlet and flush out the pipes. Reassembled, the tube drained with a loud gurgle and visible whirlpool. Success! But wait...

Suddenly, you pointed out there was water dripping from the cold water faucet every time we turned it on. A leak in the water pipe? A faucet malfunction? House water off, we pulled the ole and decrepit faucet and disassembled it, noted a old gasket, re-assembled it, re-installed it, and watched it leak again.

Now he and I were off, faucet in hand (and house water turned off; sorry, family) to to get a new gasket. So many options: will this fit, or that? Oops, we just stripped the stem handle thread. Hey, it's all cheap, buy one of everything, and throw in a new stem that looks sort of like the old one and maybe will replace the old one completely.

Working with you on this two-act domestic maintenance drama, I can see why you are so good at what you do, work with volunteers to rehab houses for low-income families. You listened; you thought out loud; you cooperated in testing my ideas, and suggested your own: 'Why don't we try.' You consulted with knowledgeable people,came up with innovative ideas, calculated and took risks, and, through it all, accepted the project as your own. Working with you was so smooth and pleasant, though the job was dirty and confusing.

People who work together regularly find a satisfying rhythm that they grow to love, but you have the gift of facilitating that camaraderie that makes work light. We're so happy you and and your family are visiting us, and, I assure you, I didn't schedule this plumbing failure to coincide with your visit. But I do have some pictures I need hanging...

Birthday

Saw light 66 years ago today. Once there was a toddler as lively as my grandson, then an adolescent, and so on, age after a age to the out - on - limb stage I'm at now

So far from being a live in the past fellow,  u feel awkwardly like a stepfather when my wife and children talk about family history. I know I was there and  wholehearted and important participant, but I can only vaguely remember these incidents,  if at all, and not with vividness, either as to the events or the emotions.

Around the dinner table last night, stories of family gerbils and hamsters had I'd all laughing, but was l there? I love my family but these lapses feel like a kind of dereliction.

All who have had this name have been fully there in the moment of occupancy. But each subsequent age occasions the extinction of the prior.

Thank God for a wife who keeps me informed about my past. 

Caught

It was after two when we finally got to bed and we were still groggy when we got up,  but we were so eager to see our just arrived grandson that we ignored fatigue and started interacting with him as soon as he woke.

As haggard as we were, you were that lively, engaging with the puzzles, blocks, figurines and other toys we had been collecting for you, particularly the mechanical and magnetic. If it whirred, squeaked, flashed, snapped, it caught your fancy. Small battery candles in a box with glass walls,  and wall lights switched on and off, 'Daytime', 'Night time.' Tea parties. Books galore with all associated animal noises.

You're at a fascinating age, building your basic vocabulary and grammar with every conversation. Your soft voice is often affect-less especially when responding to yes or no questions, probably because your mind is occupied elsewhere. When making requests or reports on his or other's actions--'Granmere, you do it.'--direct and clear.

Fully focused until you say you're finished, you're burning fuel at rocket ship rates. We're triple - teaming you, and when the bright light of your attention is beaming away from me, I feel mine dimming. 'Look, Granpere's asleep.' Caught.

Gobbler

Along Canterbury St, not as far as the juvenile detention center or the pre-release facility, but in fact just opposite St. Michael's Cemetery, I saw behind the iron palings of the Forest Hills cemetery what looked like a stuffed black plastic bag. On closer inspection, it was you, Mr Turkey, nestled in a shallow depression and enjoying the sun of this wonderfully warm late December day.

In fact, you are gorgeous. Blue-white head, flecks of bittersweet berry red along your back, blue flashes on your wings, tail feathers the tawny color of oak leaves. You lifted your head to consider me, but were in no rush to move, perhaps understanding well the uses of fences.

I've see your kind strutting along the edge of the road, even sometimes in full display with several females behind, though that not near here. You were reintroduced to the state more than 40 years ago and you've made yourself at home everywhere here.  Wily, confident, sometimes aggressive, you're the same bird that Pilgrims might have feasted on near 400 years ago.

What struck me, however, in our encounter was how attractive your colors are. What a flashy dresser! It doesn't take my heart as it would a hen's, but if I were wearing a hat this beautiful day, I would doff it to you. 

Woodcuts

 Woodcuts make my head ring like a bell. Something about the intense clarity of the pure black and pure white, interleaved and yet distinct, playing off each other to make portraits, architecture, landscapes, and visual expressions of abstract mathematical forms that have powerful impact from a few steps back and dissolve into geometrical ones and zeros close up. Literally, I feel my face flush as I examine such work, and my head feels packed as if suffering a bad cold.

So it was at the M.C. Escher exhibit at the Currier in Manchester, NH. I was familiar with his later work, but his earlier images were new to me. Up until middle age, much of this Dutch artist's work was representational, often of Italian scenes; then, more or less suddenly, he gave that up for the presentations of abstract mathematical forms that we all know so well: the Belvedere, the endless waterfall, the hands drawing each other and many more.

He started out with brilliant skills in all kinds of printmaking and and with a bold graphic imagination, and never stopped learning all his life, consulting with some of the world's most brilliant mathematicians and physicists to further his explorations. Following the course of the exhibit, we could see him, work after work over time, experimenting with tessellations, metamorphoses, reflections, infinite sequences in two-dimensions and threeo, illusions and impossibilities, each new picture a conceptual advance in the orderly and simultaneous presentation of clashing alternative perspectives: inside vs outside, near vs far away, general vs specific, object vs  background.

On the ride back, and over the kitchen since, we talked about what we'd seen: 'Did you notice the...' and 'What about that one...' and each item as if it were a prodigy. Yet, you were formal as man and artist, very precise in planning, producing  ('My hand still steady' was one of the blessings he mentioned at the end of his career) and printing.

You wrote: 'It can apparently happen that someone, without much exact learning and will little of the information collected by earlier generations in his head, that such an individual, passing his days like other artists in the creation of more or less fantastical pictures, can one day feel ripen within himself a conscious wish to use his imaginary images to approach infinity as purely and as closely as possible.

 'Deep, deep infinity! Quietness. To dream away from the tensions of daily living: to sail over a calm sea at the prow of a ship, toward a horizon that always recedes; to stare at the passing waves and listen to their monotonous soft murmur; to dream away into unconsciousness.

'Anyone who plunges into infinity...needs fixed points, mileposts...' and each of your carefully wrought images speak to both imperatives.

Yet the intellectual brilliance of your last work didn't rock me like some of your earlier, and how, using fine or broad parallel lines or cross-hatching, you created textures or borders.  The white streaked hair of Eve over the black shoulder of Adam in your Sixth Day of Creation: I looked and looked to see how you did it. Maybe it's woodcut 101, but visually a challenge to me. And the billows in your Second Day: I feel them viscerally even in memory. And the tender picture of your young wife: how did you vary the thicknesses of your lines to suggest skin and not polished marble? The closer I looked, the more lost I became in your technique, in your careful hand wielding one of woodcutter's tools--lozenge graver, spitsticker, scorper, chisel--moving repetitively but with modulation over the surface of a piece of wood. Then the making of the print so that here it's black, black, black and beyond that exact line, white as white.

You, Mr Escher, quiet and overt as you were, challenged my hand, my eye, my imagination. I came away exhausted and delighted. Thank you.

Newcomer

Christmas morning, grey and rainy, the temperature around 10 degrees C., no traffic on the road, no sound. On this day Christians remember the birth of special person many years ago. At the center of the story, a baby, then around about, the parents, then domestic animals, then working men, then visiting dignitaries. Encompassing all, the structures of power that count, control and brook no opposition.

There are angels in this story also, lots of them singing 'peace on earth,' and pointing to the birth as a sign of God's 'good will to men.'

This story is far from incompatible with your purposes, God-in-love, but what to make of it? The creche is touching scene, but where does it go?  Some years later the baby, once a man, will have things to say and do, but as  baby, simply a vulnerable, helpless being at the center of strange and unstable situation.

I remember seeing my own children, my grandchild, other children, each one special. How wonderful to feel the heft of, to smell the scent of, to feel the warmth of these feebly active beings.The drama was this: could I provide for, care for this being in my charge such that the potential minute by minute being realized in it, had a chance to reach fruition. My grandson coming tomorrow is running, talking, manipulating, playing. Our care has moved into a new phase.

The book by P.D. James and the movie made of it The Children of Men is one whose premise cannot even think about without feeling a constriction in my throat: a world without human births, without human children. The one birth in the story is has the power of unlocked door to someone in a cell.

Of course, there are lots of children born to us these days, but not everywhere. Even where birth rates are low, attitudes and circumstances conspire to make children specially burdensome and unwelcome. Yet, for you, God-in-love, each baby has significance as a participant in your Beloved Other coming into being, and already here. With each child, you look forward to life-long romance of hospitality, friendship, exploration, and with none, some say, more than with this baby at the heart of Christmas.

Now, the weather has changed. The sun is out and warm upon the cheek. The breeze mild and inviting. Water is flowing down each gully and swale. Winter has just begun, and this is a confusing but welcome harbinger. I welcome each new person as a fellow participant in this adventure of love.

Gulls

Wyeth's gulls, strutting head back, beak open, venting in loud, open-throated screams, or tearing to pieces some flesh naked or shelled, or bullying one another with arrogant caws and vicious stabs, or else preening and cooing prior to mating, or sated and resting, yellow eyes ringed with red: other.

In any extensive show of one artist, such as Jamie Wyeth's at the Museum of Fine Arts, themes emerge from seeing the same images appear in picture after picture, and Wyeth confronts the demonic in his studies of gulls. In fact, a sequence of paintings is devoted to the seven deadly sins illustrated by gull behavior. Another, titled 'Inferno' is of  a boy stoking a metal fire box with gulls making flying and crying all around.  Wyeth says the eye of a gull suggests more remoteness than the broadest expanse of ocean.

I remember in Sierra Leone visiting a village for an extended time, and taking with me a bag of rice for myself. My room opened off the central room of the house where I was staying, but it also opened directly outside. The chickens roaming the village soon discovered my sack, so when, for any reason, the outside door was open, there was soon a busy group of birds pecking at the sacking to get at my, my, rice.

To shoo them out of the room was a task because they wouldn't be herded; rather they scattered around the room and reassembled on the bag. As time passed, the hens got savvier and more persistent. The least inattention and I was having to confront a a flock of feathered fowl for whom I was a minor distraction.

Still, the bargain holds: our grain for the food they provide, their eggs or they themselves cooked. We perhaps get the best of the bargain; I know I ate some of my 'persecutors' in cassava leaf sauce. Who has eaten gull, however? Once their eggs were intensively hunted and the numbers of birds plunged. They're back though, brawling over our beaches, as much as sign of ocean as salt air.

Wyeth's gulls have the cast of the infernal about them, representing all aggressive scavengers of discarded or dead things, fully self-absorbed and remorseless, ever alert to chances to thrust their scimitar beaks into something wet and quivery. It's their cold eyes, their open throats, their shouldering, their ever-circling back that makes them seem alien.

It's this in people that terrifies us. The seven cardinal vices--arrogance, greed, gluttony, rage, lust, laziness, envy--are alien to none of us. Wyeth's gulls are us with wings. It's not pretty.

I don't want to be gulled by appearances, though. The blandest human expression can hide any of these, and equipped as well, as gulls are not, with ideology, strategy, and institutional reinforcement; witness the Goya etchings elsewhere in the museum.

Your choice of that ubiquitous shore bird to show us to ourselves was brilliant; the images pierced my complacency. I have to own my inner gull.

Cozy

An evening at home with our new vividly colored living room furniture, the music of Haydn, Kabalesky, Blake and Tviett playing, and the tiny tree, all summer on the back porch but now inside, festooned with tiny lights, twinkling away like a miniature Times Square. My wife working on a crumbling 3D puzzle, emitting words I never, ever hear from her, and I, drawing.

We've not had a evening like this for a while, not watching a movie or in our separate places reading. I attribute it to the new red floral living room set, and the season. The place and the time.
The power of interior design matched with occasion is clearly powerful.

My friend Yori told me about a friend of his, a man in his early fifties, who's been living voluntarily in an austere one room cabin with no indoor plumbing, wood-stove heat, a single extension cord for power, a man well-known in his neighborhood for his carpentry skills and generosity.

Now, it seems, he's renovating another larger cabin so he can live closer to his girl friend. Yori is helping him with wiring. What a change: from relatively ascetic and rigorous to comfort and easy. The space will change his way of life, and he'll wonder, with some alarm perhaps, if who he is is changing as well.

Running yesterday in the drizzly dusk, I stooped to retie my shoe, stood, tipped my head and looked long up at the tree crowns silhouetted against the grey sky. How still it was. Only one leaf waggled madly high up. I thought: I could stay indefinitely in this place, here in the open, listening to the rain and feeling it on my face, watching the light dim. I would be different if I did.

Places--rooms, buildings, open spaces--how you affect us, turning us in on ourselves or opening us out. Your influence is silent and static, except insofar as we move within you, and yet you press on our consciousness in subtle ways, and when we ask that incessant and pressing question, 'Where am I?', your answer insinuates itself into where our wardrobes of self-perception are kept. 'This is what you need to wear in his place.'

Much more than simple extension, than geometry and topology, than points, lines, surfaces and volumes, you are our foil, our mirror, our garment, our freedom. Inside coziness, outside the endless abyss of space, and that of the earth in between, shaped, shape-able, shaping.

Swaddled in tape, the bridge finally stands, and a figurine goat is placed on it, a Billygoat Gruff, to outwit the monsters underneath.

Green space

My friend Yori stopped by to tell me about the tour he gave the city's Park Commissioner of the neighborhood's green spaces

Much of what he and his wife showed was new to the city officials: an embankment, a section of open stream,  a filled-in quarry, an unmarked pauper's field in the city owned cemetery. The city has a plan to make sure no city resident is more than a ten minute walk from a playground, ball field or park, so he wonders: what about such places in our part of town? 

And what about this new building, said to be temporary, that the city is constructing opposite the Audubon nature center? Is this the first move in a wholesaler relocation of municipal storage facilities from more well-connected neighborhoods? 

Yori, this quiet, semi-retired man, is vigilant, dogged, is increasingly visible to people in City Hall. Don't these city folks have the imagination to see the green space possibilities here, he asks me. Do they see us at all? 

I confess I hadn't thought of these spaces as possible recreation areas. Canterbury Brook, that hidden, virtually inaccessible watercourse, could, yes, become strollable. That property bought by the electric company for a switching yard could indeed spare space for a park which would have views over the city. As you spoke about these possibilities, I found myself thinking in a new way about places I walk or drive by regularly. 

That's one thing I like about you. I hope I return the favor. Most of all,  I hope the city hears and takes your ideas and concerns seriously. Your eyes are valuable. Thank you for letting me see through them.

Solstice

This evening, around 6 pm, is the Winter Soltice: the shortest day, longest night of the year. The earth in its circuit around the sun is now more and more presenting the northern hemisphere to the sun. The days will lengthen, the sun will become more effective, winter will pass and spring will come. We know all this well ahead of time. It's a cycle sure to repeat over and over, barring unforeseen astronomical disaster.

Last night at a party to celebrate this astronomical behavior, we read aloud solstice customs around the world and over time. Bread was distributed and wishes were made: This, go! That, come! Pete Seeger was honored (?) in song. 'As I walk on that endless highway...' to spring,I can look forward another such moment in reverse in June, the tip into darkness, and so round and round endlessly.

I pray: 'Let the consummation of your creation quickly come, soon arrive....' which implies a belief in an end to the cycle, and something else after. Yesterday morning, I woke up, doubt-stricken. How plausible is any end to this constant turn-over of history, and (just as sharp) how ridiculous holding this belief must make me look. I must seem a crank, an apocalypticist, a fool. I was thoroughly pierced by skeptical arrows, launched by myself (others are too polite or indifferent to do this service.)

I never really thought to give up the belief, a sign perhaps that I'm not impartial. But then, how could I be? This assertion of a 'consummation' is linch-pin of that network of beliefs by which I'm guided and consoled. To dump them, and go 'agnostic' would be, it seems to me, like driving auto-pilot while peering through a fogged windshield. My blindness makes me uneasy. Or I could just turn on the defogger and adopt an alternate set of convictions.

What would, should, make me change my beliefs is evidence or argument demonstrating their inescapable absurdity or pernicious consequence. That is, I should give up my beliefs if they force me to deny what is clearly evident or demonstrable (or clearly deducible from what is) or to condone what is clearly cruel or callous. But the axiom of the autonomy of this universe (or bevy of same) seems to me no more compelling a starting point than the one asserting your existence, God-in-love, nor does the premise of the indifference at the heart of the universe seem a better one than than that of the friendship, hospitality and exploration characterizing your engagement with your creation.

Which leads me to the 'world to come,' a concept that flies in the face of the endless cycle posited by last night's celebration. Life continuing in another mode, call it heaven (or hell), after death doesn't flout of our day to day experience; the dead are not present in the same was the family across the street is. 'World to come' suggests not a mode but a place. 'Consummation of creation' suggests some kind of completion or sufficiency in this everyday world. 'Let [it] quickly come and soon arrive' suggests a moment of appearance. But this is the only place we have; the concept of progress is ambiguous (re technology, there's far to go; re person practice of virtue or vice we're no further forward nor backward than before (thought both are more institutionalized.); and a life-cancelling wave of gamma rays from nearby supernova explosion or the planet-rocking impact of an errant asteroid are the only significant arrivals we can expect from off-world. And while the four horsemen still ride, and may ever, any apocalypse will be wholly natural, perhaps of our own doing.

What then do I mean when I say the words 'arrive', 'consummation,' 'world to come' and what warrant do I have for saying them? This is what I asked myself yesterday.

Simply this: there will be a time when your relationship with the Beloved, God-in-love, will mature to the point of take-off into something constituted of elements similar to those we read in our history books and newspapers but fresh, exciting, and as yet inconceivable. And this I base on the conviction that you are ever challenging to encounter you and that our encounters are meaningful and are going somewhere. Your presence is what I find compelling.

Still, I am grateful for the cosmic circumstances which will bring spring and which allow me to enjoy the expectation of same. That is, I enjoyed thinking along with others about where we are, what's coming and what it means. Plus the chowder and the chat were great.

Take down

As I watched, the backhoe reached up into the bare crown of the sycamore, hooked a branch and pulled backward. With a tear, the limb came free and fell down on lower ones. The squirrel's nest on the highest twigs shook back and forth.

Is this any way to take down a tree?

Another thrust into the assemblage of branches, a combined tug-twist movement and another branch rips off. 'Why do you break me?' asked by the tree containing the soul of a suicide of Dante, who had injured it. My sycamore, no spirit, simply a squatter at the corner of a lot that had until a month ago contained a house, submitted mutely; the only sound was the clanking of the metal tracks as the backhoe maneuvered to get a better grip.

Now, all branches off, the bucket snagged the top of the bole itself and pulls backward, back and back, as the trunk bent more and more until it splintered and snapped.

Perhaps the thinking was: why use a chainsaw when the backhoe is already on site. A building has been torn down there, why not a tree? Cheap and convenient.

Further on in my run, I came across professional tree trimmers on the Esplanade. A bucket truck, workers with googles and gauntlets, neatly sliced branch stumps, a pile of lopped limbs on the ground. The whole grove seemed airier, able to breath easier, disburdened as it was.

I briefly chatted with one tree worker about the ugly scene I'd witnessed in Charlestown just a few moments before. 'This is the better way,' she said, as I nodded.

But trees, how would you want us to treat you? I know, left to grow, age and die naturally. In a forest, the other trees compete with you for space to do the same. If you have to be taken down, what would you rather: to be brutally shredded or surgically sliced?  Perhaps the second option seems better to me because more orderly, less violent. Would I rather be attacked on the street or disinvested by legal provisions?

Still, it was shocking to see you treated so disrespectfully. Flattened, battered road kill made the mistake of wandering into traffic and now thump under our tires as we pass, unable to stop. Your mistake was to grow in a place someone has another use for, but who can take time to take you down in somewhat as neat a fashion as you grew. My apologies for us.

Model

At the Met yesterday,  a theme: the artist and the model in encounter--Pablo Picasso and his lover Fernande Olivier, Suzanne Valadon and her Reclining Nude, Paul Cezanne and his wife in their sitting room of an evening.

The first job of the representational artist is looking, and of the model, being looked at. Hours, days, or longer, the model has to hold a pose, dressed or undressed, and wait while the artist captures what is interesting about posture and expression, as well as skin and hair color and body form, beauty-spots and blemishes.

The Boston Figurative Art Center which I came across through Meetup sent me an email saying Thea would be model for the last drawing session of the year, clearly a well-known and favorite model.

What does a model think of while posing? The straightness of her stitches in the case of the prim Mme. Cezanne bent over her sewing; why is he examining me as I just do my work? The fact that the artist was once model like herself is maybe what the pensive, fleshy naked woman reclining on the couch must have thought of the self-taught Mlle.Valadon;  perhaps I can do the same.. The loyal Mlle. Olivier, an artist in her own right, unclothed on an armchair; why is my talented lover tuning my classically beautiful face and abundant hair into a collection of angular blocks and ridges?

The artist use bodies to launch their personal visions, but where is the model when the impression has been taken and taken flight? Still clothed with the same body or garb, still with chores to do or places to go. Meanwhile the picture, or in the case of Olivier, the sculpted bust as well, take on their independent lives in studios and galleries and museums. Model are left behind, unless they find models of their own.

I can imagine an exasperation, or quizzicality, or resentment in these models as they see what had been done to their visual images, the way they looked. You, they might say to the man or woman behind the canvas or sketch pad, do you see who I am beyond the plaything surface?  Models often like doing what they do, and even set up housekeeping with their painters, or else write memoirs. Between posing sessions, and even during, the inner person breaks through, perhaps inevitably and incessantly.

Perhaps the gift of the model is just to be still so the surface can be captured and contemplated. I've been frustrated when people I've tried to sketch don't stay still for more than a few seconds. That line I liked and longed to capture is now gone, another in its places. The configurations change; aspects succeed each other.

There's a financial component to the relationship but there's more. You to whose beauty I wish to do justice, says the artist, and you who gathers up all my ephemeral visual effluvia and assembles them into something noteworthy, says the model: let us collaborate to create.  

Hand work

a New York City has any of, it has a lot of. Christmas greens, for instance: a whole street of shop after shop of wreaths, sprays, bundles of white - painted branches. Famous name shops not just here and there but chock-a-block.

And sidewalks full of scaffolding,  piles of trash,  vendors and people in huge busy multitudes. 

This is definitely not Boston, but that's why I'm here: to visit the museum that has dozens of what the MFA is proud to have a few of. I don't know what l want to find, but it will be there, I'm sure. 

Yep. As l went from the Cubist paintings of Basque, Picasso and Gris through New Guinea carvings to ancient Near Eastern reliefs, it was my hand that craved satisfaction. In front of piece after piece, it was you who wanted to trace the shapes, and know them beyond just looking. What I couldn't sketch, I took pictures of to week join later.

after Juan Gris

after Pablo Picasso

On the way back to Boston,  I sent drawings and photos ahead of me attached to texts. Hand, are you happy now? I'm happy when you are.There's lots of fun ahead for you copying the visual boots I brought back. Like you, I can't wait to dig in. 

New me

Last night's end-of-course party got a little raucous. There was loud music (we were asked to turn it down), dancing and arm waving(it almost took off), lots of munching on the variety of foods people had brought, and games. These were common party games like Taboo and charades, but most of the students hadn't played them, and indeed hadn't (I think) played any such games.

I and the young woman who'd covered a couple of classes for me in October and had been invited to attend set things up, got the people up in turn, gave them them challenges to present to their teammates, and sometimes gave broad hints. (Many thanks! It was super having you there. Best wishes for the Peace Corps, if I don't see you.)

We'd all been together week after week since September and our spirits were high (but completely sober), so everybody's effort was applauded--and it was hard work standing there, thinking how to express what some words mean in whatever verbal or gestural language they had available. We had a great time, but one, in particular, came alive in a new way.

One of the things I love about teaching at the community college is watching people gradually become more animated, engaged, bright-eyed. This is certainly described you, my student, these months. From our first days when I struggled over your name, through the direct interactions in class and the indirect through the assignments you've written, to last night when you seized the opportunity to perform, I've see your strict staidness turn into an exuberant openness. Your smiles were always so guarded and wry. Now you play with personas as if you were a girl.

We're in this for English proficiency, of course, and as we wrap up the term and think ahead to a new level--for you, and also for me-we can look forward to lots more learning. But what if what we learn and how gives us a chance to explore more of the possible modes of being ourselves? What if learning is not just about what we can do, but what we can be? I can see you're already exploring that possibility. I'm excited for you.

Hope to see you, all of you, again soon.

Heretics

Such scorn. No sugar-coating, just acid disdain. Whew! One sits up immediately as if suddenly soused with cold water. It's bracing actually, and also thought-provoking.

Following is an excerpt from a scholarly article on some current issue. As redacted and paraphrased, it could be about any controversy--philosophical, religious, economic, political, scientific, aesthetic.

The title: The Why [of the matter under discussion]; a Non-issue for [those in my camp] 

'I have also noticed that these two camps have little to say to one another, for their differences are deep and deeply entrenched. I can't say that I expect to change that fact here. I ...am a committed [member of my camp] and believe absolutely and certainly that empirical investigation is the proper approach in explaining [the subject] . I also recognize that I have little convincing to say to those opposed to me. There are few useful conversations; there are even fewer converts.' 

'How do I make my [position] intelligible? My answer is that I don't. The solution to this 'vexing' problem is all a matter of attitude.' 

'..the source of the conflict really turns on a difference in the rules each side has adopted in playing the game.'  

'In some sense, of course, I have a ready response to [them. They] need to alter theirs. To put it bluntly: their failure to understand the world as it really is cuts no ice... Their ideas are at fault, not the...method.'

'The sceptics do not share my intuitions. So be it. However, I do not feel inclined to convince them otherwise than I do trying to convince the religious that souls do not exist. I recognize hopeless projects.' 

'Explanations are social creatures. They are designed for particular audiences asking particular questions within a particular historically determined framework....Their explanations(those of the people of my camp) are designed for them. If you don't antecedently buy into this project, including its biases, history, context, central questions, possible answers, and relevant actors, then [the] explanation (of one of us) probably won't satisfy you. It shouldn't. 

Who's in and who's out is a matter of antecedent self-selection. I opt in; the sceptics opt out. Because we don't agree on the rules, my explanations don't make sense to them, and their explanations don't make sense to me.'

'Denying the project and devising different criteria for explanation is a perfectly legitimate move to make, of course.There is always room for more.'

This is extensive quotation but I want to give a fair presentation from the 1996 essay. A note of exasperation is evident, as well as disdain. There is no problem, the writer insists, so why do you insist on talking about it?

The writer makes double suggestion: First, she and her side are engaged in the proper pursuit, and those on the other side are not. Second, nothing can come of conversation because the differences are unbridgeable; the two camps live in separate worlds. The result: at a distance, a scorn; in direct competition, an anger the other is misappropriating their common name and misleading public perception. This is tantamount to heresy, and nobody is more hated than heretics because they are betrayers.

You (this is me, not the author speaking), you whom I oppose, whom I believe misguided and even dangerous, whom I wish would go away but won't, it's you I have to encounter, though the experience is distressing and somewhat defiling. If you would only open your eyes, you'd know how wrong you are, and be ashamed. (Who am I addressing? Any number of people and groups). In the meantime, I'm going to walk away and stick to my agenda, and you can do whatever the hell you want.

Complicated, intense emotions; genuinely high stakes: the history of ideas is riven with these kinds of conflicts. No anodyne answers will do. 'Love one another' by itself doesn't give us traction on our feelings of danger, outrage and disgust, and urgency as we act and speak. But orthodoxy/heresy storms mutate, dissipate, revive in new forms. Perhaps what we most regret in the next generation of conflict is what we felt compelled to do in the previous.

Perhaps all we can do is remember that good faith is not our monopoly, and bad faith not theirs; and not to give up on conversation, even such as the above. 

Awake

Far too early to get up, I was suddenly wide awake, my thoughts on that days blog post, what I'd said, should say, could say better. Back, side, other side, knees up, knees straight. Nothing was unlocking me into sleep again.

A bright idea about drawing! Should trying it when its light. No, let's try it now: tracing pictures on notebook pages laid on my bright phone screen. Aah! A little tricky avoiding the zoom in and out, but it works. Proportions and perspective captured.

Now sleep. No sleep. Finish the drawings? Open the blog? What? Music!

And so I called on you, Czech composers Petr Eben and your Suita Balladica for Cello and Piano of 1955. There in the darkness, I followed the deep-voiced instrument as it went through every kind of mood--long and lyrical, jaunty, troubled, elegaic--until finally, sleep.

What I hadn't realized was that in this piece you were reflecting on your years of internship as a boy at Buchenwald. Indeed, you wrote about it, 'It is a remembrance of the dead in mass graves and...a testimony of the wonderful faith of human beings. Faith and hope cannot be killed, the spirit cannot be defeated by external events.' The immense musical output of your long life spoke often to this point.

But I was just someone wanting 40 more winks, and loved the company of your melodies. So it is especially with music, I think. The deep structures of feeling the composer tries to depict or grapple with in music become just sounds to soothe would-be sleepers. And yet, I'm touched by this piece, return again and again to it. The movements, Introduction and Dance, Mazurka, Elegy, Toccata, are in just right order and of just the right length. Now I know better why I like it.

Did you know you would spend time with such as me? You wrote and sent out into the world something which hasn't yet exhausted its influence. Dark bedrooms, or concert halls, like an angel you'll visit anywhere to minister.Whether we sip at what you offer or immerse ourselves in it, the offer remains the same.

This colloquy of cello and piano is designed like a seed pod for reproduction and dispersal. Even our casual words can have long lives, but this was built to last...and last it has. You offered a lot, Mr Eben, and I've taken a little, and perhaps a little more. You wouldn't have thought of me, but you knew how speech from the heart works.

Ravished

A huge volume of air overhead; seen from above, the large space below tightly packed with seated, attentive people. Its exterior is one the most well-known in American architecture, and this was its justly celebrated interior, full of rich, deep color.

The music: exquisite, by Britten, Rutter, Taverner, Boles, Dupre, Posten, Sandstrom, Desamours: the cream of contemporary choral composers. Children's voices and adults': wonderful harmonies, fascinating rhythms, haunting sounds. I won't soon forget them.

The space carried the sounds carefully, especially those high boy soprano, and deposited them carefully in each ear. The words were not always clear, especially since normal speech rhythms were foregone for musical ones The music was almost overwhelmingly bright, colorful, patterned and penetrating. I was ravished.

But when spoken, the words were about God, meaning, I'm sure, you, God-in-love, and what happened long ago which was miraculous, they said, and still important today. But here's what I didn't understand: important as symbol, or sentiment, or as fact in the field we'd be wise to take into consideration?

You're more than just a symbol, I think, an emblem for some insight or perception we don't want to forget, do want to share. I take you to be a presence, actively seeking to engage the Beloved, which includes me, in ongoing ever-broadening conversation of friendship, hospitality, exploration.

You have an agenda: an ever-deepening relationship with an ever more rich and responsive Beloved all the way into the world to come. You pursue it all the time, never bullying or dictating or whining, or wagging the finger, but straightforward wooing.

A deep awareness of your continuing presence and your consistent aim and how the one is actually bringing to fruit the other is what I didn't hear in the words that separated the glorious episodes of music. You were very there then, I heard, but now it's all up to us because....

Sometimes people say we know you're present when what we want (or better than we want) happens, but when things go south, say that you're being mean, or gone, or were never anyway. I'm  sometimes one of these people. Sometimes people say we we're only got ourselves to thank if things go well or badly. I know that feeling too.

But I don't think you're an interventionist (we've seen what problems that can unleash) or mere audience (as most of us were last night) but a suitor on the 2nd person channel you specialize in. The world works as it does producing weal and woe, but we, I and others, can be open to your energy, potentiality and power (as you to ours) and do what we wouldn't have, couldn't have otherwise. (Who's to tell, somebody asks reasonably.)  And that's what we both are after: bringing the whole world into our relationship.

It's not as if those who listened last night don't live as if this is the case; many, many do, oh lives that abash me. But they think of you as either hectoring micro-manager or absentee landlord (this latter is the sense I got.) But there's another way to see you, know you, encounter you, and that's as God-in-love.

Merci beaucoup for last night's beauty, but as I look at a recent selfie of my mum and me, I think: what's aesthetic is one thing, what's powerful through presence is another.

Conscious

You in there! Yes, the one that's calling out, 'You in there'. You know who I'm talking to, because it's you that's talking.

All this comes after reading Searle's The Rediscovery of the Mind in which he presents his solution to the Mind-Body problem: body creates mind; we just don't know how. How something objectively knowable (at least theoretically) can produce subjective experience is still a mystery, but that it does, he takes to be a fact.

What's interesting is that he describes consciousness as a kind of presentation of the world to an observer/participant, a subject. The appearance is the reality as far as consciousness is concerned. However it may have been generated, it's describable to but not experience-able by others.

This is the provocative part: what is it about experience of things that is more than just exact description of them? Surely, precise-down-to-the-smallest-detail third-person representation is just as good as, no, is actually the same as experience; that is, what we can experience adds nothing to it.

Nothing? If consciousness is the coherent perspective of a situated observer/participant (agent/patient) of something attended to because of its relevance, then consciousness adds relevance, mattering-ness, to the world Is that nothing?

Watched yesterday afternoon the movie The Theory of Everything about physicist Stephen Hawking and his first wife. There the problem of consciousness is highlighted: far-ranging, deep-probing thoughts in an unresponsive body. The product: concepts expressed in equations that describe the direst events of the universe. What does the experience of conceiving these thoughts add to the universe they depict? That is, is the universe richer for having been thought of? Is the observer/participant relevant to a full representation of all that is?

Searle deals with the problem of introspection thusly: (Listen, close, this is why I don't like to think about you inside much)  For most things, a clear distinction can be made between observer and observed. However, since consciousness is examining itself, no such clear line can be drawn; cue infinite regresses, distortions, carnival mirrors. So, you, this is the last I'll say it, are doing a fine job, but I won't dig into you to find out about myself. I'll reflect on my thoughts, perceptions, feelings and behaviors, but I won't try to the find the man behind the curtain of appearances. There's no one there, other than all of me.

Care

Lethargic and woozy, waiting for this cold, I think it is, to finish wreaking its damage and move on, I cuddle under the covers, drink cider, swallow green pills ('Which will put you to sleep'), try to read, fail to focus, drop off again.

Slowly I feel the tide of battle turning. I'm able to stand, though unsteadily, even dress. Now soup and English muffins, now red pills ('Which will keep you awake.') which allow me to read.

What I first noticed a few days ago in my my head and throat, having gone full-somatic with chills and muscle weakness, has returned to my head, expressed in yucky yellow phlegm. Some joints are stiff and I move with studied care. I enjoy being indolen

Through all this, you've been just the nurse I've needed. You recognized that something was going on, urged me to call in sick (which I never do), brought me things to drink and eat and swallow, called me from downstairs to see if I wanted anything, stayed long enough to assure me I was not forgotten, but not too long, updated your prescriptions as I arose, and through it all encouraged and comforted me, kissing me where there was no possibility of contagion.

I would have survived alone and unassisted, but your ministrations eased and accelerated the process. But it was you caring that made the difference. You created the healing space wherein I could weather the tumult.

We're older now and times of mutual care are going to be more frequent. Both of us have been afraid of this, afraid of how they will change our lives and stress (read: expose) aspects of our relationship. But this episode, relatively painless, may be more the norm, at least for the next few years, and it draws us, I think, closer together. At least, I'm grateful for your positivity, your prescriptions, and not least, your presence.

Golden note

All I want is to be still, close my eyes, and wait patiently while you do what you want to my body.

My head rings, my limbs are heavy, my face glows, my lips are parched, my throat is full of gummy catarrh and I feel chilly, but when I sit or recline, the space my mind goes to is special.

Not a place of vigorous thought, nor a place of insight, it seems to balance on a single note running through whatever comes to mind. I'm ready to be roused from it anytime--just speak to me--but what I want is to sink into that monophonic mental state, and cruise.

I don't know what kind of virus you are, perhaps something between a cold and a flu, the symptoms are ambiguous, yesterday the one, today the other. I do know many of the things I feel are what civilian bystanders experience when their houses and streets are a battle field, my immune system against a host of you buccaneer molecules turning my cells into nurseries for your own opportunistic spawn.

Meanwhile, my consciousness sets sail on that golden note. I'm swept past all the people talking and walking by. Minutes pass like seconds. Ideas
arise and fall away. I crack open my eyes. Where am I? Still here? Ah, easeful, easeful, like falling asleep but infinitely prolonged, that twilight, afterglow in the horizon and one or two lights blinking on the gloaming...

Health is so much preferable, and I've got so much to do, but since I'm here, I'll appreciate what I can. Save what I've written, close the computer, weigh anchor, and I'm off.

Genteel

Intellectual, idealistic, prudent, proper: so Boston presents itself. Looking out my classroom window at the rainswept City Hall plaza, you seem eminently respectable, the busy people rush by under their umbrellas on their way to their way back to their desks.

I've been reading, listening actually, to the exploits of pirates and privateers like Henry Morgan operating in the Caribbean in the late 17th C. From the taking of Jamaica, through the sacking of town and cities on the Spanish Main, to the drowning of the town of Port Royal, the story of these buccaneers is remarkable--and there's a Boston connection.

Who bought and resold the loot taken from Spanish Porto Bello or Maracaibo?  Boston merchants. Later when sugar rather than stolen  property was at the heart of the Jamaican economy, Boston merchants used it to make rum to fuel the Triangle trade that brought slaves from Africa to the New World. Indeed, later still,  when the engine of industrial development was cotton production, Boston led the way in investing in the plantation system of the South.

Your Revolutionary lawlessness has been white-washed as patriotism. The intolerance exhibited in the banishment of Anne Hutchison has been atoned for by a statue in front of the State House. And you've had your explicit criminals, the Ponzi's the Bulgers. But the pilings hammered into harbor or tidal mud to build out the North End or fill in the Back Bay were financed by the proceeds of morally questionable (to say the least) enterprises. And butter wouldn't melt in your mouth!

Trading cities make their money where they can. I think of Tyre and Sidon, the Hansa towns, Amsterdam, all making their living bringing in cheap, transforming, and send out at a profit. One cargo outward bound and another inward, with several in between, a profit at each step. So much of the history of commerce is of exploitation of one resources or another, natural or human. So why should your hands be clean, St Botolph's town?

But we're all beneficiaries of the past, checkered as it is. The idea was that succeeding generations, over time, could be progressively de-sullied, as if, at any age we don't have our own deeds to answer for, and include myself.

But there you are out my window, being nor'eastered. Everything is battened down or else beaten down by the pelting rain. Yet the work of the city goes on. The opportunism of the past has lead to the opportunities of the present, which you're busy taking advantage of. The raw will to live, to thrive, and in your case, to be something special, persists, as it should.

Wire walker

While having soup and sandwich with my son and expressing outrage at what I'd just read in the paper ('Calm down, Dad'), I had a moment of insight a couple of nights ago which I've been rubbing between the fingers of my mind since.

In this blog, I've been exploring personal encounters and seeing them in a context of the world to come. Let's leave that aside for a moment, and think of images that express where we as mankind here and now are going, and why it's worth wanting to get there.

There's the Deus Ex Machina vision, a city descending from on high. There's the Excelsior! race to the top of the mountain. There's the final victory over the forces of (fill in the blank), ushering in a New Golden Age. The problem is not that these aren't desirable, but that we know enough to ask: what then?, a question that deflates all the glamour. The Millennium is now history and any future Golden Age looks glittery from here more from its sprinkling technological sequins than from something transcendent that the word 'Progress' once connoted.

Since my wife and I rounded the corner of our 40th, I've been thinking about how to evaluate that longevity. Lots of people are congratulatory, speaking as though simple persistence were what's praiseworthy in this two-person institution. Yet, hanging in there this long does have some significance, but what is it?  No dragons are dead beneath our feet; we don't dwell on the summit of any mountain; no descending city has yet to break through the clouds.

The image that came to mind as I sat with my son was of a tightrope artist, ever sensitive to the movements of the center of gravity, moving forward step by step. Each moment is an adventure in balance. In the circus there may be a net beneath, but the daredevils who sling wires between towers and walk out exposed to hazards above and below, left and right, are more what I had in mind. There's something heroic about it. When walking wire, one is successful until one isn't. The accomplishing begins anew with each step. The longer one doesn't fall, the greater the achievement.

Is this not like mankind, walking a wire anchored ahead of us we know not where, striving to maintain  balance as we keep moving forward. Indeed, our smaller scale enterprises that in total comprise the overarching story may be conceived and evaluated the same way.

One thing more. The wire walker between towers can be buffeted by winds. Birds may land or take off from the balancing pole. The nose may develop an itch. So I conceive of us walking. The unpredictability of circumstances and the incessance of human busy-ness continually threaten the balance and require adjustment.

But if our arms are ever extending in new explorations, our backs ever offering hospitality to new if sometimes awkward things, our interior configurations ever accommodating as friendships develop, (and useless things let go), we may find in these practices the signs for centering and the means for restorating equilibrium. We will be ever different, but ever going ahead.

Thus, the challenge of 2014 will be different from that of 2064 or 2114, or 3114, each age its own exercise in balance such as never before assayed. For however long we do walk in this way, we will have been doing something wonderful, an achievement worth aspiration. (For how long have I wanted to find occasion to use the future perfect progressive?)

As poorly as I've expressed this idea, I can see several advantages in the image of mankind as wire-walker toward an indefinite destination. It's open-ended in time; there's a built-in rigor (fueled by fear of falling); the multifariousness of our aspirations is acknowledged; the maintenance of a dynamic equilibrium (not just an Aristotelian mean) is our good work; longevity of journey represents our achievement.

After 40 years, is our marriage like that? Certainly we can expect changes, but will we always still take the next step? Let it be so.

And you, my beamish boy, tell me: is this image in any way compelling? Does it avoid the inanity of sheer extension of time? Can ambition find opportunity in it, and imagination find sustenance? Is walking the wire worth the effort?

Don't worry; I'll keep my voice down as I ponder these things.

Hostess

Abundance and diversity of edibles, drinkables and talkables. My mother had talked about the food: how much there was,  how many different kinds, and how tasty. Our ride hammered home the same point. When we got to the modest suburban home, it was clear neither had exaggerated.

The long table in the center of the house displayed a lavish array of stuffed pastries, beef, coq au vin, meatballs, pasta, scalloped potatoes, smoked herring, sushi, a variety of cheeses, relishes, garnishes, on and on and on. People were there to chow down, so a  line was slowly moving counter-clockwise around the table snagging a few of these, a little of that, a smidge of something else, and, oh, that look's good, and, well, I looove those.

On another table, cheesecakes, cream cakes, rich chocolate cakes, and pastries of different kinds, all yummy (as I can attest).  Add to this champagne and huge assortment of other beverages.

Gradually, as more and more people showed up and attended to the laden table for their first, second or even third rounds, the trays and plates, regularly replenished, finally began to thin out and we could see the platter beneath the plenty. At the beginning there had seem too much, but by the end of the evening, most was gone, and our hostess supplied containers to us to take away what was left.

The house was packed with every color and kind of people from all over the town, not one-percenters, just folks, casually dressed and primed to talk between mouthfuls, especially about politics. People were wedged in the sofas, doubled up on the chairs, huddled around tight-packed card tables, gesturing with their forks, only lowering their voices to take bites.

All this is the work of one woman who every year invites what seems to be half the town to show up once a year at her house and eat the food she'd been preparing for weeks ahead of time. Her husband seemed a bit overwhelmed by this annual project, as are others; indeed, a painting of our hostess smiling and serving hangs in the living room.

Thank you for inviting me (or rather my mother), but please, why do you do it and why so single-handedly? Was it political, because there was a clear preponderance of one party represented? Was it social, because just about every ethnic group was represented? Was it because of the season, though there the little creche was amusing more than devotional? Was it to show off your fine cooking skills (your pastries, with so many shapes and forms and fillings, were delicious)?  Was it your love of parties, though you had little enough time to talk? Was it because something that started small has became an institution, and people would be disappointed if you stopped--which you didn't do anytime in the evening?

I, on the other hand, only filling and emptying plate after plate, chatted about school policy with one person, the Canadian job market with another, party nominating processes with a third. There was an general enthusiasm that animated the crowd, not too loud but not sedate. We left a few hours later stuffed, talked out and happy (and a little in awe), thanks to you, who made us welcome.

Gaze

The one-to-one classroom feels to me like a dynamic place. There's a energy generated by the way we bring personal experience and different kinds of teaching materials to bear on the task: increasing fluency, improving intelligibility, deepening comprehension, and so on.

When I'm with a new student I haven't taught before or someone who has just come to the school and who is also from a place we get few people from, and this place one around which all kinds of myths and misconceptions have collected, then there's an extra charge in the air. When, moreover, the student is friendly and voluble, communicative regarding on all kinds of subjects related to his country, then our time is full of interest. I, he, we both learn a lot.

But beyond the things for me to learn about him and his country, and he to learn about English and the United States, there are also cultural differences expressed this way by a fellow teacher: 'I don't know how to read him what's going on.'

The gaze. It happened at odd moments in the middle of my presentation, maybe 3 or 4 times in the week, a looking at my face without question or impatience. It was as if I were being, not contemplated, but waited on for the next exhibition of who I was.

I found it unnerving. I realized how much I rely on facial expressions to cue my next words. Since I didn't know what his expression meant I was at a loss how to proceed: did he understand what I'd just said, did he need more explication, what?

Then there's the question of what that gaze implied about how I was perceived: a curious object, a friend, a figure of authority?  In his tradition, did it suggest some kind of relationship?

I found myself talking a bit too long and changing tack. That gaze knocked me off my stride, but I'm sure you were unaware of what it was doing.

It was a pleasure meeting you as student and person--serious, playful, hard-working, relaxed, intelligent. You taught me a lot and gave me a lot to think about. Perhaps there are several kinds of otherness: one, just alternative ways of doing the same thing; the other, different perceptions based on an alternative value system, that is to say, world-view.

I've tried to imagine what was going on, based on what I know about your tradition. But these are intellectual suppositions, with a different ontological standing than you and me in encounter in the classroom. I'm glad: otherness is not to be managed, but met. And I did. Thank you.

Weighing

The risk? The program might be modern, melody-phobic, snooze-inducing, you said; in which case, a possible waste of time. On the other hand, you had a movie in hand about food-truck cuisine, one with Latin music, touching moments, and jokes, a sure winner. So I went to the concert alone.

Your assessment of risk vis-a'-vis mine, our respective judgments of the value of possible losses, possible gains: how individual.

I went because I was unfamiliar with but curious about the pieces, and I wanted to hear live music, piping hot, made on the spot at the moment. The actions of the musicians are non-dramatic, a fact counterbalanced by the gesturing of the conductor, but what really matters is the immediacy of the encounter; before bow is put to string, there are only notes on a page.

At every moment, we assess what we already have in terms of what any proposal for the future is likely to bring us. If continuation or augmentation of our current situation in terms of its levels of personal affirmation, freedom, control, efficiency, convenience, life seem probable, we often go with it. Otherwise, the gain won't outweigh the irksome waste or even more serious loss. Chekhov's schoolteacher Byelinkov, 'The Man in the Case', is convinced that the benefit of any risk is never more than a small fraction of its inevitable cost.

What are the potential gains? The lottery tickets a former student keeps pressing into my hands when I meet him before class are full of possibility but thin on probability. Would I buy them myself? I don't. But I do check them to see if I've won; after all, how much would I regret passing up fabulous wealth there for the having on the off chance this scrap of paper has the bingo! sequence of numbers.

I think of you, God-in-love, initiating this universe. Before that moment: uniqueness, absolute autonomy, vistas of untrammeled future possibility? Afterwards, clutter, division, conflict, failures and frustrations, uncertainties. On the other hand, there's the possibility of surprises, interesting distinctions, dramas, novelties, and, not least, companionship. And here we are; it must have been a risk worth taking.

The Resphigi tone poems based on scenes of Botticelli were sweet: twitterings in the Primavera, carols (beautifully worked) in the Adoration of the Magi, and heaving seas in the Birth of Venus. The Elgar symphony: very long, gnarly, beginning, returning again and again to and finishing with a processional theme that reminded me of a BBC glorious heritage scene. (How much of the past is spoiled for us by what uses we've put it to).  I remember overhearing one musician telling student friends in the audience during the intermission that the symphony coming up was worth listening to: 'You won't sleep through all of it.' I heard another remark that Elgar was a favorite composer of hers, this piece in particular. Leaving Kresge, a student in black formal suit in the crowded lobby, violin case slung over his shoulder, said to another, 'I've just survived an hour of...'

The piece was hugely popular when it debuted early in the last century and it's obviously well-wrought. Maybe because it was a Friday night, I lost consciousness a couple of times in the adagio movement that so moved the conductor. Once is usually not enough to appreciate the specialness of something new. I need to, want to hear it again.

So, did you make the right risk-decision? I think you would have loved the Italian and been exasperated by the Englishman. And what I saw of the movie with the infectious rhythms looked good; I'd like to watch it.

Impressive to intriguing

More advice on growing vegetables: narrow, small leaves: more nitrogen needed; skinny stalks and shallow roots, purple-tinted leaves: more phosphorus; small fissile flowers; more potassium. I hadn't thought plant were known so well. To me, a latecomer and a dilettante, it's enough that any plant lives and produces anything. But commercial growers have the inside scoop.

Another tip: if I want to fight nematodes in the soil, grow sorghum. What? An unwelcome kind of worm? And that tall pellet-headed grass that looks like a roadside weed? What can I do with it?  Oh, a kind of molasses? Well, then... But, of course, a farmer is very aware of everything affecting the harvest, especially negatively.

Finally, what about my trees and the larvae that defoliate them in the spring. A detergent solution sprayed on the trunk and branches will irritate the delicate skins of the gnawers, especially as they crawl up from the ground.

I learned much of practical significance, which I suppose I could have read in books or on the internet. Talking to someone knowledgeable, though, drove all the points home. The information will allow me to advance my idiosyncratic agricultural and floricultural projects.

The plant culture we discussed, however, came off as a little industrialized. The remarkable fact of their growing at all was displaced by a systematic inventory of nutritional requirements, protective strategies and yields. Does large scale production wash away the wonder? How much wonder had I actually felt, and wouldn't it be replaced by more curiosity if I knew enough to find out more?

Still I felt a shudder when, urged to try growing an new kind of tree, the reply was that, first of all, a market had to be found. Can't grown if it can't be sold. That professional expertise, despite its personal appreciation, is not for nothing.

The returns from my garden are modest since, as overseer, I'm rather indolent. Still it's the non-commercial, individuality of each plot and plant that affords me most pleasure. Ranks and files of, say, uniform bell peppers... Unless I need to eat, I'll stick to mine.

Alma mater

'He who runs may read', said Edwin Blashfield referring to his murals which are in distinguished public (state houses, libraries and such) around the country, famous in the early twentieth, but somewhat embarrassing in the twenty-first. The works of this handle-bar mustachioed painter come to mind because I saw again last night the series he made for MIT's Walker Memorial Hall.

He was right. One morning I detoured from the path next to the river and ducked into to read the explanatory plaque and quickly glance at the pictures, three on the north wall, the Alma Mater triptych, painted in 1923, and two on the south, of 1930: Humanity Led by Knowledge and Invention and a Fateful Choice. Nothing need be puzzled over; even the symbols were straightforward.

Still, hokey as it all is, I like it. The alma mater harks back to the time when the challenge was to get lots of distinct people into a painting, and these murals are crowded. The little girls dancing through the forest in the side panels are delightfully insouciant. The spirit of Learning through Experiment to the left of Miss MIT is an old woman (I've always thought) but perhaps not, perhaps an old man,according to some of the students with me. The whole huge three part symmetrical painting was completed by the muralist who was near 80 in only three weeks: such energy and obvious enthusiasm, not just in the images and the subtle colors but in the huge scale.

The north wall picture of the scientist is a strange memento for the wall of a public reception area in a school that has been well-supported by the Pentagon: a scientist asking the soldiers and diplomats of the world in conference, 'Which of these two jars of gas do you want me to produce: the Poison or the Positive?

Your figures, Mr Blashfield, are the old fashioned in their smooth, slick-haired Flapper-era athleticism. Your ethnic sensibilities wee exemplified in the South Dakota state house mural so demeaning native Americans that it had to be blocked off with a false wall. But your question you posed in  your north wall picture of the scientist remains valid for its institution and all such: 'What would you have me do with what I know?'

That's the way, old fella. Look us straight in the eye and put the question, 'Now that you have become like gods knowing good and evil, what do you propose.' We can run, but we can't hide.

Fruit

Hefty with a smooth, orange-yellow skin, topped with a green lace collar around the stem: this is a persimmon. I''d never eaten on before but, inspired by the recipe of Indiana persimmon pudding in a Thanksgiving recipe list, I thought: why not find out?

After peeling, slicing and pureeing the mango-like flesh of 5 of the slippery fruit, adding lots of ingredients in a complicated sequence: sugar, eggs  then buttermilk and baking soda, then flour and heavy cream in three alternating stages, then mixing everything in the laboring blender, then baking for over an hour, I thought, 'This had better be good.'

Sure enough, the astringent taste of the fruit came through to me, and later, to my colleague who called the fruit by its Portuguese name 'caqui' and approved the recipe, and to the Mexico farmer who wants to shift his production to fruit trees from vegetables--whose plans got me thinking about tree fruits in general.

I remember in West Africa my first soursop. It astonished me with its completely new but delightful flavor of combined pineapple and banana. The spiky skin, the fibrous white flesh were like nothing I'd ever seen before.

I remember in one seaside town a large mango tree laden with fruit that people said was a diet mainstay during the hungry time of year. Mango. Completely unfamiliar to me then, How could I imagined its special flavor which has been described as a mixture between pineapple and peach. Yet all the X and Y descriptions fail to do justice to the bouquet, the texture, the unique of the flavor of each fruit.

The splendid peaches from my neighbor's tree across the street, small, with crystalline sugar gashes, the crunchy apples and juicy pears in pick-your-own orchards, the despised mulberry across the street...how many fruit trees...how many forms of pleasure offered to us.  The edible world is enormously rich in its variety, why do we not revel in it?  And equally, the visible, and tactile and auditory worlds. 'The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.'

Much as I love the classic tree fruits of my youth, there are new loves ahead.  My next adventure will be the pawpaw, a sort of papaya-like fruit that grows wild west of the Appalachians east of the Mississippi. Why have I never heard of it before? Why isn't it in stores?  Indeed, how many items in even Baby Nat's, my local produce store, have I yet to sample? How much more of the world's great flavors--luscious, piquant, subtle--are just waiting for me to learn about and actually taste. I may have a lifetime of exploration ahead of me.

And rather than all the work entailed in making puddings just to sample the flavors, I'm going to follow the Mexican orchardist's advice and use them in ice-cream.

Initiator of diversity, thank you.

Styles

The situation is so aggravating. The job was there to be done, waiting to be done, potentially damaging if not done, but you didn't do it. My sense of urgency is sounding sirens and flashing lights like an ambulance, but you didn't change your pace, which was no pace at all. Today was the day; why not today?

What do I have to do to make it happen, besides doing it myself, which I can't, and don't want to anyway, since it lets you off the hook, and you're the one who should see to it.

This is the dilemma of collaboration: different priorities, different speeds. My style: think about it, then act. Yours: think about it...and then think about something else, until I make a fuss. At that point, all kinds of developments can possible--arguments, recriminations--but not among these is actually getting it done.

I think, Is this passive-aggressive? Is this depression? Is this inertia? Is this part of a better plan I can't see? Am I being obsessive? Importunate? Bullying? The responsible adult?

I'll grant you I normally do it, and, yes, I was late in ordering something and was holding off until it arrived (which it hasn't yet  where the heck is it?), so I missed the opportunity to do it this weekend when I could, but nonetheless...it's not just mine to do. It's ours.

Okay, granted, if the deadline was day before yesterday then, no, tomorrow is not much different than today. But I've been thinking all day about it getting done. It's been iterating in my thoughts: I want this unfinished business wrapped up and resolved--and it could have been, but isn't yet. So vexing.

Tomorrow?  You'll do it tomorrow?  Okay, sure, great, why not?, sounds like a plan, good thinking, go for it. And likely it will happen, and there'll be no problem, and this inflamed spot in my mind will stop throbbing.

By this time, we should work together like clockwork, but sometimes, this time, no. If this were all we had going, it could be camel's last straw. As it is, let's try to do things differently next time, okay?

Bud

Ready for the the other side of winter, the buds on my pear and plum trees are set.

I've been been busy getting my house winterized: weather-stripping, caulking cracks, big sheets of plexiglass on my basement windows. The leaves are raked, bagged and gone, grape vine ditto, gardens stripped, hose wrapped up, chairs and tables put away. Okay, let the snow fall and the north cold wind blow; I'll be snug (I hope.)

The trees have less to do, and start as the days get short: no more growth, leaves turn and drop, and on the cellular level, water concentrations fall so sugar concentrations go up, inhibiting freezing. It's called 'hardening off.'

But it's your buds that are the toughest, situated at the very tips of twigs, right where finger tips would be on me (and I know how cold those get). Yet they're well formed, tightly packed inside glossy bud scales, hunkered down. You pears I planted this summer have confident buds but you I planted last year, stripped as you were by worms in May, have tiny tentative terminal buds and your lateral ones are better felt than seen. Hard times leave their mark.

I look for egg clusters, but see none. That little white patch at the root of the bud? I scrape it gently with my fingernail. No, it's simply one of the normal colors.

Each tree species, each variety has its own type of bud, or even bud cluster. The oak buds on the trees out back are bundled like rockets. I have no beeches but love to see the angular dagger buds on those hardy trees.

Later, when snow is pelting my window and I look out from my warm place, I'll see you out there, sleet-slashed, wind-whipped, and hope your little bud helmets help as you meet winter head on. Are we still going to meet come spring?

Mobile

You said, 'The underlying sense of form in my work has been the system of the Universe...that is a rather large model to work from,' referring to the art form you invented--the mobile. There were plenty of these to watch at the Peabody Essex exhibition of your work, Alexander Calder. It's not everyone who invents a new form of sculpture and goes on to exhaust (it seems) its possibilities.

A curated show, of course, but your words, chosen and printed on the walls, and the large selection of pieces from the Thirties on displayed in large, white alcoves illuminated with strong lights that cast shadows of the work on wall, floor, all contrived to put me in touch with your imagination with its cosmic cast.

Such delightful work it is, all form and no content beyond the names (and these contributed by others).  These mobiles (stabiles came later) are just multiple balanced wires linked together and hanging from the ceiling or else a stand of some kind. These wires, often with Arp-like shapes at either end, linked with a pivot joint through their respective centers of mass, are arranged enfilade or in individually, so that a slight breeze, a viewer passing by, stirs the arrangement and individual elements and groups of elements twist with each other, or away.  You wrote: 'A mobile in motion leaves an invisible wake behind it or rather each element leaves an individual wake behind its individual self...a slow, gentle impulse...'  I could see this as the object changed its aspect in space, but also in the layerings of shadows shifting on the white platforms below. You wrote, 'Each element able to stir, to oscillates, to come and go in its relationships with the other elements  of the universe. It must not be a fleeting moments but a physical bond between the varying element in life.'

Everything is obvious; all interiors open for inspection, and no implications beyond those of the forms themselves. One, called Eucalyptus, was perhaps 10 ft long suspended with, at the top, a frond-like array of shapes that in their overall elegant triangular shape reminded me of geese, or a goose, in flight. Below, some darting upward shapes like insects on the surface of a pond. At the bottom, a single writhing shape that seemed like a fish. Was that in your mind, or were you exploring archetypal shapes and arrangements listening for the click telling you everything had fallen into place.  You wrote, 'Not extractions but abstractions.'

Another, La Demoiselle, stood on a leaning tripod of metal legs. There was a sweeping movement backwards and then forwards (like Frost's woman drying her hair in the sun) and progressive descent into detail balanced by upward aspirations movements, and the whole ensemble tremulous and sensitive. You wrote, 'Abstractions that are like nothing in life except in their manner of reacting.'

I was more and more filled, as walked through the gallery with sense of things in the midst of emptiness linked and interactive and occupying space. Was this inter-atomic space or inter-stellar? It could be either or both. The wire linkages were visible but the permutations of arrangement occasioned by external forces on these structures (perhaps also linked in some way) were uncountable. You wrote, 'Each element able to stir, to oscillates, to come and go in its relationships with the other elements  of the universe. It must not be a fleeting moment s but a physical bond between the varying element in life.'  I felt myself, at moments, to be a flexible framework pierced and permeated by light, by air, and by other moving things I could not name.

Mobiles with dangling cartoon animals are hung over baby cribs to provide objects for infant eyes to track, infant hands to reach for. We, as a family, used to, at Thanksgiving, make clothes-hanger mobiles hung with washers and slips of paper saying what we were grateful for. I felt, seeing your work, that these simple, simple things get their power from deeper sources: 'How can art be realized? Out of volumes, motion, spaces bounded by the great space, the universe.'

And you wrote, 'I have remained faithful to this original conception: that disparity is the spice of life, i.e. disparity of form, size, density, motion and perhaps a few other things.' Disparity! I had to read my notes again. I expected you to have said 'diversity.' Non-parity, yet parity nonetheless, only on a more fundamental level. Which? What?

In the meantime, looking out my window as I write this at the wind wrestling the last yellow holdout leaves off the trees, I'm grateful to you, Alexander Calder, for this vision of yours embodied in these diagrams of dynamism, and for your challenge:  'Sculptors of all places and climates have used what came ready to hand...simplicity of equipment and an adventurous spirit in attacking the unfinished or unknown.'

Mask

The face she shows me is like a mask, frozen, heavy eyes and mouth. She takes pictures when I'm reading or drawing to send to our grandson. It looks inert, not at all alive, though I'm happily busy behind.  What role does this mask represent?  Or are all ny other expressions the roles? When I'm with people, am I just hoisting my features out of their easy chair and into motion? Is there life in the warping and twisting of the mask?

Yet the mask itself is freedom. I saw this recently when I handed out scripts for us to perform in class. Set situations playing out and roles to perform in them sometimes liberate my students. I remember one person whose voice register changed, and began investing her words with expression, and gestured even to touching the arm of the other student in the class playing a different role. She hurdled smoothly those complex sequences of consonants that so bedevil English learners. The words she said were the responsibility of someone else. She was able to go beyond them to what she knows from her life: how people react in different circumstances. She was able to speak from the inside.

At a bar or a dinner party, I don my 'jollyiness', and feel free to quip, laugh, play-act, make dance moves, and enjoy myself in ways I don't when alone or at home. Out, I'm Mr Bon Vivant; at home, Mr Bruin. Which one is the mask? Both?

Part of my reticence when meeting or finding myself in groups with new people is perhaps due to this: I find myself with no clear sense of what mask I should put on to cue that set of ready-made responses that allow me the mind space to deploy the things I do confidently know. For me, a social barrierf; or my students, a linguistic one. We want to get over it to what we know we know that's under the surface.

The mask allows us to unrecognizable to ourselves. Would my student have ever known herself as a stick-in-the-mud teacher of Greek and Latin in rural 19C Russia coping with unexpected romance? It's a role worth exploring. The script allowed her to go beyond the technical challenge of the words to what was interesting, even profound, in the character and plot.

As I encounter you, God-in-love, I wear masks that are sometimes comfortable, and sometimes a challenge. The reader at the kitchen table is easy for me to play. The role of the generous is something I find more difficult. I wear that mask to explore what it feels like, while for others, it's like the feel of water for the fish.

What about you, my lover yet other? Which masks do you easily wear, lapse into without thinking, and which ones arouse you, draw you out, teach you what you wouldn't otherwise learn? Like my housemate photographer, I''m on the watch.

Not spud

What has eyes but sees not?  Sound like a riddle. No, actually it's the 5 week son of my daughter's best friend, a baby with a bird's name, peering dazedly around with blue eyes. Oh, kissable, oh, warm head against my bearded cheek, oh, squeaks and bleats and tiny head-flops, and  fitting so perfectly into my arms...
   
We'd come for our ritual Thanksgiving evening of games, and to catch up on the lives of those who'd been the best friends of our children going up, and their younger siblings and their friends. There have been years and years of comings and goings between our families. The mystery of the passage of time filled the crowded cozy living room, fire crackling in the hearth. That our contemporaries are growing older is no surprise--so are we--but that the young should cease being little girls and become young women and mothers (and mothers to be) is wonder-ful. The evening was a reaffirmation of what doesn't grow old: our common love of word games, our affection for each other.

So I'd say to you, Mr Huggable: Welcome to the Planet, but you're as much a child of this blue-green globe as any who've gone before, and those foreseeable, carbon-based, DNA-directed. How  about this: Welcome to the World of Human Affairs, but you've been participant in the lives of all around you for months already, indeed even as as potentiality you were making an impact.

So Welcome to the Light and Air, and to the arms to those who didn't conceive you but do want to hold you. Today it's only me, friend of the family, later it will be lover, later on it may be son or daughter, and you'll do your share of carrying in turn.

On this holiday in honor of the virtue of gratitude, I appreciate with joy  the continued vigor of the old and vitality itself incarnate in the new--and so fetchingly, with just the right heft, just the right heat, just the right level of alertness. I look forward to getting to know you as your life unfolds, a prospect I'm grateful for.

Fear

Maybe you should have been more afraid, mouse, at least more cautious. To successfully raid one trap, doesn't mean you can do the same with the bigger and snappier one next. Your protruding eyeballs, one cloudy white, as I threw your stiff little body away, were probably the result of your neck being snapped, but they certainly gave you a look of cross-eyed shocked surprise.

You had reasons. Not so the yappy dog of my neighbor. No matter how kind we are to it, moving deliberately, speaking with slow, low words, offering treats, it still response to our presence with furious barkings and lunges. The animal is an exasperation and embarrassment to its owners. As a second hand dog, it perhaps had experiences that once warranted this response, but it hasn't learned new ones since.

Marylynne Robinson remarked recently on the recent respectability of fear, that it alone is sufficient justification for decisive, even lethal, response. Indeed it is a product to be sold like fish. On the other hand, there's the vast popular literature encouraging us to overcome our phobias of, say, public speaking, by acknowledging the uncomfortable and compelling feeling, and controlling it by managing one's breath and one's imagination and so on.

I remember once being afraid of airplane take-offs, but was mildly surprised on my recent trip to Scotland by how innocuous seemed the throwing of a massive object, me aboard, into the air. If, however, halfway across, we'd heard an ominous 'This is the captain speaking...' I would certainly feel incipient panic. The challenge would be not to not feel the fear but not let it provoke me ior paralyze me into doing something unhelpful or nothing at all.(I've experienced the latter reaction while rock climbing.) And what about what we may not dread sufficiently such as slow-mo dangers like climate change?

Are you afraid of us, God-in-love? Should we be of you? Rather we're afraid for each other because we do love each other, want the best for each other, and understand that risk or loss are not make-believe. However, through my relationship with you, I'm changing the way I deal with fear.

For one thing, I'm coming to understand that face to face with something alarming, a 'you' response is better than an 'I/it' one. I saw this on the train the other day when, jostled by some girls, I mentally rehearsed some snarky lines, until I actually looked at them, saw them chatting, and felt what had risen in me melt away. No danger there, of course, but if, in other circumstances, we can encounter an assailant as 'you' rather than, say, a demon, we might open to options other than bullets. The overwhelming and terrifying alien entity may become open to negotiation, even interesting.

Indeed, while fear tends to polarize our options, and limit them to now or never shoot or die, the complexity of this world and your presence in it make it a fount of opportunities we do not know, may not even suspect, that can and often do deflect the march to inexorable doom and finesse the dilemma we find ourselves in.

Still the passengers of United Airlines Flight 93 still all lost their lives--as will we all one day. Yet their courage has a quality of lastingness that is secure until the world to come. Our achievements even as we live but certainly after we die are in the public domain and subject to the vicissitudes thereof, but that which we desire and dare of hospitality, friendship and exploration is more significant than death itself.

Or so I think as I sit here in my tight book-lined workroom on Thanksgiving morning with the prospects of good food and good company ahead. I don't feel even a flicker of anxiety at this moment, but I know even small changes in circumstance can let fear in the door. Ahead of time, I can't say how well I will manage. But you, God-in-love, offer a way to live, a place to be, that obviates fear. This is what I want and mean to have.

Beastie

Just the quickest glimpse of this morning as I entered the pre-dawn kitchen to get breakfast and prepare for school. Just the merest flicker in my periphery; it might have been an eyelash falling. A few minutes later, there!, a definite tail attached to a tiny animal scurrying into the side room. A few strides forward and I was in time to see it disappear into a closet.

A mouse, maybe one of several. This is the season for brown field mice to find their way inside. Perhaps because I've been sealing the house for winter, this one which may have been reconnoitering is trapped. Not unattractive, mice nibble, nest, leave droppings, can carry disease, and do stink. They've got to go.

This one, however, seemed oblivious to our ancient enmity, for it came out of the room with the closet and ran under the stove whence it assayed an excursion into the center of the room. With tiny bead-like eyes, active and uplifted tail, it seemed reckless. Hadn't its teachers instructed it in caution? A quick stamp of my foot and it beat a hasty retreat back under the stove from which it peeped out.

This house is no stranger to animal visitors: ants, spiders, moths (these last few evenings) make their way in through their secret entrances and exits, so too mice this time of year. It's small house with room enough for two empty-nesters, but, sorry, none for you.

You are, though, such a pretty little creature: compact, delicate, quick, and with a boldness suggesting youth and callow inexperience. Though you're not quite the 'wee, sleekit, cowerin, tim'rous beastie,' I can still say with Robert Burns:

I'm truly sorry Man's dominion
Has broken Nature's social union,
An' justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle,
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An' fellow-mortal!

It's not with pleasure that tonight I set the traps.