is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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Sometimes a Spiral is Truer to Form (by which I mean life) than is a Narrative Arc.
In other words, sometimes chaos and tenuous connection say more about a process of thought, and the way we move through our own lives and the lives of others, than does an organized presentation of events as they appear to consciousness in the clean light of retrospect.
We are constantly in the middle of relations that we don�t fully understand. Those relations make or break things for us. And often, figuring them out wouldn�t help in either direction.
So. Get ready:
Yesterday afternoon I was walking in the door from taking the train back from Philly, and the phone was ringing. I answered, and it was Richard. There was no chair near the phone, because Linda came out from New York straight to the suburbs of Philly, and I made her a meal. I made her a lovely meal, so lovely that I actually set up the gateleg table and we ate at the table, using the chair from near the phone and the chair from near the bar, instead of eating at the kitchen island or on the couch, which is where eating tends to happen in my house.
The kitchen island is more like a peninsula in this kitchen, come to think of it, because it is up against a window and thus one cannot navigate around it. I call it a kitchen island because that�s what Richard always called it, and we bought it together, and that�s how it functioned in the kitchen in San Francisco.
I picked up the phone, and as soon as I realized it was Richard I laid down on the wood floor (no chair nearby, you�ll remember) and talked to him for a good long time. We laughed. That is what we do. But we also discussed things that aren�t funny. We do that sometimes too. This might sound funny, but he was deadly serious when he asked me to enter the essay contest for Dark Horse comics. If I win I get to appear in the next Buffy the Vampire Slayer comic book. He said, �I really want a cool and dorky philosophy of law professor to appear in a comic book!�
For that I�ll need my red platform boots, which I was wearing as I walked in the door while the phone was ringing. I was returning from Philly because Linda and I took the train in to eat yummy Malaysian food at Banana Leaf on Arch Street. We had some lemongrass seafood saut� and a vegetarian curry clay pot soup-stew. It was all Very Very Tasty. I sent the considerable amount of leftovers home with Linda to keep me from eating them, as I am certain they contained much more salt than I am allowed to eat.
Speaking of salt, my visit to the cardiologist (after his initial disappointing no-show) was encouraging because apparently �operation: no salt� combined with �project: drink water,� etc., has made enough of a difference in my condition that he switched me to a schedule of getting checked-up every six months instead of every three.
During that part of the story Richard interrupted to make me clarify for him what exactly my heart condition is and how worried people are supposed to be about it. I reassured him that everything I am doing now I am doing for two reasons: 1) so that I don�t have anymore fainting episodes and have fewer strange palpitations and 2) to keep anything more serious from happening later. The water works for part 1, cutting out salt and taking an anti-cholesterol drug works for part 2. I am perfectly healthy right now, but given the minor defects of my heart valve system, it is important that I don�t get any build-up or stiffness in the valves. Build-up is caused by cholesterol and stiffness is caused by salt.
Linda had asked the same question, and I told her the same story, beginning with, �remember how I almost fainted driving you home from the Mutter Museum when you, Wendy, and Yoktan came out for my bday party in QB?� She remembered. Anyway, I made for Linda a fine and unsalty meal of spicy lentil soup, a Portobello mushroom rice pilaf, and a salad with tasty balsamic vinaigrette. Linda brought a cute (because tiny) loaf of rosemary olive bread, and I had a tasty Vouvray on hand for our drinking pleasure.
As I prepared the meal I was listening to Roxy Music�s second album, For Your Pleasure.
Linda arrived laughing and crying (metaphorically) because a) she said that when she pointed at the loaf in question across some distance in the bread shop, her distance-perception told her it was a normal-sized loaf of bread, but when the breadguy handed it to her after she paid for it she realized it was a baby loaf. So she felt like a cheapskate. However, the two of us only managed to eat half of the baby loaf, and we weren�t being shy about the eating of the tasty tasty bread, so no harm, no foul. Also, b) she had bought a nice bottle of wine to gift to me, and the Greyhound people confiscated it. Apparently you can�t bring wine on Greyhound anymore. It hasn�t always been that way. In any case, I had not expected any gifts from her, what with all the many many nights I�ve spent sleeping in her guest room lo! these many years of our friendship.
But you know that�s not the whole story. �What? What?� You are thinking. �A story has been told, but only by half? Surely I was paying attention, but I discerned no narrative arc�� etc. Settle down! What I mean is that I just told you of cooking a meal and did not mention dessert. Do you think I cooked someone a meal without thinking of dessert? WELL, DO YOU?!
No. You do not.
My intent had been to make some sweet corn bread or corn cake because that sounded tasty to me on Friday afternoon. But when I got out one of my cookbooks to look for a good recipe, out of said cookbook fell a card in my Grandma Stauffer�s handwriting that said �Grandma Johnson�s One-Egg Cake.�
When I see my Grandma�s handwriting it always makes me simultaneously happy and sad, happy to remember how cool she was and sad because she�s gone. In fact, the other evening, when Gus came over and told me that my TV was cute, we were sitting around and he asked if I had ever read Frankenstein and I was all, um, it is an EPISTOLARY NOVEL. OF COURSE I HAVE READ FRANKENSTEIN. (I said it with this emphasis despite the fact that there are many epistolary novels I have never read.) And then I went on to speak of my lifelong love of letters, letter-writing, and thinking and writing about letters and letter writing. I pretty much left out the years I spent trying to write fiction about letters and letter-writing, because I am currently in a period of self-loathing with regard to that episode and so I find I cannot even link to the stories in question for you. I think they are probably not terrible. But right now I can�t look. They must remain in darkness.
This reminds me of the time my great mentor Philippe Nonet, upon receiving Heidegger�s Beitrage, finally available outside of archives, said to me, as he was in the midst of reading it, �this work is extraordinary, though I must confess that some of its passages still remain in utter darkness for me. I only hope I have enough years left in me to bring them to the light.� Philippe is Belgian so when he utters words and phrases like �extraordinary� and �some of its passages� and �utter darkness,� it is, well, extraordinary.
He has said other things to me, things that were sometimes not very kind. But perhaps that�s what a certain kind of a good teacher has to do. As Nietzsche says (and here I quote Philippe), �with love, always a little contempt.�
But we were speaking of my Grandma, a formidable and extraordinary woman every bit as difficult as Philippe, and a fellow lover of letters. She once wrote to me (she shared, and perhaps helped to form, my love of letters and letter-writing) in a letter dated May 14, 2003,�Dear Jill: I have decided that the art of letter-writing is dead. Email has taken away this lovely custom, and soon there will be no need for adjectives and adverbs. Eventually commas and semi-colons will go, but the period will survive to write .com. Daily I receive nothing but silly forwards that seem to come from illiterate ghosts who never include a personal message.�
As my cousin Adam once said to me, �Word to your Mommy!�
Philippe also said: �Love is not wisdom, but it knows it is not.�
Gus said, �Wow, your grandma wrote that to you? She sounds cool.� She was.
Sara said (over email): �You have a rare blend of gravitas and whimsy. And you are kind, and not as intimidating as you look.�
I read that and thought it could have described my Grandma, and that made me smile.
I was also smiling when Gus walked into my apartment and said that my TV was cute, and then he also handed me a CD. I had asked him to make me a CD of songs by Paul McCartney and Wings. And he did. He did it awhile ago, but for some reason he wouldn�t give it to me because he kept forgetting to print out the cover for it. That seemed strange to me, given that a track list, etc., wouldn�t end up being all that important. However, it was worth waiting for. Because the cover consists of a photo of Paul McCartney and a photo of wings. Really gross looking buffalo wings. No one could force me to eat such things, but the Paul-and-wings juxtaposition was worth waiting for. It makes me laugh every time I look at it.
�Grandma Johnson� of �Grandma Johnson�s One-Egg Cake� is my great-grandmother�even though I�m not related by blood to anyone named Johnson�and she was famous for forcing people to eat things. Not gross things like buffalo wings, but extra and extra and then more helpings of whatever yummy thing she had cooked. And then if you said you were full she would say, �oh, you didn�t like it. I guess I can�t cook anymore,� etc., which is of course now a joking trope of cooking in my family. The Johnsons took my Grandma in when she needed a family, and that is more of a family than some kinds of blood relations are. So Grandma Johnson is my great grandmother, with or without blood relation.
In that way it is also true that Richard and Linda are part of my family, for all the years they�ve spent front-and-center, backdrop, to-the-side, and yet always there in my life.
The cooking-of-dinner for Linda made me realize that I should eat at a table more often. I mean, what am I, a savage? I insist on eating with knife and fork, and won�t drink out of a bottle or a can or even a plastic cup, and I only like sterling silver cutlery, and then I sit on a couch in front of a TV to eat? Damn. I�m a SAVAGE!
But not like Adam Savage.
However, for a savage, I am not a bad cook at all (and, really, neither is Adam Savage). Why is it, then, that I am always just shoving bread and fruit into my mouth instead of making a meal? I think it�s all the time alone. It sometimes seems ludicrous to prepare a full meal for one person.
Richard used to cook almost every meal for me. I would wash the dishes. We would always laugh a lot at dinner time.
The Paul-and-wings photo collage makes me laugh in part because it consists of two photos crudely cut out of the two subjects, and then taped to a blue piece of paper. And yet that was worth waiting for? Somehow, it was.
The minute I put the Wings CD on I realized that, if only I had been listening to it last summer, I could have added another 30 seconds to my maid-of-honor speech at my sister�s wedding reception. My speech was about how people say love is blind, and how scientists have recently proven that �love is blind� in that it adversely affects our reasoning skills, etc. I countered that with Rousseau�s contention that �love has been presented as blind because it sees with better eyes than we do.� To which I might have added the opening lines to to my new CD, with the buffalo wings: Any time / any day / you can hear the people say / love is blind / well I don�t know but I say love is kind.
But really, my favorite is the call and response part of �Silly Love Songs.� I am not tired of silly love songs! I think that�s one of the things I said forcefully to my dad during a recent lunch we had when the Beatles came up as a topic and he was stating that Paul McCartney is about pretty-ness and catchy-melodies and trying to make people happy and not much else. Sometimes that is what we need! Let us admit that trying to make people happy is an ambition we might all undertake. OK, so that�s also the argument of Music and Lyrics. However, if you need to make a choice, listen to Paul McCartney and Wings instead. Remember: maybe he�s a man, maybe he�s a lonely man / who�s in the middle of something / that he doesn�t really understand.
4:52 p.m. - March 04, 2007
majortominor - 2007-03-05 11:04:55
Re your opening paragraphs, there is this beautiful Henry James line: �Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.�
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