notes | archives | vivian@ June 18, 2004 Danforth and Pape To the guy in the black SUV who called out my name and kindly asked how I was doing as I was strolling along Danforth at Pape — I'm sorry I didn't wave back with quite as much enthusiasm. I couldn't tell who you were. Perhaps I should have responded, "Blind!" instead of "Fine!" ¤ June 11, 2004 The Ontological Status of Ice Cream redux Is it so wrong that whenever I see a sideways heart emoticon - <3 - I see a double scoop of ice cream? <3 for everyone. ¤ June 8, 2004 Christopher Dewdney is Acquainted with the Night In another age, lush forests covered Ellesmere Island. At that latitude, the summer nights were very long. And to think of three-month long tropical nights, I feel quite cheated by going to bed at 1 a.m. ¤ June 6, 2004 Doglicious chaos Although for me, every day is a dog festival, yesterday we took doglet to Woofstock at the Gooderham & Worts Distillery District. Like everyone else, we spent most of the time at Woofstock looking down. The effect was dizzying. Even doglet must have become dizzy, because just before we left the site, she fell off a bench for no apparent reason. One moment, sitting, next moment, whoomp. It was doglicious chaos. This dog, or maybe his shadow, reminds me of Loop from the Ondaatje poem ("my last dog poem," even though it wasn't), the one who "survives the porcupine, cars, poison," "the one you see at Drive-Ins / tearing silent into garbage / while societies unfold in his sky." ¤ downward, facing dogs June 4, 2004 Ghirlwind girl + whirlwind = ghirlwind (having the havoc-causing effect of a whirlwind; tempestuous; related to whirling-dervishes, general whirliness; i.e.,"Sigh of relief as the ghirlwind leaves the continent.") ¤ June 1, 2004 Peony for breakfast Peony blossom floating in a white lotus bowl. ¤ May 21, 2004 Crazy Moon Talk I can't always decipher your crazy moon talk. I thought maybe you were just free-associating or something. — note from a far-flung friend dizzy + all-business = bizy dizzy + busy = bizzy dizzy + nauseous = diseous (pronounced "dishes") Three new entries in my lexicon. I hope this will be helpful. ¤ May 17, 2004 Spring oh spring In Japan, the flowering of cherry blossoms (sakura) in springtime is celebrated with cherry blossom viewing picnics (hanami). Meteorologists follow closely the progression of the cherry blossom front (sakura zensen) and as the petals fall, report on cherry blossom snowstorms. So yesterday we went to High Park to look at the cherry blossoms. Actually, it was so that I could look at flowers and K could eat sandwiches. The doglet came along too, of course. The sakura do not bear edible fruit; their only mission in life is to be beautiful. ¤ May 16, 2004 jamais vu The opposite of déjà vu. Not necessarily a blip of memory. The name for that sudden feeling of oddness amid the familiar, when all the material things are the same as they have always been and these are my sheets, my bed, my books upon the table, the rooms I could navigate in darkness, and the oddity here is me, an alien flower afloat in a dream I've always dreamed of dreaming yet this, too, is mineminemine. It is as if to say, "I've never inhabited this world before, yet I do inhabit it, completely." In the movies this might be a black-and-white world transformed by technicolour. In real life this might be real love, after it has sunk in while you weren't looking, and everything is shaded with its colour. ¤ May 9, 2004 House of entropy As a child I had very little choice in what I could and could not keep, and this turned me into a watcher, not a keeper. What seemed true to me as I grew up was that much of what mattered would go unrecorded or misrecorded and these days I have boxes and boxes of nothing — nothing except the fragments of memory I bring to each small thing. A passage in Nicholson Baker's Box of Matches speaks to my distrust of documentary: My son, who is eight, had a plan for the leaves this year. He filled six large kraft-paper bags with them, and saved them in the barn, so that when my brother and sister-in-law came to visit with their children he could make an enormous pile. His plan worked, which is not true of all of his plans. The pile was big and the leaves were dry, not soggy, and my sister-in-law and I took lots of pictures of smiling children leaping around piles of leaves and flinging them in the air, and I had that moment of slight fear when I knew the future. I knew that we would remember this moment better than other perhaps worthier or more representative moments because we were taking pictures of it. It's a striking observation from a narrator consumed with minutiae. Of course there is much more to say about this; foraging in my own stain'd mind, I think of Atwood's "This is a Photograph of Me" ("I am in the lake, in the center / of the picture, just under the surface"); a stray memory of Japanese tourists slowly scanning paintings in a gallery with their videocameras, their faces never lifting away from the lens; the perils of collective denial and selective amnesia; and so on. Perhaps my memory is poor because I've forgotten to take photographs, but if you like films you've seen that even annotated mementoes cannot be trusted. It's not that I dislike photographs or discount the cultural significance of photography, I'm just aware of their presumption and want to protect the life flickering at the edges, the life they leave out. ¤ May 3, 2004 The ontological status of ice cream Mars, Twix, Toasted Almond, Roasted Marshmallow, Malted Vanilla. This is all I ever think about. Sometimes I stop to think about little molten chocolate lava cakes and fluffy white doglets, and also the variegated effects of iron oxides in high-fire glazes, but otherwise, ice cream. Gelato mi piace. ¤ April 24, 2004 The archetypal braveheart Sir Galahad had the strength of a hundred men because he was pure of heart. In my misspent girlhood I looked for him in everyone. But the problem with loving a fictional man is that it makes a fiction out of you. ¤ April 13, 2004 April showers "Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote / The droghte of March hath perced to the roote," etc. ¤ March 28, 2004 Where have all the bravehearts gone? part i "You stand still for three days / for a piece of wisdom / and everything falls to the right place / or wrong place / You speak / don't know whether seraph or bitch / flutters at your heart." — Ondaatje "Many are the deceivers." — Anne Sexton, from "Red-Riding Hood" Epistemology can be seen as an instance of what Berkeley expressed as: "We have first raised dust and then complain we cannot see"; give an account of why you accept or reject this point of view. — essay topic in PHI230F, University of Toronto circa 1991 A few years ago, a blackbough reader remarked that it seemed like I was trying to figure out the right way to live in a world where everything is a little bit wrong, and he admired that. And now, when "the world's faith is falling down" sometimes I don't know what to believe anymore. Yet I still exist. Here are two ways to look at this problem. Let me know of any others. Richard Moore once suggested to me that Oedipus' tragic flaw was that he insisted, against Jocasta's cautions, on inquiring further. He translates Jocasta's line as, "it is best to live by chance, as much as one is able." "Not all translations bring out what strikes me as its Zen quality," Richard explained, noting that Oedipus is not in tune with life and can't let things be. But then there is the rebuttal in Anne Sexton's poem, "For John, Who Begs Me Not to Enquire Further," which speaks to me of such bravery. And as another bedside favourite said, "We will be better men, braver and less idle, if we believe that one must search for the things one does not know, rather than if we believe that it is not possible to find out what we do not know and that we must not look for it" (Plato, in Meno). I hold out that desire matters. And even without faith, it is best to live bravely, as bravely as one is able; to outstare selfishness and deception; and keep the better men and women at your fluttering heart. ¤ March 21, 2004 Minding the gap, part iv I remember several foiled attempts to see Solaris when it was in theatres in 2002. I don't remember if I knew it explored memory. George Clooney plays a psychiatrist called upon to investigate spooky things happening aboard a space station. It seems that some force is recreating his dead wife from his memories. As he dreams, we see his memories play out in a languorous amber lit montage, love at first sight and courtship, the long walks, the lovemaking, the meaningful glances, the sorrowful choreography of their marriage. She is suicidal because that's how he remembers her. She has no secrets other than the ones she revealed to him before dying. But isn't that how it always is? I could never know enough about you to build another you. Memory is always corrupt, rife with gaps, misunderstandings, missed cues, consoling fictions, hubris, and fantasy. I still worry about the distinctions among knowledge, belief, and truth, but in the meantime I have to get from my house to the grocery store and so settle for the real, instead of the Real. The existential questions in Solaris lead up to the most pressing question, which is what to do when epistemological frameworks shatter, how can one possibility continue to be? The woman that the character in Solaris remembers is glowingly beautiful and loves him ardently. She also senses that she is not real and tells him so, though she also feels his love and expresses a wish to live inside that feeling forever. He is haunted by the idea that maybe he remembered her wrong, and when that possibility plays itself out, forever becomes whatever he wants it to be. His own existence is beside the point. ¤ March 10, 2004 While you were out Attached to the dashboard was a Post-it note left by the valet parking attendant. "Larry, Anika called. She's at home." Well. I'm not Larry. Neither was my lunch companion. But we know what complications could ensue from a mislaid message. Larry, call Anika, and hurry! ¤ February 26, 2004 The world's faith is falling down He: I was looking at blackbough and you made me think of Harper in Angels in America. She: Harper, the acrobat? He: About the body being dumb, wanting something in spite of the brain and the heart. She: Oh wait, I thought you meant Wings of Desire. He: Harper, the agoraphobic valium addict. She: Oh. Oui, c'est moi. He: Have you read it? She: I haven't. Should I? He: It's good. I like Harper's monologues especially. She's very Ophelia, just kind of loopy and out there and her words are just gorgeous and pained. But also whimsical. She's probably my favorite character in the play. She: That's me, very Ophelia. "A document in madness." He: There's a bit where she talks about the ozone layers, about angels in O3 form holding hands to form a spherical bond and how the world's faith is falling down. ¤ February 25, 2004 Minding the gap, part iii Save your soul. As Anne Carson says, "Soul is the place / stretched like a surface of millstone grit between body and mind," where love's necessity grinds itself out. ¤ February 24, 2004 Minding the gap, part ii "The things we say are / true; it is our crooked / aims, our choices / turn them criminal." What the body wants isn't always in tune with the mind. But what the body does can be decisive. Does the body lie moving like this, are these touches, hairs, wet soft marble my tongue runs over lies you are telling me? Your body is not a word, it does not lie or speak truth either. It is only here or not here. — Margaret Atwood Here, the body has the last word. ¤ February 21, 2004 Minding the gap, part i Shakespeare has shown us the calamities that ensue when people cannot heave their hearts into their mouths but also the failure of "words, words, words," and awareness/wariness of the latter really shut Hamlet up sometimes. How fitting that a metaphor Esta Spalding uses for miscommunication is so viscerally of the body: Shouldn't every word have its place, shouldn't language flow between us to be understood? A body built when we speak. Articulation. Each word snapped into its joint. Verbs like tendons, levering, moving nouns ridged with calcium. Prepositions, knuckles. Articles, nails. Words fixed to the things they are. And when there's misunderstanding, when I have that bone to pick with you, shouldn't words convey exactly meaning? Earlier and elsewhere, I quoted from a Richard Ford short story, in which a wayward character says, "I read on a napkin once, between the idea and the act a whole kingdom lies." The character couldn't make thought, word, and deed coalesce, and a moral philosophy has to be inhabited. Perhaps body and mind are always split, though we don't know this until we are forced to mind the gap. As the narrator in Anne Carson's Glass Essay observes, thinking of something she'd done for love, "There was no area of my mind / not appalled by this action, no part of my body / that could have done otherwise." In my past life as a scholar of literary theory, I might have explained part of this in terms of the gap between signifier and the signified, yet I cannot remember if I ever settled on what happens in the middle ground between body and word, that Lacanian lacuna, or how to cope with the losses that gather from absentmindedness: You come back into the room where you've been living all along. You say: What's been going on while I was away? Who got those sheets dirty, and why are there no more grapefruit? Setting foot on the middle ground between body and word, which contains, or is supposed to, other people. You know it was you who slept, who ate here, though you don't believe it. I must have taken time off, you think, for the buttered toast and the love and maybe both at once, which would account for the grease on the bedspead, but no, now you're certain, someone else has been here wearing your clothes and saying words for you, because there was no time off. — Margaret Atwood Minding the gap requires constant diligence. ¤ February 17, 2004 Adaptation The Republic of Love, the film adapted from Carol Shield's novel of the same name, is now playing in Toronto. After seeing it on Saturday evening, I went home and looked up the bit about the lungfish in hibernation: She remembered a nature program she'd seen recently on TV in which the life cycle of a lungfish had been described. The lungfish was a miracle of adaptation, an ugly earth-colored creature capable of surviving long periods of drought. During times when there was no water to be had, it buried itself in mud and slept, sometimes for as long as two years. By lowering its heart rate and blood pressure, it managed to stay alive but to feel nothing. She lay back stiffly on the bare mattress and wondered if it was too early to go to bed and whether she would be able to sleep. She wished she could run through the dark streets crying, doing nothing to hold back her spilling tears. But the streets were choked with deep rutted snow tonight, and the wind was excruciatingly cold. She wondered if Tom was at home —across the street, the third floor, right this minute. Sitting in a room, the kitchen, perhaps, or the bedroom — reading a newspaper, watching television, making himself some kind of meal. "I can't bear this," she said, bringing her hands up to her mouth like a kind of cup. — Carol Shields The last line intersects with another metaphor for lack: A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands knowing it is something that feeds him more than water. There is a plant he knows of near El Taj, whose heart, if one cuts it out, is replaced with a fluid containing herbal goodness. Every morning one can drink the liquid the amount of a missing heart. The plant continues to flourish for a year before it dies from some lack or other. — from The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje It is a paradox that love needs protection more than we do, when love feels so much more powerful than we are. ¤ February 16, 2004 The slow unfolding Pardon my delay in telling you this: while these pages slept I remembered a prose poem by Michael Ondaatje which describes being let into a domestic space, the observations that patience affords, and "the secret drawer which you opened after you knew me two years to show me the ancient Japanese pens." ¤ February 15, 2004 The quiet after it snows Another January has been irretrievably lost under a fog of hibernation, routine, and eventful yet unremembered dreams. There had been something comforting about reading Elizabeth David's Harvest of the Cold Months, a social history of ice and ices, which I had thought of as two different things entirely. This book, which began as a book about ice cream, gave me a sense of promise. Reading descriptions of sorbetto and recipes for gelato, recalling ambrosia on my tongue; the sensations of a summer day became almost palpable. There was comfort, too, in evocations of beautiful things that never happened — a line from Esta Spalding's Anchoress, "she loves me in snow;" another line in an unpublished poem about impressions in the snow after making angels; and that gorgeous, perfectly choreographed scene of snow falling outside a cocktail lounge in Steven Soderbergh's Out of Sight. Something about my own, fleeting winter wonderland — once at night, alone in the space between two houses, and again one clear morning amid gleaming hills — brought these things to mind. You know how it is very quiet after it snows, before the freshly fallen snow has a chance to settle into itself? in the New Year unsent Christmas cards in the car, addressed and stamped ¤ January 5, 2004 You're so vain You probably think this line is about you. ¤