The week started with physical tests for the breast cancer research project I’m taking part in. I was on the treadmill to find my maximum heart rate. Then I was put through a series of leg presses to find the limit of my leg strength. Then: How long can you stand heel to toe with your eyes closed, each side? I was proud of myself, all in all. But afterwards, I was wiped out for two days. Fatigue comes suddenly.
So I was only able to get in two runs this week. I noticed that the line of ducks along the edge of ice, is moving ever-closer to the shore. The rain had dissolved the miniature mountains of snow, striated with dirt and exhaust along the sidewalks. Everything is revealed, almost immodestly so: pink earthworms stranded on the concrete. What were they thinking? The worms.
Spring always seems to start with death. But now the snowbells will push up in unexpected places. February is always effortful. It’s like starting to ride a bicycle, pushing down on the pedal from the top of its little orbit. I keep telling myself it will get easier. If I watch the horison and notice it getting incrementally brighter at 8 a.m. each day, I can feel the world’s momentum.
Excerpt from Margaret Atwood’s “February”
Winter. Time to eat fat
and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,
a black fur sausage with yellow
Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries
to get onto my head. It’s his
way of telling whether or not I’m dead.
If I’m not, he wants to be scratched; if I am
He’ll think of something. He settles
on my chest, breathing his breath
of burped-up meat and musty sofas,
purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat,
not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door,
declaring war. It’s all about sex and territory,
which are what will finish us off
in the long run. Some cat owners around here
should snip a few testicles. If we wise
hominids were sensible, we’d do that too,
or eat our young, like sharks.
But it’s love that does us in.
(cont. reading the whole poem at Poetry Foundation)
This week I returned to a book that helped define me from elementary school and into college. I’d bought Helen Hayes’ Gift of Joy at a garage sale when I was 10. Part biography, part anthology, and definitely a love letter to literature. Reading it, I thought I’d found my only kindred spirit. She was an actress, her husband and their entourage were writers (some of them great ones). It was a very long time before I could accept that I was more like her husband Charlie than I was like her.
Reading it this time, I have to admit to an uncomfortable awareness of her sense of entitlement and privilege to which I was not only blind, but subconsciously sought. I guess this is what happens when we return to books after decades. And decades.
I wonder if I am being overly harsh this time—that I might read it someday with a more balanced view?
The pencil markings are my own—age 10?, age 14? I’m not sure. Hayes writes about visiting the theater at Epidaurus. She stood on the stage and recited Hecuba’s speech from Euripides’ The Trojan Women. I wanted to speak those words. Travel to that place. Have friends like Hayes’ who, after having watched the performance “rejoined me, telling me how wonderful it had all been, how they had heard every syllable, even at the end.” But mostly, knowing without comprehending, I wanted to make words come together the way these do:
But words are only part of the experience. If not acted for us, they require a reader’s imagination, relying on memory to add movements, sounds, temperatures, textures, and smells. Aural, visual, tactile … all of the senses we know—including those whose names are too scientific on our tongues to let us indulge in onomatopoeia.
Collaboration is community. Maybe the collaboration between a writer and a reader was the first kind of virtual reality space? Maybe collaborative is the most profound kind of art. The only kind of art. Art as a verb, too.
Here, the filmmaker (Yeoseop Yoon) teases our sense of proprioception. I noticed that, in comments, someone asked why the poem wasn’t closed captioned. But, honestly, I don’t believe it’s necessary; the title on the Nowness website, which also features this film, titles it: Louder than Words.
Finally, just a bit of very old gossip (ah, elderberry wine). Forgive me.
Have a great week!
And if you stumbled on something you want to share with me, please do!
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