Watching The Secret Life of Words

Ducks are very smart.  My mother had a pair of white Peking ducks when I was in my late teens/early twenties.  I would visit her when in town from LA or NY.  The ducks would be in the kitchen following her around, quacking between the pair of Maine Coon cats and Heidi, my parents' miniature poodle.  The ducks bathed in the claw foot tub off the music room.  They sat on my lap in the keeping room, tucking their heads under my palm, telling me to keep stroking them.  My stepfather built a little pond off the living room and a little house for the ducks to sleep in.  Frick and Frack were their names.  We all loved them, but my mother loved them most.  She had a special gift with animals, in the choosing of them.  All of her pets were unusually smart with intriguing personalities.  One evening, my parents suddenly heard Frack scream and went out to investigate.  A raccoon had Frick by the neck and was climbing up a branch in a pine tree that grew on the edge of the little pond.  Blood was seeping down his neck and on his beautiful white chest.  My mother screamed and the raccoon dropped Frick right at her feet.  Poor Frack was devastated.

I think I pull focus to the lightness of the duck because I cannot write about what in the film triggered my ptsd.  It doesn't help that, recently, one of the men who hurt me most popped up in my "find friends" link on facebook. He iis a  criminal who hit me, choked me, called me names; he stole my credit cards, my car, my checks  which he then forged my signature on in order to use/cash - he should be in jail. But instead, his wealthy family told the police that I was to blame and sent him to a kibbutz in Israel and then to Newport Beach where they banked rolled a drug rehab center in his name for him to own.  This man should be in jail; instead, he is out among the people, a ticking time bomb waiting to go off.    

I wish I could work a job that was small and quiet.  Near people, but not with people, and even all alone somewhere.  I could write in my free time and I wouldn't have to make small talk, listen to gossip, get labelled and categorized...I could just be.  

             

Forty-Somethings: Perhaps the Most Acutely Technology-Affected Generation

Dear Reader:


Right now, on NPR, Faith Middleton is hosting a show about manners and etiquette.  The topic reminds me of how luckless, or lucky, depending on how you look at it, Generation X'ers are.  Being one, I nostalgically grieve for the pre-internet world, having spent 3/4th of my life communicating face-to-face, voice-to-voice on the phone, scent-to-scent, energy-to-energy... with friends and strangers.  Now, it is mostly strangers that I share such intimacy with, in the form of service-workers, public-workers, and my fellow grocery shoppers and dog walkers.  


My family is quite small.  I have a mother and a sort of stepfather (he isn't the marrying type I've decided after 42 years of co-habitation with my mother, and his being 81) in Connecticut, one aunt and a half-brother; both live in Michigan and are not in contact with each other.  My husband is an orphan.  Our two daughters (I am remarried to their stepfather since 2000) are our whole world - our youngest is a senior this year and soon will be off to college.            


Gen-Xers like myself remember manners and etiquette because we were socialized on it. Today, I am appalled at the disregard, disrespect and often pure social-hostility of many people under 40.  I remember when movies made you think and news was not spoon-fed in little, sensational bytes.  I also appreciate the internet and how blogging has spurred my writing and made a somewhat permanent record of my existence.  Well, my anonymous existence anyway.  Blogging has also afforded me connections to people, based on common interests; I will never meet these people, but knowing that I am of a sort of tribe, however minuscule, is fascinating to me.       


More later...    

Mixed Feelings Reading Beryl Markham's West with the Night - 11/27/11

After reading the first book of Markham's memoir, I was captivated by her observations and writing style.  However, I am a passionate supporter of bringing stalkers and all other murderers of elephants to swift and unmistakable justice.  I have been a supporter of The David Sheldrick Wildlife Fund, financially, when I am able, and in getting their important message out to as many as possible.  I was a foster parent of Kudup, an orphaned baby elephant that changed my life and continues to influence my life today.  Tragically, Kudup passed away on the 10th of May 2011.  What I'm about to write, no one will ever believe. It happened to me, my husband witnessed it, and I will never forget it as long as I live. Nor will I ever doubt the bond 2 beings (me, unable, financially to travel far, and Kudup, a little orphaned elephant living in Kenya) can share - through some metaphysical force, despite having never physically met.    

I had been aware that Kudup was ill for some time before she died. Yet, I had not sent any monetary support since a donation in July of 2010.  Unable to send money, I tried to get the message out to as many people as I had contact information for, as well as on Facebook.  The guilt I felt was enormous.  I found a little elephant statue on Cape Cod, right in the hometown of my family's summer cottage. I named the statue Kudup, and placed her next to my bed.  Every night I would say a prayer and touch my little statue of Kudup and try to feel her across the miles; to tune in my love-energy toward her, and to feel what I wanted to believe was her love-energy, alive, happy and about.  Roughly 2 nights after Kudup passed - as I found out about her passing on the 19th of May when I received a beautifully written personal email from the Trust - I was awoken in the middle of the night, well that's not exactly accurate.  In my sleep, I was lifted, somewhat forcibly, out of my bed.  My whole body was seized, lifted and then dropped, as if I were too heavy to bear.  Being groggy, I thought I was having a bad dream.  It happened, where I was completely lifted off of my bed, as if something very large were picking me up and trying to take me up through the ceiling, approximately 7 or 8 times.  I groggily recall being a little frightened, and clinging to my husband, who was asleep.  My husband said it felt as if my whole body was convulsing up off the bed.  I never thought to attune what was happening to Kudup's illness and possible death.  I am sure it was Kudup coming to shake me from my complacency, ignorance, insensitive lack of support...

I have never felt that type and depth of attachment to another living thing except for my children.  I believe.

So, what does this have to do with West with the Night?  As I began to read Book II, I was struck with terrible pains - like childbirth, and I had to stop reading.  Book II talks about elephant hunting.  I haven't been able to pick it up since.  I don't know if I will ever finish it.

Below is what I wrote before realizing what Book II was partly about: 


A memoir written with the originality and sophisticated economy more often found in a Chekhovian or Joyce short story, or among the more modern Carver or Beattie.  Tons of allusion.  Very sparse, yet achingly savory.  Puts all other memoirs to shame with its tight and quick recollections.  Will make me a better writer, I hope - a more discerning reader, for sure.

Some especially satisfying turns:

from   Men with Blackwater Die 

"'You don't mind being here, I hope,' he said.  It's been four years since I left Nairobi, and there haven't been many letters.'  He ran the tip of his tongue over his lips and attempted a smile.  'People forget,' he added.  'It's easy for a whole group of people to forget just one, but if you're very long in a place like this, you remember everybody you every met.  You even worry about people you never liked; you get nostalgic about your enemies.  It's all something to think about and it all helps.'"
 

This entire chapter, as a matter of fact, is memoir perfected.  The end note - well, I wanted to reach for a drink with her.

From The Stamp of Wilderness:

"Balmy's challenge, clearly well spiced with insult, brought the old dam up on her heels and there ensued a battle of tongues that, in volume of sound and intensity of fury, would have put to shame all the aroused fishwives of literature."

From Message from Nungwe:

"Night flying over charted country by the aid of instruments and radio guidance can still be a lonely business, but to fly in unbroken darkness without even the cold companionship of a pair of ear-phones or the knowledge that somewhere ahead are lights and life and a well-marked airport is something more than just lonely.  It is at times unreal to the point where the existence of other people seems not even a reasonable probability.  The hills, the forests, the rocks, and the plains are one with the darkness, and the darkness is infinite.  The earth is no more your planet than a distant star -- if a star is shining; the plane is your planet and you are its sole inhabitant."

and  from Why Do We Fly?:

"There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing.  There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city.  There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same.  There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt.  There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of a man, for pleasure or for work.  This kind of silence can speak.  Its voice may be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by a laughing child or the last notes of the piano may have been raucous and gay.  Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows.  It is a soundless echo."

That's all I've read.  On to Book Two.

 

"In Particular" by Elena Karina Byrne

Recognition in the body

moves like a swarm of bees: you know all

over at once.  Your place

in history has not been betrayed

as you find what you really feel follows

no language: wild stir

of insects, flurry of birds, one bone

of the earth shows through night root

tightened within its ground.

Can we be hypnotized by the primitive?

I heard a tick, tick, tick

once, turned and stared with the light

thinking about nothing.

But I noticed a fine grain of sink wood

like waves, weaving, the real bending

of trees against wind, over-- how beautiful it was.

This is

what it is like before sudden disaster, before

the inhospitable truth:

our other brain, the one

which cannot speak, the one who sleeps incipient

on the job, walks the dog, erasure,

and gives in, hears

the tick, tick, tick, turns

toward it with the light

and makes us look--  whether for the first

or last time, we look. 

Copied from Poetry Daily, December 5

originally from The Flammable Bird

Drafts, Design and Technology

So, I'm sitting in Starbucks waiting for my students and playing with my blog design, or trying to.  With the new user template, I am able to change the color and font of the text, but not the background color, so all my posts have this horribly bright, white background that drowns my text.  So, I changed the color of my text to a dark blue, but it only applied the change to recent posts, which might mean that I have to go back and change each of the nearly 600 post's text color in order to use the new Dynamic designs.  To make matters more complicated, there is no "Design" link on the new user profile edit page - at least none that I can find.  

Slept 12 hours last night, still exhausted.  Woke up with a migraine, again.

Working with syncopated meter and hard consonants in a poem I'm drafting. Approaching it from a completely different angle.  If I can create the effect I'm working toward, it should free my work from its static pin head of an area. I'm hoping anyway.