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Ahh, Music.

The symphony season opened last week, and I went to the Friday night concert. All in all it was a lovely concert; the music was enjoyable and although there were a few glitches here and there, they were really just that, glitches. The evening was still lovely; in fact it may have even been remarkable.

The concert opened with a piece commissioned for the orchestra by a young composer named Michael Schachter. It was titled Overture to Knoxville and I found it to be a piece of music that was both enthusiastic and brash but also softly melodic and even hopeful. The brass section of the UT symphony was in the balcony with us and they played well, although not perfectly. There were a few missed notes in the French Horns to my left, a few minor struggles here and there, but overall the work accommodated them and the charm of the piece absorbed these minor missteps. The more melodic, soft, sections of the work were also lovely and I was actually happy that the composer wrote an ode to Knoxville without falling back on Appalachian heritage, without making obvious overtures to bluegrass and country music. Yes, this is a part of our heritage, and not just our past, but also a part of our present and our future. But it is not all that we are. It is good to hear something expansive and less chained to one aspect of being to the exclusion of everything else that we are. I would like to hear more from young Mr. Schachter.

I suppose I would say the core of the concert was a pair of works built around the words of Knoxville native, James Agee: Samuel Barber's Knoxville Summer of 1915 and Aaron Copeland's orchestral suite, The Tender Land. Surprisingly to me, the high point of both pieces may have been captured in the readings, performed by RB Morris. Morris read the opening part of the text as a prelude to the Barber, and it was only through this reading, poetically rendered, that one got the sense of the piece, of the story behind the music. The music was beautifully performed and although the soprano, Joelle Harvey, has a beautiful and richly melodic lyric tone, the words were unintelligible, either due to lack of enunciation or projection. The performance offered beauty without a foundation of meaning. For a piece that is meant to be sung, a piece that revolves around words and story, the absence of that story proved to be a setback, no matter how skillfully and beautifully rendered was the music itself.

RB Morris read again before the Copeland, this time a passage from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. He ended by singing a portion of Jim Reeves' song This Is Not My Home. Oddly this kind of mixing of elements usually bothers me, and admittedly I am perhaps too attached to my little boxes, but this may have been one of the most magical and emotionally moving parts of the concert. And. as you know, I'm always a sucker for the magic.

But it was in the second half of this concert that the music had its greatest impact: disturbing, unsettling, enchanting and enlightening, all wrapped in what should have been a familiar wrapper, except that it seemed like something else entirely. And what was this music that caused such an inner uproar in this listener? The piece was Sergei Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances, Opus 45. Honestly, I struggled with the performance. I can't say it was not beautiful, it was. In places it was gorgeous and understatedly spare. And yet although it was obviously the work I know and love, it wasn't; And I didn't know what I thought.

The Symphonic Dances is late, Rachmaninoff's last work, and it is certainly far more Spartan and menacing than his earlier works. But it is also still Rachmaninoff, and there remains a subdued lushness, almost a decadence, a holding on to the past in the face of an uncertain present. And yet this is something I did not really sense in this performance. Demirjian emphasized the sparseness — the isolation and the darkness — in the music. It sounded like something I had never heard before, some newly discovered "lost" piece, but it is, in fact, a fairly frequently performed piece, probably familiar to most concert goers. And yet, I often felt like I was listening to something completely unfamiliar.

Initially, I was on edge, filled with hostile protest. I felt the work was too slow, and it was slow. Perhaps it was not radically slow, here is where I wish I played an instrument, had more musical training, but it was slow, intentionally slow, in a way that changed everything. It was obvious in the very beginning, in that first, energetic, opening movement. The pace was heavier, more threatening. Yes the threat was always there, but Friday evening I heard it differently and I was not always convinced I liked what I heard. And yet… the meltingly beautiful melody in the center of the first movement, the saxophone solo, was more melting, more poignant that I have ever heard it to be, and this was more than just the superb performance. The very tenderness rendered the harshness of the return of the military theme all the more threatening, bone-chillingly so.

The second movement is a waltz, not a strauss-like waltz, but a dance nonetheless. It begins with hesitation, but pulls together, forming something lovely and sad before decaying and revealing an almost sinister edge. I've heard the work many times and I always felt the pace, the movement of the dance here, even when it slows to an almost imperceptible echo of itself, the dancers barely moving, clinging together to a memory of a past that is crumbling around them. But I did not feel the dance in this performance, and I am still uncertain of what I make of that. Without the waltz, the sense of decay seems simultaneously harsher and yet also more removed. The poignancy is gone; the human touch removed.

As expected the last movement pulled everything together, disparate threads tied in knots, explosive trumpets and timpani, and even Rachmaninoff's lifelong fascination with sacred chant. In the finale he quotes the Dies Irae, the day of wrath, or the last judgement. And there is much wrath in the finale. But Rachmaninoff also uses the chant "Blessed be the Lord" from his own All Night Vigil, and yet I almost missed it in this performance. closes by quoting his own Vespers, as was done here on Friday night, and yet I almost missed it.

For the first time, certainly since I moved to Knoxville, and perhaps for the first time that I can recall, I wanted to hear the concert again. I wished I had gone to the Thursday night concert simply so that I could have gone again on Friday. I came home Friday night, poured a glass of wine, and sat in the living room listening to a favorite version of the Symphonic Dances. Perhaps I prefer the more traditional approach. It is certainly less unsettling. But as I listened to the recording I also began to more deeply appreciate what I had heard in the concert hall. Now that I have heard a further depth in the music, I cannot un-hear it. Nothing was done to that work other than an exploration of what was already there. Perhaps in our gloss over Rachmaninoff, our affection for melody and a certain pacing, we have smoothed some of the edges, have grown so familiar with the melody we no longer think about the work itself.

Music is so much more than the physical act of playing notes on an instrument. It is everything, the playing, the pacing, the expression of everything in the hearts and minds of the musicians. The notes, the instruments, are just the tip of the iceberg. I wish I could hear it again. Even more I wish I could sit down and talk with Aram Demirjian and learn where he was coming from, what he was thinking. Not just his head, but the thoughts of the musicians as well. What has in their hearts? What was in their heads? Did the musicians accept or struggle with the pacing? And how did that all play out in what I heard? I may have heard he heart of Rachmaninoff revealed for a newer world, a world in which we no longer cling, waltzing to a romantic ideal. Or I may have heard something else entirely, something only time will reveal as the tendrils of the music wend their way through my memory.

Just when you think you have everything under control, just when you think you know what to expect, your world is cracked open and the old becomes new again.

September 27, 2017
Obsession …. Satisfaction

When I was younger I would deal with stress by baking. I baked cookies and brownies and cakes for my dorm during exam week. I still like to cook, and it is a way to distract my swirling thoughts and feel like I am doing something creative, but I no longer have a dorm full of hungry mouths to feed.

I suppose it was not the cooking itself that calmed my nerves, but the act of doing something that was both creative and occupied my thoughts. Later, sewing often filled that space, or other projects, but there was a slight delay in setting up the sewing room, a glitch, hopefully now corrected, and other kinds of projects can work equally well.

Last week that project was weeding out cookbooks. It was not a new idea, but previously the energy required to sort and eliminate seemed daunting. Better to shut the door on the problem and pretend it wasn't there. Something changed last week; more likely I just needed some short term project to obsess over for a couple of days. I think my initial goal was to reduce the collection by ten percent or so, but the more I got involved in the project the easier it became. I began to see a pattern, a pattern which made it easier to sort books. Although I like books with good recipes, in the end that is not what attracts me. I want to learn something, imagine something, be inspired. Those things can come in many different forms: inspiration, imagination, education. But they are all important. I have books I love that I will never cook from directly, yet they have indelibly changed the way I cook. I'll use a book heavily for a while then abandon it only to rediscover it later. I am not even-keeled, never have been, not steady and constant.

In the end I managed to eliminate twenty-five percent of the cookbooks. There had been books on the floor, and at least one of those spaces will be used for tall pots and small appliances. I'll probably move larger books to the floor on the other side, as they are too heavy for the thin shelves that are there now, although these cabinets will be redone at some point in the future. That will leave me some additional pantry room. All the cabinets in this house are not full, but there are a few items that would be more easily accessed here than where they are currently stored. That seems to be the hardest thing about settling in: arranging and rearranging. But perhaps that is just me. Years ago, I would ask George why something was stored in a particular place, usually a place that seemed inconvenient or odd to me. The answer inevitably was "because that is where we put it the day we moved in (6 years previously). I don't understand; I've never understood.

I took the first group of cookbooks to McKay's to sell on Friday. While I was waiting for my number to be called, I remembered that the Man Booker shortlist had been announced and looked it up. I was thrilled to see that, of the mere seven books I have read, my four favorites made the list, and the three I did not think should make the list were not there. If you read my last post, you know which two are my favorites.

Before I started project cookbook reduction, I had hoped to start Paul Auster's 4321 this weekend. Yet I struggled. Auster's recent novels have not been my favorites, and I wondered if I needed something I knew I could look forward to after just having finished Zadie Smith, an excellent writer in whose work I find no pleasure. I had also read Arundhati Roy's Ministry of Utmost Happiness, and found it disappointing, or perhaps it was just my expectations, just that I expected to find it as poetic as I had found The God of Small Things. It may have been a difficult plan, as when Auster is good, he is very very good, and when he is bad he is atrocious, at least in my experience. In short I either love his books or hate them, with little middle ground.

Perhaps I was feeling cautious. Perhaps I was really yearning for some middle ground.

While I was perusing the stacks, I found Louise Penney's new novel, Glass Houses, and took it home with some of the proceeds of my cookbook sales. When I finished sorting and shifting books I curled up with Penney instead of Auster. I have no complaints; it was exactly what I needed to read this weekend.

But this brief interlude is over, and responsibilities mount. My window of opportunity to get myself pulled into a huge novel may have passed until the middle of next month. We will see.

(Man Booker Short List Photo from NPR, here)

September 18, 2017
Fun Things

A friend and I went on a little adventure last weekend. We drove down to Brevard, North Carolina, to see the Embroidery Guild of America's 21st National Exhibit. This was our destination:

We didn't know what to expect, and we drove past the building the first time. It was well worth the visit, and many works were incredibly beautiful, showing great technical proficiency and creativity. I didn't really understand some of the pieces, but the creativity amazes and inspires me.

Photography was not allowed. I bought the catalog so that I could remember things that inspired me. The back cover is shown above. Below is a promotional photo from the exhibit. Oddly, none of these were my favorite pieces. I know the exhibit will be traveling. I highly recommend it.

The workmanship was so inspiring that I came home and spent the next afternoon ripping stitches out on a piece I had been working on. I had been dithering as to whether or not it mattered, but it does.

We took the scenic route down, through the Pisgah National Forest. It was a slow winding road, but quite beautiful. Just outside the park we had lunch at a bicycle shop/tavern. The food came from a Lebanese Food truck and was incredibly good. I couldn't help but think about how much the world has changed in the last half-century. We took the "fast" route home, on the interstate. But it took us the same amount of time. Perhaps it is just the "fast" route because you are moving faster, not because you reach your destination any faster.

Last week I also made garam masala for the first time since I moved. One part of me can't believe I have lived here for over three months and am only now making garam masala. But at the same time I also noticed that I had not used either dried basil, tarragon, or oregano yet either. These are spices that I usually go through quite regularly. There were some additions to the herb and spice rack this week.

Perhaps summer food simply cries out for fresh herbs. I don't believe the fresh and the dried are interchangeable. Their uses, and their flavors are very similar, but not quite identical. Perhaps, now that it feels more like fall, I feel like cooking food that allows the flavors of dried herbs to shine.

Expanding the spice rack while still recovering from a cold/sinus thing, gave me a perfect excuse to fritter away part of an afternoon making matching labels for all my jars.

I'm trying something different. I am a bit overextended at the moment, and I have been struggling with blogging anyway. I don't want to give it up, but it seems I've become to stuck in one place, blog-wise, and I want to venture out. I'm giving myself permission to not stick to a schedule. I'm also going to try a few different things, like this post, and see what happens.

Until next time,.

September 13, 2017
My Edges Were Showing

Darn My intellectual side was showing again! I don't particularly think of myself as an intellectual, per se. And yet, I always seem to default to the odd, the obscure, the off-kilter. (and when did choosing the unusual become intellectual anyway? Believe me when I say I do not possess the rigor of mind required for a true intellectual)

The above poster, of a painting by Picasso, was given to me in college. The person who gave it to me said it reminded him of me. I still love the poster. At times I am perplexed at how it has anything to do with me, because I see myself as a fairly simple person. But here's the rub. I increasingly we think we all see ourselves as simple people because we all know our own inmost desires. We see our own simple selves, but we do not present those simple selves to the world. I know for a fact that some of the most complex people I know also see themselves as simple souls.

Today, I see the complexities, and the similarities more readily. But these too are not unique to me. We also all have disparate bits folded in ourselves, perhaps some of us more obviously so than others. But there is also something universally human in that painting, in the seeing and wanting and doing and all the competing urges that make us who we are

Thursday evening I was at a dinner welcoming newcomers to the parish community. Part of our introduction was to say who we would like to be if we could be anyone from history. At times I fret with those things, the girl who was accused of being too serious comes out, and I really don't want to be anyone but myself. But this time I didn't hesitate. If I could be anyone, I would be Henriette-Lucy Dillon, Marquise de la Tour du Pin, although I just said Lucie de la Tour du Pin. Leave it to me to chose someone no one has ever heard of. Lucie de la Tour du Pin was smart, and resourceful, and not an intellectual; she also had gumption, started over more than once, and survived a turbulent period of history. She was, or at least gave the impression of being, at ease being herself. Equally obviously, no one had any idea of whom I was speaking. Admittedly, that too, may be one of the reasons I chose her.

And yet, in retrospect I am also somewhat bemused that I was so ready to leap. That very morning I had held back in another discussion simply because my choices were going to be "out there" compared to the rest of the discussion. My morning study group had reconvened after its summer break, and we were discussing books we had read over the summer. As people talked about Karen Kingsbury and other popular authors, authors whom I have read, and enjoy, much the way I enjoy an occasional chocolate cupcake, I pulled back. Of the thirty or so books I read this summer, some of which were popular fiction, the two that stood out, the two I would most love to discuss were Lincoln in the Bardo and Elmet. They were the two books that would have most marked me as an intellectual, an outsider, and I didn't want to be on the fringes, I was happy to be back in the group, and I wanted to stay there, safely hidden in the middle.

Obviously all such concerns had fled my brain by evening. Or the group was different. For whatever reason I was much more comfortable letting my edges show.

I've admired Lucie, Marquise de la Tour du Pin since I first read her memoirs, Memoris of Madame de la Tour du Pin, when I was sixteen, and this is not the first time I have written about her. I still admire her. I reread her memoirs when we were packing to move to Knoxville. At the moment that volume is in a box in the basement, or I would be rereading the memoirs yet again.. There is also a biography by Caroline Moorehead, Dancing to the Precipice. I haven't read that, but it is on my list of books to be read, a list so long as to be massive.

I'd still simply prefer to be myself. I suppose with maturity comes some sort of accommodation to wisdom. I'd no longer like to be someone else when I grow up, I'd just like to be the best self I can be. And I'm not convinced that we ever really grow up, we are constantly en route to being our next best selves. If my best self is likely to leap in without thought and take the slightly off-kilter path, so be it. At least it is my own path.

.

September 9, 2017
Food for Thought and Thoughts about Food and Cooking: August Books

Very little reading was done during the last few days of August. In fact, none, despite the fact that I piled books up around my reclining chair. The books mostly acted as a supporting table for a box of kleenex while I watched tv or dozed. Rather than books, my companions were average but entertaining movies and all three seasons of Grace and Frankie.

The last book I started was Days Without End by Sebastian Barry, but, although the novel is incredibly poignant, and beautifully written, the opening sections of the novel were, in fact, too slowly meandering and lyrical for my sinus congested brain to latch onto. Luckily, it is also a book that is easy to put down and equally easy to pick up later, even a week later.

In many ways the book unfolds the way a life unfolds, the way the American prairie unfolds. In that it is a uniquely American novel, although the time and the place are captured in a way that perhaps no modern American could, suffused as we are with our own history, our own sense of being American. Of course we have to remember that "America" as experienced by McNulty and John Cole is itself a more elusive concept than the more defined nationalism we carry today. The book is unflinching in the brutality that occurs, but also equally open-handed with love and community building, in its tenderness, yes, its tenderness. The writing is deceptively simple, and although the book is at times shocking, what might be most important about this story is what is not said, or more exactly the way it is not said. This is the story of one man's journey. It deals with his life, with the complexity of what it means to be human, and with the dangers of seeing people as the other, with gender fluidity, with race, poverty, and love. And yet the novel doesn't actually address any of these things and this may be its greatest strength, the way it seeps under you skin — subtly, quietly, and with humanity.

Days Without End is the fourth of the books listed for the Man Booker Prize that I have read. (Elmet and History of Wolves, here)(Lincoln in the Bardo, here) I read more novels than anything else in August, and that makes me very happy. Although I can't bring myself to read novels exclusively, my mind is too peripatetic for that, I am happiest when my reading is more heavily weighted toward fiction as opposed to non-fiction. Of the novels I read in August, Elmet, Where Roses Never Die, and Karin Slaughter's The Good Daughter were the ones I most enjoyed reading. Slaughter is another author who is new to me, but then the genre is something I have only recently begun to explore as well. It is a good story and with excellent and gentle development of deeply flawed and traumatized characters.

On other fronts, I read two cookbooks although I didn't cook from either of them. Squirrel Pie is about food traditions and the way those traditions reflect their cutlures. There are recipes I may cook someday but that really isn't why I love the book. Mrs. Wheelbarrow's Practical Pantry, is about preserving food and I loved reading it although I haven't cooked anything from it either.

Years ago, in what feels like a former life, I used to make jams and preserves, chutneys, pickles, vinegars and syrups. I look back on that self now and think I had much energy. And yet, I'd still like to think that I might again preserve some of my food. I like the idea of preserving the best of what is local, the idea of making. Even though the act of canning, drying, preserving in any way is not the simplest thing to do in any modern sense, in any sense in a world where it is easy to jump in a car and buy almost anything, in my mind it ties to something simpler, to being more connected to what fuels us and drives our lives.

I do make kimchi and sauerkraut. I make the occasional pickle. I ate some fabulous kohlrabi pickles with my lunch yesterday. I put them up last fall when I had a glut of habanero chiles. After the initial fermentation the pickles were hot and spicy, now they still have a little echo of that habanero heat, but the fruitiness of the pepper is more evident. I find this evolution, the process of fermentation and change, fascinating. Increasingly I also want the deliberate slowness and connection that I see as the promise of this book. It speaks of the simplicity of taking some sense of ownership in what is essential to our own lives, and what is in fact essential to life itself, not to our man-made world but to the world in which our cells and bodies, our food belong. In my mind, this book is filled with promise.

Or perhaps it is not really the book itself, merely that it acts as a jumping off point for my own thoughts. Much as I think about connection to the earth, I am not about to ditch civilization and move to a parcel of land and attempt to live off the grid. That is not me. Instead I am thinking about a new stove. I do not like my current stove. I loved the induction cooktop at my former house. I had far more control over temperature and heat with it than I do with my current Jenn-Air stove. I realize that this is the fault of the stove, which is old, not the fact that it is gas. And although I also realize that learning to cook on gas is itself a process, my mother's gas stove (Kenmore?) is far more useable than this, fancier, stove in my new house.

All my adult life I wanted a gas stove. I couldn't have it in Hyde Park, not without completely gutting half the house and starting over. The kitchen was in the middle of the house and building codes forbad gas in that circumstance; besides bringing the gas line down from the street would have involved blasting through hundreds of feet of rock. And yet I have never had as much meticulous control over heat as I had on my induction cooktop in the Moss Creek House. What do I want? If I get an induction cooktop, I would have to use an electric water bath canner, and could not use a pressure canner, since they are not made for induction. Canners really shouldn't be used on glass cooking surfaces anyway. Realistically speaking, will I ever use a canner? Or is this just some idle dream? An obscure dream is no reason to make a decision, and yet the sorting out of dreams is part of the process, my process at least.

Did I tell you that I'm the kind of person who will mull over this decision for some time? Even when I seem to make snap decisions, extensive background mulling and fretting has been swirling about beneath the surface. There is plenty of time. In the meantime, my current stove and I are slowly defining the terms of a truce.

September 7, 2017
Day 8

I woke up this morning feeling normal. Today is the 8th day since I came down with a cold.

On day 6 I was both starting to feel better, but also feeling like I would never recover. I went to church, came home, went to the food coop for some groceries, and was suddenly overtaken with exhaustion. At 2 in the afternoon I stripped off my "public" clothes and took a 2 1/2 hour nap.

Tikka took a nap too. She was happy because it was the first time in a week we had been out together in the car, and she had been busy socializing with the other dogs at the Co-op. But she might just tell me she was "guarding" my clothes.

Sometime during the past week, I claimed ownership of the second nightstand. What? There are two nightstands, I live alone. They are both mine, are they not? But somehow, they were not. I have learned that it is important to me where things are placed, how they relate to the other objects in the room. The second nightstand was bare; well, almost bare. It held the charger for my watch. I had been looking for something to put under the small painting, to no avail, until I thought of the books, books I enjoy just picking up for inspiration and distraction.

It seems like my nightstands belong to me now. There is harmony between the nightstands and the person who lives in this house. Odd, the old house seemed like it didn't fit me. This house has seemed more like me than I myself have always seemed like me; more exactly, it has reflected my nature in a way that has not always been reflected in the way I present myself to the world. No longer.

I was thinking about this last week, well, when I was thinking anyway — thinking about my sartorial evolution, thinking about how the seeds of my artsy-cousin (thank you Lisa) style were present early on, in the clothes I lusted after as a young girl, the clothes in which I was rarely allowed to indulge, in the protracted fights with my mom about whether I should comb my hair, about the style-dichotomy between my work-self and my home-self, and even my social-self, which came closest to integrating the two. I thought about how hard it was for me to give up my work wardrobe when I retired, not so much because I was afraid to cast off cultural fetters, but because it can be tricky to sort out the way we are sometimes. Self, culture, community, family: all conspire to make us who we are, are imbedded in the very fabric of our natures.

This is the 8th day. Further exploration may be warranted.

September 5, 2017
Cozying up to my Kleenex

I've come down with a late summer cold, nothing that won't be improved by some time spent curled up with some books and tea and a box of kleenex. I'll be back after Labor Day.

August 31, 2017
What I Wore

It seems like its been a long time since I posted a picture of my physical self.

This wasn't what I had planned for today, but more photos of my pre-Harvey trip to Texas just didn't seem appropriate at the moment. This photo is both atypical in that it is not exactly what I have been wearing all summer, and yet it is completely typical and clearly something I would put together and am comfortable wearing. Several key elements are present: jeans or chinos rolled to be either right at, or above, the ankle; flat shoes (either sneakers or sandals in summer); deliberately mussed hair. Maybe I've just given up on feeling I have to present myself as something I'm not and I can dress simply to please myself, expectations and rules be damned.

It was a bit cooler and a bit cloudy yesterday, with a promise of fall in the quality of the light. My pale blue chinos didn't feel right, so I ended up pulling out these lightweight tan jeans I hadn't worn since April. The jeans inspired the layers, which included a scarf I bought when I was 24 and had to rescue from the donation pile, and a pair of earrings I hadn't worn in a few years.

The earrings were one of my last gifts from George. I hadn't worn them much since the gold-filled wires bothered my ears. It is always a problem finding earrings that fit my style, but which have quality gold or platinum posts or wires I can actually wear. Surprisingly, although I have reset funky stones into rings or necklaces, it only occurred to me recently that I could have someone replace the wires. They had just come back from the jeweler. Perhaps it wasn't the jeans that inspired the outfit, but the earrings, I really wanted to wear the earrings, and the rest just fell in place in accordance with my mood.

August 29, 2017
Creator of Radical Compassion

That is who I'd like to be when I grow up, a creator of radical compassion. The idea actually came from one of those Facebook memes, perhaps the one titled "what's your solar eclipse identity? It is all frivoulous, and meaningless, and yet the idea resonates simply I yearn to see more compassion in the world. I don't think I could ever quite measure up, but its one hell of a goal to strive for. Perhaps I need to make a sign above my desk, embroider or needlepoint something, just to remind me, especially on those days I am tired or stressed, days I all too often need reminding of good goals.

This summer has been a summer of questioning for me, and I certainly don't have any answers. Perhaps that little internet meme resonates because it seems that I haven't really seen a lot of compassion, and that is exactly the kind of thing I fret about. And this sense of things falling apart, of a loss of compassion, of concern for each other, is not unique to me. It has been a year of hard questions in many ways for many of us. To some extent the upset revolves around change and the fear of the unknown. We live in a world that changes rapidly, that has changed rapidly even since I was a child, and I suspect many fears are rooted there, rooted before my memories even began. But the fear reproduces itself. As we see the world becoming more uncertain, we cling to our own "certainties" more tightly and the entire cycle perpetuates itself, growing in on itself.

But the thing is, we change all the time. The world changes, and yet it doesn't. Our bodies change daily, replacing old cells with new cells and if we didn't change we would die. Sometimes we hold on to things tightly, thinking there is security in that, but more likely by the time we grab hold of it, what we seek is already past, we have already lost it.

I was reading Manjit Kumar's book about Einstein and Bohr, Quantum and, although the science and the biographies were interesting, the part of the book that struck me most forcefully this particular summer came near the end when the author was writing about the fundamental disagreement between Einstein and Bohr, and the energy surrounding that disagreement. According to Kumar, this battle was perceived, at least by some, if not many, as the old guard struggling against the young guns, or the seemingly eternal war between comfortable truths as opposed to new insights. But, that idea was really missing the crux of the question, at least as Einstein apparently perceived it. (It is more than possible I misunderstand). Others felt that Einstein had grown settled and could not accept the new idea of quantum mechanics as opposed to classical physics. But I got the impression the author was telling us that the inverse was true, Einstein felt Bohr and his peers were still defining quantum mechanics in relation to classical physics, they still used classical physics as an underlying frame of reference. Einstein felt the question wasn't classical physics OR quantum mechanics at all, If my understanding is correct, he felt the entire frame of reference was wrong, that there had to be something else that no one understood (yet) (if ever) a frame of reference that would include both.

But don't we always do this? We make decisions and judgements, often on little information, on fleeting perceptions, and those are based on our own biases: our own history, what the world has taught each of us, and our own confidence that our perceptions are universal when they aren't. If we don't question, are we not trapped in an endless circle? If my understanding of what Einstein was saying is correct, what appears conservative could actually be radically liberal, and what appears progressive could be regressive. What appears safe and secure could be a trap, like the trap the rabbits find in Watership Down, when they learn they have been lured into what at first appeared to be a safe haven and later proved to be a trap. But the trick is, the rabbits knew something was off, they had that uncomfortable feeling of something being not quite right, but they were tired, and so wanted security, that they ignored all the signs.

I've started working my way through the Man Booker long list, not in a particularly organized fashion, just randomly with diversions, and my reading has served to fuel my generally wandering mind and occasionally clarify my thoughts. But of course reading always does that, and novels in particular, if they are good, teach us much about ourselves, and about compassion, that we cannot necessarily learn unless we can escape from our own brittle shells. But what I learn today may not be what I learn from the same book tomorrow, as reading, in some ways like life itself, is a relationship, constantly evolving (changing)(damn! there it is again).

But before I started this year's books, I read last year's winner, Paul Beatty's novel The Sellout. The truth is that I struggled with this novel initially. It is written from a point of view, from a knowledge of an aspect of culture with which I am both completely unfamiliar and fairly uncomfortable, and I found it quite difficult. This doesn't mean that the novel isn't brilliant, it is, and it is brilliantly satiric, which of course explains a lot. If satire doesn't make us squirm in our seats, almost make our skins crawl, it is not doing its job. The Sellout does all this, and at the same time it makes the reader dig deeply into his or her own assumptions about race and culture and society, about what is the good fight, and what is not. I came out of this novel rethinking much of what I had previously held to be true. I read the novel before I read Quantum, but I realized in retrospect that the same question was being raised. What if our entire frame of reference is wrong? Where do we go from here? And how do we take as many people with us as possible?

I just finished reading Fiona Mozley's Elmet, a beautifully written and haunting book. Mosley's prose is so finely wrought, so poetic, and the conceit of Elmet, of the world of the copse where our characters live, almost outside of time and space, with the haunting overlays of timelessness and the intrusions of time, is beautifully rendered. In fact it is so beautifully drawn that the purely unadulterated visceral shock of the violence feels unanticipated, even though it has, in fact, been clear from the very opening lines that it is coming. Thus the author captures the seductions of life, of the stories we tell ourselves, of the innocence of children, and there are children here, children who are both wise, in the uncanny ways children on the cusp of adulthood can be, and yet also innocent in a way that we can barely imagine as adults. The story itself is beautiful, and thoughtful, highlighting wisdom and innocence and blindness, the way we are often all blind, the way we often make judgements and assumptions without really knowing either ourselves or the world which we are judging, and in the same way we are also innocent in that we rarely know the truth, and that which we are judged for often has nothing, or very little, to do with the way we see ourselves.

Between The Sellout and Elmet, I read Emily Fridlund's History of Wolves. Both Mozley's and Fridlund's books are, on one level, coming of age novels, although in radically different places and with radically different outcomes, and yet there are common threads. Both narrators are looking back on an episode that changed their young lives, Both narrators exist on the fringes of their respective cultures, and although they are aware they are outsiders they are not yet mature enough to understand why they are outsiders. The insiders are often blind to their own motivations and guilt as well, as we all are, defining those who are different as "other" and then somehow being shocked when the other doesn't understand the rules and expectations that have been placed on them, even though no one has bothered to teach them those rules.

As for me, I don't really know what I think about these books yet, just as I don't know what I think about the general unrest that has plagued me. I think, in these novels, that people expect too much, and I think we do as well. I see expectations that are somehow disconnected from the realities portrayed. In both of these books, and in life as I have perceived it this summer, I see a world in which the discomfort is there, but is not addressed, because we would rather not address it. Actually it is more than that, more like a denial of reality, of difference, of expecting that everyone will know what we expect because we assume that the world is like us, and, because we assume our knowledge is common knowledge, we can absolve ourselves of responsibility and blame the other. But life isn't really like this. And responsibility is always shared.

In Fridlund's book a fifteen year girl who obviously lives a mostly solitary life, already on the fringes of her society, is expected to suddenly have the wisdom of a fully educated and integrated adult. She is expected to have seen and understood what the adults themselves did not see or understand, or perhaps did not want to see or understand. In Elmet, well in Elmet, there are multiple layers of misunderstanding, topmultiple levels of denial, Mozley manages to create a world that seems completely unlike our own while at the same time capturing a level of dysfunction and denial that is probably closer to our own lives than we would comfortably like to admit. In all four of these novels, the implications of both action and inaction ripple out in overlapping circles, becoming something beyond control, something far greater than was intended or imagined.

Do you see the link? Why compassion weighs so heavily on my mind? We need compassion. We need compassion for ourselves and for others. Because it seems to me that without compassion, the things we haven't done would damn us far more than the things we have done. And in that, at least, we are each and every one of us, alike.

top photo: War Mother by Charles Umlauf. Photo taken at the McNay Museum of Art, San Antonio, Texas.

August 26, 2017
Morning Melancholy

While I was in San Antonio I spent some time looking at an exhibit of nineteenth and early twentieth century French art glass at the McNay Art Musuem. The McNay is one of my favorite small museums, and I try to go by each time I am in town.

This time the glass captured my attention, probably because I had just seen an entirely different collection of glass, glass created using entirely different techniques, in Arkansas at the Chihuly exhibit. As I studied the small pieces and read the information posted, I thought about art and skill and fashion, how we hold ideas in our heads. Looking at these small pieces of glass, I was thinking that some of them can never be recreated, the technique has been lost. I'm certain we did not intend to lose that knowledge, those particular skills. There were wars, people died, so many things changed. We value different skills now, but sometimes we don't even know what we lost until we have lost it.

I remember back when I was in my early 20s, talking to artists in the Woodstock community of New York state. I remember being told that only mouth-blown glass was true art, that fused glass, glass formed in molds, was inferior, was not art. Did the first person who fused glass together and carved it think that? No. I suspect not.

Of course we know better now, know that art and beauty come in many forms, in many guises. Hopefully we know we are as apt to lose them as we are to hold on to them, and that those two desires, two results, are interrelated. Hopefully we know that we can hold to tightly and crush the life. We can hold too loosely and not realize that what we truly valued has been lost. Or do we?

August 24, 2017