December camera

December 1, a candle in the dark tonight joined by six others from ongoing Hanukkah, now Thanksgiving-free!

I'm going to try something this month that I did four years ago when this blog was new—in the spirit of seizing or seasoning or scavenging the day. Here's an excerpt from that other December 1:

There's one way of slowing down that cascade of days. December has its own calendar. LIttle paper windows to open each day of the month until Christmas, usually revealing things like angels, toys, wreaths, ornaments. We even had one once when I was a kid. I remember it hanging in our kitchen, an exotic item in a Jewish household, but I enjoyed those little daily revelations.

One December first, a few years ago, I was wandering through the meadowy acreage of Alewife Brook reservation. Came upon a bird box, one of several put up to attract bluebirds. On a whim, I reached up, opened the hinged wooden lid and peeked inside. There lay a little field mouse, fast asleep. Of course there would be! I quickly reclosed the lid. And it occurred to me later that what I had here was the first opening of a natural advent calendar. One could fill all the days of the month (or any other month) with such unexpected revelations, ones that shed light on the other December. Or just passed the time interestingly.


As it happens, another mouse has crossed paths with me this November-December. Like many before it, this mouse betrayed its presence in the silverware drawer (a.k.a. the poop deck) with tiny dry black peppercorns. So last night, 11/30, faced with two or three egregious specimens—not periods, but commas—I baited a Victory mousetrap with a dab of peanut butter, placed it in the otherwise empty drawer, closed the drawer, and called it a foul but necessary night's work.

Come the morning, expecting to see the unfortunate rodent lying stiff under the sprung counterweight, I opened the drawer. Opened the first square of December's calendar to reveal...no mouse. The dab of peanut butter solid gone. And a festschrift of periods, commas, semicolons, hyphens, and quotation marks scattered all around.

Whatever ensues after tonight (with two new traps), the first advent window for this December is the anticlimactic open silverware drawer strewn with apostrophes, and the useless mousetrap parked among them, sans peanut butter, sans mouse, sans everything.

Runner-up: a new box of Kleenex tissues, with the first one pulled up like an iceberg, which is  good way to catch a cold. But for sheer impact on the day, the mouse roars.

Season the Day

Sunday, 11/24

It's the beginning of Thanksgiving week! A landing party of Christmas trees has mobilized in the parking lot of Walgreen's! (They're not early; Thanksgiving's late, even colliding with Chanukah in a vaguely patronizing dual identity called Thanksgivukah that made both days a kind of Jabberwocky.)

Sunday regards this week with amused tolerance, bowing to Thursday, of all days, with Wednesday and Friday in supporting roles.

Let this be the unfurling of the half-baked radio station (another contribution from the little inner voice, who takes no responsibility for meaning)! Over to you, Monday.

11/25

Monday anagram poems

Oy. Damn!
Monday

*                

Weekday.
A dew-key
waked ye,
eked way:
yak weed.


So you wake up feeling like yak weed. Maybe you blame it on Monday, but this time Monday's wearing the same white coat that Sunday had on—labeled TWC, Thanksgiving Week Caterers. Not that Monday's doing much work, but it still gets to wear that silly chef's toque, and still has deniability, don't look at me, Thursday's calling the shots this week.

Ever feel like you're in a pre-launch mode that's lasting forever, not that it's without aspiration. It's like this slow, rhythmic nodding I sometimes get into when I'm writing or listening intently—yes—yes—yes—a kind of assent to an ascent. Without doing much actual climbing.

i need to (aha!) seize the day. But the day is a hard thing to seize, being time, akin to air, or thought, or sound waves.

You can seize a thought, like that aha! moment in the last paragraph, maybe write it down, and discover it is a handhold on the day, giving the day that meaning you were looking for. Carpe diem or substantia nigra (the "dark matter" of the brain)? Choose a direction. Spin the dial—diem—day.

Tuesday, 11/26

How to seize a day.
Not so easy. Does a day like to be seized? Would I?
Depends. Seized by an inspiration, yes. Seized by a desire, probably. Seized by an orangutan? Probably not.          
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

It gets at how you see a day. As a microcosm, a small cube of life? Or just the dawn-to-dusk arc that appears to be the sun's motion, but is really ours? Trying to seize planetary motion would be, well, unnecessary. We're each born to the reins. No one falls off, not even the upside-down people who live in the southern hemisphere. Let the great world spin.

Back to seizing the idea—the art of mental grabbing. (Maybe you even carpe the diem with the substantia nigra.) You wake up. It's a new day. What do you do? Just lie in bed, existing, not being asleep, attending to whatever hypnopompic colors float across the mental bubble? Maybe.  Is that seizing? Or do you have to get out of bed and exert yourself? Tasks suggest themselves, things that need to be done. You choose one: getting up to pee. Other choices are not so compelling, except maybe going back to bed. Let's say seizing the day should be bolder than that, more like the orangutan grabbing you to its red hairy chest, an affectionate display of alpha ownership. You are mine, baby. 

So, like, boldly going back to bed? 

11/27

Odin's day. Anything-can-happen day on the Mickey Mouse Club. "Wed-nez-day," as it's jokingly mispronounced. Mercredi in French, very dashing. Mittwoch in German. Very functional—mid-week. And certain Wednesdays are distinguished, like today, the Wednesday before the biggest Thursday; a half-workday or half-schoolday. I've written about this Wednesday before, back in '09—called it Uncle Wally—but the fact is, a day is mainly defined by what it's filled with, especially the routines (in my case, a Tai Chi class, maybe the Wednesday Times crossword, the customary availability of my father-in-law's car...)

My date is getting bored. She's looking round for someone else to leave with. Seize the day, man! says the bartender, meaning what? Take her in my arms, orangutan-style, plant a big wet one on her mouth? Emulate weird Wednesday, the little girl in the Addams Family? Avoid the usual. Do one odd thing a day, or maybe three odd things. But what if you don't want to? Odd for the sake of odd is even, man!
Anyway, I gotta go. But what about...caress the day? Befriend the day? Write an entry a day. Entry!
Entrance! Entrance the day!

Wednesday proceeds. I am warming to the idea of seizing the day by writing about it. Grabbing it by the tailcoat, like the ancient mariner nabbing the wedding-guest—"Hey Wed! Not so fast! Lemme tell you shtory! 'There was a ship!'" quoth he. But to what end? To confer an identity on the day before it disappears? To write a "Kilroy was here" on the smooth wall of the day to validate your own existence? At the end of the day: to assert some control.

Life is like a sheet of graph paper (I'm writing on). All these little squares so easily blend together. They're so easy to write over. The vertical lines kind of cancel out the row lines, but I need them both. A blank sheet would be scarier: no structure at all? Give me a structure I can ignore. Or disregard.

So thanks, Wed, for your morning, afternoon, and evening, even though I wish you didn't get dark so soon. I wish I didn't feel I had to cram my life into your hours. I wish I didn't like two to three better than five to six. It's possible to like the possibilities of time but resent the containment. To admire the generosity and art of the clock and calendar but feel constrained by the tick-tock, the chime, and the impatience of the SMTWTFS—the Smith-Whitfords.  Slow it down! Walk the day! Stroll the day. Amble the day. Season the day. A walk in progress.

No Complicatedness.

Nov. 22

November is getting wiser. What else can it get? Colder, wetter, rawer. Clearer tomorrow, then milder. It takes these weather indices more seriously than most. The other months call it "Mr. Weatherbee," after the needle-nosed principal in Archie Comics. It has an owlish appearance, with the N suggesting owl horns, reinforced by the ov (see the eye and beak?). 

November would like to hang out with March, who understands its wild, cowboy ways. But its place is here, between October, old pumpkin puss, and December, the lucky month, stripped clean and wearing lit-up finery. So Nov contents itself with squinting at the bitter landscape, rolling a cigarette and expertly cupping its flame against a crosscutting wind. It hosts innumerable migrating birds, claiming to possess negative energy, conducting crows in "the classical canon."

I'm not sure what any of this means. But it doesn't hurt to keep writing, just the same.

It's 10:30. I'm falling asleep at the table with a carton of black raisins and a pain in my side from sitting sideways. I'm a vagabond in my own home, careening from one necessity to another—stretches to writing to crossword puzzle to dishes—and then it's time for bed.

I think I heard a mouse. Or maybe an aural hallucination. I sometimes dream that I and LBJ's younger daughter run the country. Our slogan: "It's a Hal/Luci Nation. You just live in it."

Not true. A little dream voice just spoke in my head: "No complicatedness."

Nov. 23

Back at Kickstand, waiting for a mug of chai, which finally arrived. Painfully slow myself, I am not very tolerant of slowness in others, or at least with service providers.

Ditto the screaming child.

Maybe it's my back, which has been very cranky this morning while doing chores.
I am at the long table. Pear ginger scone and chai nearly gone. I like the long table. People together but apart. Dark scratched wood. Mead-hall for bus passengers. 
There is a small scale-model bicycle on the window sill. Leaning on its kickstand. That angle and location must be pretty exact to support the bike. Kind of a keystone. Why is Pennsylvania the Keystone State?  How did the Keystone Cops get their name? These are bus passenger questions.

The window reveals a steady flow of furrowed clouds, driven by the wind, as in "Ghost Riders in the Sky," a stirring pop myth from 1948, sung by, among others, Vaughn Monroe, who (probably apocryphally) got into a fight with my dad. He was drunk...rude to my mom...not sure if punches were thrown...makes a good mead-hall story, anyway.

Haven't found the kernel of truth yet. What can we learn from the clouds? The inevitability of evaporation? The group journey—random but yoked together, like us at this long table?

Each day throwing a new configuration of energy and weather at us. How to use it? Just observe it? Build from it? Tune into it, as we are each radios?  Adios, muchachos.                                                       

Strange Fruit

More jottings from my notebook, Micrographia (a.k.a. Mike):

November 20

November is in its late period. The balmy day two days ago is a goner. Now we are bundling up. And trees are leafless, for the most part.

It should be this way for this leg of the orbit, but we still take exception to it as if we're hard done by.

Leaves look confused on streets and sidewalks. They shouldn't be equivalent to candy wrappers or baseball cards; they belong on the ground, the earthy ground. But we've co-opted it with our tarmac and cement, so lie they do, in drifts or singly, like panhandlers or castaways, no longer sure of where they should be, somewhere between the terra and the tree.

I kept pushing ahead a coffee/scone/treadmill plan like leaves being chivvied along by a blower—the prejudicial wind of writing stuff for work instead. Move along, exercise, there's nothing to see here. Finally I went outside for the gloaming of the day—the long lingering light diffused by the memory of long-gone sun. It really lasts a while, that blue to yellow zone above the horizon, lasts like a cowboy song, or the last shot of an Italian movie before FINE appears on the screen. While I sat on a rock watching the tree reflections on the pond go in and out of high-def, depending on current or wind, a different drama was unfolding to my left in the baseball field. 

Some kid was trying to get up the nerve to jump off the bleachers, from the sound of it—something daring. He kept revving up himself up, then backing down with a moan and a curse. His will for self-preservation seemed to be winning. I watched the steady light of a bright planet peering through the network of a tree. Two predilections so different—his to jump or not to jump. Mine to sit and sift the physical world through a sieve of significance. Both of us coming away with fruitful fruitlessness. I hope he has a good supper waiting for him at home, and appreciates it. 

Nov. 21

Back at the Kickstand Café, sitting at the front-window counter with a mug of Mark's Chai tea and a raspberry/almond muffin, feeling lucky. Looking out at a dazzling day. November has done its tonsorial work. Or as the trees quip: "You kuh-lipped us!"  

It's my sister Dory's birthday today. Birthdays resemble laps in a race. Or tree rings. I just watched a kid cross the parking lot—about 9 laps along. Each lap used to seem amazingly long, between one new calendar and the next. Somewhere in the race, the consciousness of the lap is overtaken by daily experience, especially the repetitions, the patterns. You start taking the laps for granted. The sameness outpoints the differences. This makes the days flip over faster. The week becomes a zoetrope of days. Movement and change become apparent more than earned. It's Thursday because Thursday must follow Wednesday.

(On the other hand, I saw a squirrel earlier on a railing, scratching itself with the low sun silvering its fur and I briefly imagined a friendship with the squirrel—it allows me to stroke it and even purrs in a squirrelly way, rougher than a cat, then confides in human speech, or speech I can understand, the secrets of nature; what it all means, the seen and the unseen.)

This Thursday should be strikingly original—completely different from any other Thursday. A distinctive plaid, a wooden tunic, a coat of mail (literally made of letters and postcards and envelopes with postmarks sewn together). But time insists on rhythm, which requires patterns, regularity: dawn prying night open, dusk pulling the day closed like a shopkeeper pulling down the steel mesh over the windows. The sun can't be everywhere at once. It has appointments in Hong Kong, Sumatra, New Zealand, Archangel, Nairobi, Mumbai, all those far-flung places I used to troll for on my shortwave radio. We turn, the planet turns, to allow this even distribution, ceding a Creole night for a Maori day.

But what makes a day different? 

Hae Old, Ober

Recent pennings drawn from a new graph-paper notebook I am calling Micrographia (which is also a small-handwriting symptom of PD.):

November 19

I am sitting in the Charlie Card store, waiting for E-917 to be called. I am discouraged that they are mainly calling C numbers, with an A thrown in. A "D" would be nice. I am here to get my official Senior Charlie Card, entitling me to a subway fare of $1.00 instead of $2.00. Ah! They called a D. Anyway, it will make me a senior citizen in the eyes of the MBTA. This shouldn't be as shocking as it is, because I've been sneaking up on 65 for a year—or has it been sneaking up on me? (In any case, we met each other three weeks ago.) And people have been giving up their seats for me far longer than that — a courtesy that has gone from amusing to expected and sometimes required.  But this card is a new badge of old agehood. I'm not fooling anyone now.

There was an E! And 915 to boot. But now they're back to the C's. Funny how age matters, in a casual him/her versus me way. I'm more seasoned than him. She's in the prime of life. He's feebler. I'm ennobled by age. She feels freer than me. I disdain her callowness. Etc.

Should be soon. E-916 just got his picture taken. I'm trying to relax my hat hair...

Have I been here longer than is fair? On the other hand, it's affording me more writing time.

Any time now. I'm not getting any younger.

(Of course E-917 was called just after I wrote that punchline. But there was a further punchline! The Senior ID card bore the name HAEOLD OBER. I thought about having it redone, but decided to adopt HAEOLD, which sounds more like HOW OLD? than the derisive HAR! OLD! would have. And in Scots/English, hae old means "have old", which is probably good advice: "Hae old, Ober.")

Three city observations: Serial uproar of dead leaves flying and scattering in the wake of outbound D line train;

Pigeon shadows wheeling around me over and over like a crazy clock on the Tremont Street walkway along the edge of Boston Common;  

Three guys hanging around a Davis Square trash can, high-fiving each other's mutual appreciation of singer Barry White.

Or would you rather be a bat?

The two gents who wrote the breezy cautionary tune, "Swingin' on a Star," back in 1944 presented the consequences of moral laxity in bestial terms: you might grow up to be a mule, a pig, or a fish.  I wonder if they considered the bat. It lends itself so well to the lyric:

A bat is an animal that comes out at night,
A mammal that somehow mastered flight.
Its wings are webby and its eyes are weak
It maps its echo every time it squeaks
But then if staying up late is where you're at
You may grow up to be a bat.

We should celebrate bats. They did it--the only mammals granted true, unpowered, gravity-defying flight! But how do we define them? Leathery fingerbone wings, a face like a gargoyle, a preference for dark and clammy, and a creepy image somewhere between scorpions and dragons. What's the deal? Jealousy?

We were talking—a phrase that always reminds me of George Harrison's "Within You Without You" and how I vaguely envied the intimacy of that we, but if you're lucky you acquire your own we, in this case a circle of friends conversing around a homey table in upstate New York. We were talking about bats. But it didn't start out with bats...

(segue to the aforementioned conversation and its consequence, as follows:)

I. Prologue

We were talking about the knowledge of computers vs. humans, using bats as an example—how computers know the facts about bats: the sonar, the diet, the colonies, the structure of the wing, etc., but they don’t know what it feels like to be a bat, and they don’t really want to know.  Whereas people—at least some people—do want to know, and keep trying to get there.

Why?

Because we know something is happening there but we don’t know what it is.

Because at some time in myth or history we became separated from the company of nature and it became mysterious and opaque. And we’re looking for inklings and messages.

Because we suspect (or hope) that in some way bats R us and what we really want to know is what it feels like to be a person, by way of a bat.

Because we like battering closed doors.

So...

II.  Approaching the Bat

Half-truths:

They nest in your hair.

They suck your blood.

They hang upside down by the millions in dark, dank, clammy caves.

Sometimes they get in your attic and then in your house, flying round and round your room and you have to open a window and hope it finds its way out or else throw a towel over it but watch out it doesn’t bite you because those things carry rabies and if you get it you foam at the mouth and die horribly or have to get seven shots in your stomach with a gigantic needle.

Secret Identity:

“I must be a creature of the night, black, terrible…a…a…. A bat! That’s it! It’s an omen…I shall become a bat!”

       — Bruce Wayne, 1939

Flying Mammals:

When pigs fly * 

The cow jumped over the moon.*

Pegasus*

Rocky the Flying Squirrel *

Real flying squirrels and certain lemurs  *

Flying Tigers *

Winged Monkeys *

Icarus *

astronauts, pilots, plane passengers  *

bats

Selected facts:

The Congress St. Bridge in Austin, TX has become a major tourist attraction because of an estimated one million Mexican free-tailed bats that take to the air at sunset each day from spring to fall.

Congress St. Bridge

One little brown bat can eat 1000 mosquitoes per hour.

Six million bats have died due to the fungal scourge known as white nose syndrome.

Other associations:

Bats in your belfry

Bat out of hell

Bat-shit

The old bat

Batwing saloon doors

Vampires

“Twinkle, twinkle, little bat” (Lewis Carroll)

Die Fledermaus (Johann Strauss)

“The Bat-Poet” (Randall Jarrell)

 “The Bat” (Theodore Roethke)

By day the bat is cousin to the mouse.

He likes the attic of an aging house.

His fingers make a hat about his head.

His pulse beat is so slow we think him dead.

He loops in crazy figures half the night

Among the trees that face the corner light.

But when he brushes up against a screen,

We are afraid of what our eyes have seen:

For something is amiss or out of place

When mice with wings can wear a human face.

III. First attempt to feel what it’s like to be a bat

It’s like holding a dual citizenship.  It’s channeling Merlin or Ovid or Carlos Castaneda.  Maybe even Kafka. Close your eyes, metamorphose, and hope for the best.

From the bat’s point of view, it’s a home invasion. It’s John Cusack inhabiting John Malkovich.

Used to more or less vacating the premises in hibernation, the bat lets the human tenant assume its identity while it goes out of body like a bored Annie Hall having sex with Alvie Singer.

Occupant: So, what do I do?

Voice: Feel what it’s like to be a bat.

O: I’m hanging upside down. Except, no! It’s right side up, just gravity-friendly. Hey, this must be the bat’s idiosyncratic perspective! Far out!

V: Try to let go of your human predilection for labeling.

O: Right. No labeling. I am one with the bat.

I am completely batty.

Just kidding….

V: Okay, that’s enough for today.

O: But I didn’t get to fly!

IV. Another attempt   

Bat

world in motion,

balanced on

the fulcrum of

falling and not falling, moving

in tangents, caroms,    

shooting sounds

that come back as pictures:

tree (avoid)

skeeter (eat)

owl (shit!)

bat in mad motion

a blacker blot in the big dark

sky

radar-eared,

night-sighted,

skintight wings

a gift from the

pterodactyls

skedaddling

back to a hole in a roof,

folding in

like a leather hanky.

V.  Final attempt

We share DNA and mammalian ancestry, our common granny probably some kind of giant arboreal shrew. But empathy can only go so far. We have left our lower brethren behind. Computers may already feel that way about us.

Maybe I’m overthinking.

Imagine a kid, age four or five. Point out a bat flittering in the smoky twilight. Ask: What does it feel like to be a bat?

The kid runs around, arms outstretched, dashing this way and that, making peek peek peek sounds and loopy polygons in the yard, gets dizzy, and falls down laughing.

Close enough.

*

Conclusion:

Anthropomorphic virtual-reality fantasy tourism notwithstanding, it's undeniably fun to climb into the identity of a critter, be it a mule, pig, fish, bat, trilobite, or mastodon. Computers may yet learn to play. 

Cricket Music

One swallow does not a summer make, said Aristotle, dispensing wisdom again, as he had an annoying habit of doing. But that's no consolation when it's August 31 and you feel like you barely had a swallow of summer. On the other hand, maybe it was a really memorable swallow—a cold beer when you really needed it; or an ice-tinkling raspberry lime rickey on a shady verandah. Or if perchance Ari was talking about the kind of swallow that dips and cuts over a summery meadow, harvesting gnats, well, it only takes one, if it's the right sort of swallow. A glossy blue and tawny barn swallow with a natty forked tail, perhaps. Or a dapper green and white tree swallow chittering on a nest box. I submit that a good swallow can make a summer, especially on the eve of September, when the days dwindle down to a precious few and all you have are...gulp...memories.

Or is it the summer that makes a swallow, whether it's a gulp or a gulf, a flick or a flock? These are impertinent observations, cricket music, summer's stock in trade. Reminds me of the time I observed to my 9th grade Biology teacher, "I read in Ripley's Believe It or Not that the word 'butterfly' was originally 'flutter-by'." Silence. Then as it became clear that Miss Rawls was not amused, Giant Laughter erupted from my traitorous classmates.

 But that was fifty years ago and I'm not bitter. 
Anyway, this summer's big gulp really pertains to my son, Matt, who's in college suddenly, and who we left in Montreal on Monday last, in a former nunnery called Gray Nuns Residence, on a co-ed floor, with a week of bonding activities like a trip to a drag-queen show, a shopping trip to Ikea, and a trip to La Ronde, the big amusement park. College? Sounds like cricket music to me. But next week they'll probably be ready to get down to work and it will snap back into being Concordia University, Fine Arts Faculty, Film Production Dept, five classes a week, including French on Saturday. Still, he'll come back each night to the consolation of the co-ed convent.

My sister asked what it was like now, at home. I could have said, "One swallow sometimes a summer takes." But I wrote:

Weird. Normal. Slightly odd. Damned peculiar. A relief--so much more time, no interruptions to look at e-Bay purchases! And very old fogeyish, but then it always was. But now more so. No music, no juggling, no frozen waffles--in fact, half the groceries in half the time.

He's so far away. Not really, and he'll be back in early December, for 3 weeks. But he's somewhere else, he's in the wrong end of the binoculars. Sometimes it's like a book ended. What was that all about? Remember that kid…?

But the young tiger kinda melts into the woods and the old tiger lets him go. It's actually more of a physics problem than an emotional one. And I'm not even sure what I mean by that. Except that it comes down to: he's over there. We're over here. (It's okay. It makes sense. Get used to it. It's kollitch.)