Winter Solstice Is My Favorite Day

Winter greetings to you, dear reader! Are you getting enough sun? Have you noticed that the winter solstice is my favorite holiday. Every year it rolls around and I have an urge to remark on it publicly. Shortest day! Longest night! Witchy vibes! And this year, also, a real live lunar eclipse, not seen for some 537 years or something. Did you see it? Don't worry, someone else saw it for you! I thought I would. I made sure I could see the old moon out the window, but when I looked for it again at the appointed hour, she had moved and I could not go outside to look for her because this is a doorman building and I have a mental block about it. Why? Because I have a strong aversion to being watched coming and going.

This is also why I rarely post on FB other than 'liking' your posts, dear reader, and perhaps as well my deep ambivalence about this blog. (Did you notice it?) But, there are other considerations. One of these is authenticity. Can blogs be considered old media yet? I'll say this: there are blogs I love. I've mentioned some of them before. Sometimes I will go and read through the entire archives of a blog that no longer exists and it's like reading an awesome dog-eared copy of a long-forgotten experimental novel. A narrative-less, impressionistic, vaguely personal, but often secret-coded novel by a person I know or don't know or met once and never saw again, but feel I know somehow. And it is good. I think the more FB and tweets and all that other stuff I can only imagine eclipses blogs, the more I'll feel alright about them (blogs). Good news for you! And future me, who may come back and read the archives of my previous self. I cannot wait. It is already happening.

Some other obvious things I want to say. Sometimes, frequently, I forget stuff. The other day, I saw some people in Bayridge kill a possum with a stick. (Sorry.) It was a real middle-of-the-night mob scene that I thought at first was a random middle-of-the-night pickup street-hockey game but turned out to be not, and it was disturbing and awful. I will spare you the details, but it was gruesome. And then I forgot all about it until a few days later, when I was on the phone with E and suddenly remembered. So, reflection, records, memories. Can blogging make you less solipsistic by helping you remember stuff that happened? Or is the fact that it happened to you make it about you, and therefore actually still solipsism? Does the fact that I forget the stuff that happens make me more or less solipsistic than remembering everything in minute detail and/or blathering on about it in a public diary? (These questions are so 1999! Old media!)

So, I am staying at a friend's, having a mellow time with Leo and a cat (my friend's cat) in a beautiful, well-heated apartment that is not in Bayridge. I am translating and writing and watching many movies on instant and discovering television shows that I had never heard of (Soap? Anyone? Only after midnight), and generally communicating only with animals and doorpersons. It's really cold, but not as cold as Moscow, I imagine, or Canada. The other day I thought I understood Heidegger, but now that I think about it, I've already forgotten what I think I understood or how I thought it was relevant to anything I'm doing. Tonight, I will have people over for dinner and then go pick up someone from the airport and then maybe continue having dinner with all of them together. The days will get longer and I will write some chapters and then one day, I will visit the West Coast and see the desert again and I will try to hold it all in my head.

"Like being alive twice."

Judging from this doozy, I may have to start reading the Obituaries instead of the Weddings & Celebrations for the real potboilers. Novel and screenplay-writing friends, you're welcome.

And this Zadie Smith piece about speaking in tongues may require comment. But for now, I just wanted to share.

Healing "laying on of hands" ceremony in the Pentecostal Church of God. Lejunior, Harlan County, Kentucky, September 15, 1946. Photo: Russell Lee (Department of the Interior/ Solid Fuels Administration For War). Source: The National Archives (via)

Devastating

My years of inveterate reading of the Weddings & Celebrations section of the NYTimes has paid off exactly twice. The first time can be described as the grotesque pleasure in reading about a girl I vaguely knew in high school, the daughter of a famous television news personality, a girl I maybe talked to once but who, with no explanation, haunted my thoughts in an annoying and pointless way, and the validation of unexpectedly reading about the dumb and pointless story of her eventual courtship and betrothal. The way their families met at some ski resort, if not literally in a hot tub, the way she fainted at their first meeting because she had forgotten to eat, the whole stupid bourgeois drama finally resolving why, for what mysterious and inexplicable reason, this girl's existence kept surfacing in my memory. Aha! Finally! That is why! My idiotic brain can now randomly obsess about some other pointless thing lodged in my memory for no (yet) apparent reason!

The second time was today, when I read this story of the most devastatingly adorable tale of nerd love, particularly for the quote, from the bride, describing a period of time when the couple had worked together at the Met but had not known each other until they worked together again at the Jewish museum:

It was a dress rehearsal of sorts: a stage on which we ultimately missed our cues.

I like especially how the Times writer uses this quote to start a new paragraph, as if it were some kind of topic sentence pertaining not to the concrete accident of their not meeting, but to some abstract idea of life as a whole in which we always miss our cues, the characters we are assigned to play never coming together as put down in the script. And that tragic fact - thrown out there so blithely, so nonchalantly, about 3/4 of the way down in the story - being just another sentence in the larger and equally tragic/ordinary whole.

Sad One

One of my most vivid early memories is of a dream I had on the eve of a birthday, which one I can't remember, but if we are to trust geography as a marker, it was certainly before seven and after about four. I was skipping down our building's stairwell in Zhodino (Belarus), and looking down the landing, I could see my grandmother (babushka Anya) dressed in a tidy travel outfit and looking back up at me. I remember being surprised to find her there, as I hadn't been told that she was coming and I knew that she lived far away. This dream is merged in my mind with a memory of the next morning, of it being my birthday and of my walking out of the building into a blinding June sun, out into the world as if for the first time on my own. (Was it the first time?)

Anyway, my grandmother died December 26. She was eighty years old. In my dream, she would have been around 58.

Art historians are taught about the dangers of taking words like "influence" too literally. Who has the active role there? Are artists influenced, or do they choose their references? In the case of children and adults, it is equally complicated. There are so many factors to consider. Adults want to guide, children want to learn. Sometimes the adults fail, other times children push away. It's hard to tell who's leading whom at any one time.

My grandmother was a very strong woman - her father died when she was still young; she trained in surgery and worked while tending a family, like many women of her generation. In person, she liked to tell stories about her life or her grandkids, paid close attention, and could pull you aside to let you in on a secret or ask a pointed question. I'd like to think that the linkage in my mind of her unexpected appearance and my going into the world is not entirely my doing; I'd like to think she had a hand in it as well. I will, of course, miss her. (I am, of course, grateful for her influence.)

Looking as Memory

Just listened to a great Radiolab piece about memory. You know, this crazy research about selectively erasing memories? It's all over the internets. Well, what I found most interesting about it (other than the heartbreaking story about the man with the worst amnesia of all time and his love for his wife) is how they talk about memory as a constantly creative rather than a conservative or a retreiving process. The idea is that when you remember something, you are actually creating a new memory, while slightly distorting the old one. They even use the metaphor of painting or sculpture (as opposed to file cabinets or hard drives, as one might think).


Well, this reminded me of a pet theory I once had and never quite got rid of about looking at painting as a kind of performance.* I used to experience the act of looking at paintings as a very absorbing, active process (still do, but this was especially intense when I was younger and a bit newer to both museums and being by myself in public). I would stand there and trace all the lines of paint with my eyes, trying to discover all the hills and furrows in its texture. I'd get really close and try to figure out what was under the top layer, and then go back and see how the whole thing came together into a whole impression. Basically, I was that annoying person you would have to wait for to leave before you could have a look, and I didn't care one bit that you were waiting.

Anyway, this active memory thing made me think that looking at paintings is probably kind of like remembering. Think about it: you are looking at something that (in most cases) represents reality, an entity you're likely familiar with. So you are matching up the representation with your memory of the world. Also, at the level of the composition and the paint, you may be remembering other paintings and their solutions to the problem of representing the world (what kind of perspective did they use to show depth, how did they create light, how did they handle the paint to create an illusion of a world in the canvas). Even with abstraction this works, since the painter is solving some kind of problem (what to paint? how to paint?) that other painters have solved in other ways and that your subconscious mind is comparing in a way that is like remembering. But the thing that makes this idea even more compelling to me is this thing about memory as creation. If looking at a painting is kind of like remembering, and memory is itself creative, then looking becomes creative too. The brain is not just imprinting what's there in front of it, but actively generating a picture or an impression by interacting with the painting on both a conscious and subconscious level! How awesome is that? Go brain!

*Performance in the neutral, active as opposed to passive sense, not the Judith Butler sense.

* * *

In a feverish dream, I suddenly had trouble breathing. I was choking on the cold air coming in from the window, and I saw in the not too distant future the slick black pavement under the orange cast of streetlamps of winter. It's getting darker earlier, and I'm sick in bed. I think the wet black streets I am remembering come from some place where I am smaller and the pavement is vaster. The winter is coming, and with it, artificial light, soggy shoes, and the gusts of wind. The darkness making envelopes to travel in. The yellow light and swirls of soggy snow.

Goya, Blasts of Wind/Tale Bearers, 1799

UPDATE: Okay, my Soplones are almost over. Now if I could only find the text of Heidegger's "Was ist Metaphysik?" online. I thought the Germans were all about sharing their Kulturalheritage. What gives?!?!