Rosh Hashanah

Amy and I have been talking about redemption. About the possibility. And the necessity. Mostly about the first moment in fall when your breath, as I said to her, puffs out in wafts. That moment, she replied, it's like the simplest reminder of the simplest fact: we are alive. We are breathing in and out this air and we can see it.

It started because I realized as I was pulling on my long-sleeved blouse that it smelled of last winter. It smelled of settling in the curve of someone's side and huddling under blankets. I have not worn it since, with the summer's heat, and I must not have washed it.

Today, she told me, begins Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. It is one filled with contemplation and repentance. And prayer. And psalms, which I love, because they are a textual sacrifice and an attempt to praise the infinite with words. "I offer in his tabernacle sacrifices of joy; I will sing, yeah, I will sing praises unto the Lord."

Amy told me that last Saturday at midnight Ashkenazi Jews began reciting Selichot, or Shelosh-'Esreh Middot, poems seeking the thirteen attributes of mercy listed in Exodus 34. Selichot, prayers as she explained them. Key words being: forgiveness, chorus, binding, we have sinned, and petition. Key words being: compassion, mercy, grace, patience, truth, mercy, pardoning. Seeking, beseeching mercy. Forgiveness for: iniquity, transgression, sin. Key words always, insistently: forgive me, forgive me forgive me. It seems appropriate, she continued, to designate full days, weeks, months of awe—both for the things we lose, and the things we redeem. For the compassion, mercy, grace, and truth in the Lord’s infinite mercy.

And the fall is the perfect time for this, I told her. A time of forgiveness and mercy, just what I ought to feel as the sun is saying I've stayed too long already and blushing behind trees earlier in the evening. And things are getting older. Maybe that's why I'm so anxiously waiting for the cold to come and for the humidity to leave. I am craving the assurance of cardigans and warm soups. There is something comforting in the pain of frosted ears warming again. Probably about the thawing of mercy, of redemption from hurt and bleakness that sometimes doesn't seem appropriate in summer.

It seems all too appropriate, she said, to remember with longing those of our past in this week of remembrance and prayer. The many small misdoings we did to each other, the many tender acts we shared together. Even the scent of them lingering in the hems of things.

Also, Amy ROCKS

Because you're not hardcore unless you live hardcore, right, Miss Best American notable? Wahoo!

Score One for the Home Team

Just wanted to draw your attention to our friend Pat Madden's bound-to-be-awesome (wa waaa) book, Quotidiana, coming out in March. And yes, that's a kookaburra on the cover. "Legend has it that Montaigne kept one in his tower to announce the arrival of bothersome warring factions or emissaries from the king requesting his services" (PM's Facebook wall). I shared this fun fact with my roommate, who then informed me about David Sedaris' latest piece in The New Yorker, which led us in a round about way to the following great video, which certainly makes me laugh a whole lot:

Astor Piazzolla: So Hot.

He plays a mean bandoneon. He wed tango and jazz. He collaborated with Jorge Luis Borges. He had me at Libertango.

(This one kind of jumps in a second or two into it, but it's Yo Yo Ma. And therefore Awesome.)

(The one below is about the fastest I've ever heard the Libertango performed, and I don't like it as much as the versions that keep the bandoneon/accordion sound in there, but this one is tootally worth watching, just for the conductor (see 1.35 and you'll know exactly what I mean). Hoooly smokes.)

On That Note...

Patricia's post brought to mind one of my favorite pieces by one of my favorite composers, Chopin. It's his Fantasie Impromptu, Op. 66 and it is rapturous. Enjoy!

Oh. My.

Thank you, Rachel, for drawing my attention to this song. I fall more and more deeply in love with the cello every day. I have been listening to Bach's unaccompanied cello suites not stop for the past 2 weeks, and this really hit the spot.

zee avi

kind of in love
(also, sorry for being so dead online--i just moved and my internet is not hooked up yet! i will be back very shortly xo)

The Greatest Thing in the World

I'm supposed to be studying course material for the class I'll be teaching in less than a month, which means of course that I'm reading through a book by Henry Drummond, an influential Scottish writer and lecturer who lived during the late nineteenth century and wrote mostly about his two passions in life: science and religion. The title chapter of his book is a meditation on Love and since reading it I keep thinking about this:

"Religion is not a strange or added thing, but the inspiration of the secular life, the breathing of an eternal spirit through this temporal world. [Love], in short, is not a thing at all, but the giving of a further finish to the multitudinous words and acts which make up the sum of every common day."

If you have some free time, check out the full lecture here.

Inadvertent Elegies

is the name of Sarah Jenkins' chapbook, which I "won" a copy of here and which I recently read through and of course loved. I hope she doesn't mind if I share a few lines here because they are beautiful and full of heart (as is the poet), which I've been told is "the crucial bone for a writer." So:

First and Last Looks

In the beginnig was light / emanating from the first / opened eye; the implications / I let you enumerate as we exchange first and last / looks. Look / I don't know / what I see / until I see you. / I don't want to see / until I see / you. The eye emenates all / opening a thin lid / sudden expected sight. The eye emenates / all things, bright and dark, all / people, places, things. That first flame of being, beginning / kindled under streetlights / along horizons.

Emanate: give birth / give light. I give you / you give me / illumination. / We belong on the horizons, / our eyes lighting the skyline. / We belong looking at each other / for the first time, quick / glancing-- / the next word blows, but I see / white light separated: / red, orange, yellow, / orange, yellow.

[Walt Whitman Blesses the Grass]

Walt Whitman blesses the grass growing from our beautiful bodies--excellent argument, until I find you / at the base of a desert mountain, the red earth eating your bones.

Did you read Whitman? Did you imagine your body joining the mothers and sons and old men waiting? I imagine your soul triumphant, but your body--

I hate this desert, the land flat and empty, every thing dead. / If I were Whitman, I would recite your name over and over, / in perfect syllables, but I cannot translate it to sun and dust and / there are no seasons here.

I imagine you in the heat, how it makes every thing quiet.

the essence of things

It is fascination to try to pinpoint the essence of something or someone. Of course, there is the danger that you can misread or limit someone, that it can become a trite stereotype that fails to do justice to the beauty of individuality. But I think metaphors were born out of the desire to love someone deeply and to express them in terms of other wonderful things. For this reason, I love this poem by ee cummings. it won't let me get the spacing right, so check it out here.

i have found what you are like
the rain
(Who feathers frightened fields
with the superior dust-of-sleep. wields
easily the pale club of the wind
and swirled justly souls of flower strike
the air in utterable coolness
deeds of gren thrilling light
with thinned
newfragile yellows
lurch and.press
--in the woods
which
stutter
and
sing
And the coolness of your smile is
stirringofbirds between my arms;but
i should rather than anything
have(almost when hugeness will shut
quietly)almost,
your kiss

e e cummings

My Hat's Off to You Yet Again, Mr. Doyle

I am in the midst of Brian Doyle's great book of stories, "The Grail: A year ambling & shambling through an Oregon vineyard in pursuit of the best pinot noir wine in the whole wild world," and of course I am loving every page of it. Here is one chapter/essay/story/excursion of mind called Humming:

June. On my way to a town three towns past Dundee I stop by the vineyard and wander for a moment through the old pinot noir block, trying to sketch the new leaves in my notebook, trying to guess which canes Jesse will want to train where next year, keeping a weather eye out for hawks, and wondering if the easy breeze sifting through the vines is indeed between five and ten miles an hour like it is supposed to be.

I am supposed to give a talk in the town three towns away, but whenever I am supposed to give a talk I end up just telling stories, because I have no particular wisdom or expertise or lesson to convey, and am loathe to lecture and suspicious of sermon, and I am only a storyman anyway, absorbed by and agape at stories all the time, so I just tell stories, which is what we all are anyways, walking collections of stories, and as I amble through the fluttering rows I get to thinking of all the stories I have been told amid these vines, wet stories and dreamy stories and dusty stories, plant stories and animal stories and people stories, and for a minute I wonder if all those stories soaked not only into me but into the vines and dirt here, so that the dirt is a little deeper and redder than it used to be, having been watered with words, and this thought makes me smile because it reminds me of my sister who is a Buddhist nun who says, We tread only on the rim of things and hardly ever see how much more vast and infinite is the Gift, and her wise words remind me of my boy Billy Blake the great mad poet who says, If the doors of perception were cleansed we would see everything as it is, Infinite, and as I am chewing on this remark I come to the end of the row and notice a big hawk looming over the young chardonnay block, which makes me happy for murky reasons.

On my way back uphill to my car I remember what Jesse told me once, that each vine produces enough grapes to make about three-fourths of a bottle of wine, and I chew on the idea that three-fourths of a bottle of excellent wine is probably just the right amount necessary for two or three people to start telling stories fast and furious, so that each of the vines I pass is pregnant with stories, some of which were never born into the world before, and this idea makes me happy also, so by the time I get to the town where I am supposed to give a talk I am cheerful as a chipmunk, and start right in telling funny stories, and after a few minutes I notice an older woman with tired eyes laughing fit to bust, and I think to myself, you know, today I didn’t totally screw up like I usually do, today I brought some light to tired eyes, and I drive home humming.

Deirdre

The plot of William Butler Yeats' play "Deirdre" goes something like this:

King Conchubar (pronounced Conahur) finds a beautiful young girl named Deirdre and decides to marry her, but has to wait until she comes of age. In the meantime, he sequesters her in a house in the woods. Enter Naoise (pronounded Neesh-eh), a young king who falls in love with Deirdre and decides to rescue her from Old Man Conchubar, whom Deirdre decidedly does not want to marry. Long-play-short, Conchubar has Naoise killed, which leads to Deirdre's committing suicide. BUT. Right before Naoise and Deirdre are separated, right on the cusp of the tragic finale, Deirdre, who has had about enough of Naoise playing the part of the brave, stoic hero, asks,

Do you remember that first night in the woods
We lay all night on leaves, and looking up,
When the first grey of the dawn awoke the birds,
Saw leaves above us? You thought that I still slept,
And bending down to kiss me on the eyes,
Found they were open. Bend and kiss me now,
For it may be the last before our death.
And when that's over, we'll be different;
Imperishable things, a cloud or a fire.
And I know nothing but this body, nothing
But that old vehement, bewildering kiss.

The Ohio

Scott Russell Sanders, you are wonderful and your prose is inspiring. This from an essay called "The Force of Moving Water" about the Ohio River specifically and about our need for rivers and water generally:

"Watching Eva enter the world, and then, a few years later, watching newborn Jesse, I understood more deeply than ever before my love for water. We all ride the river, we are all born from a sack of water, and some of us never quit hankering for that original wetness. From birth onward, we are drawn to the wash of lakes, the heave of oceans, the hustle of streams, the needling drum of rain. I hike miles to see a creek slide over ledges, I gaze like a soothsayer into ponds, I slip into a daze from the sound of drizzle on the roof. When it storms and the street is running like a sluice, I go out barefoot or booted and slosh about while neighbors stare at me from the shelter of porches."

and and and!

"Riverness--the appeal of a river, the way it speaks to us--has to do with our craving for a sense of direction within the seeming randomness of the world. Narrative offers us the same pleasure, a shape and direction imposed on time. And so we tell stories and listen to them as we listen to the coursing of water."

Reading Sanders is getting me even more excited about my move to Ohio next month!

Homing

I just started reading Staying Put: Making a home in a restless world by Scott Russell Sanders this morning and I've already marked a bunch of passages and wept once. The following are brief excerpts from chapter 2, "House and Home," a beautiful contemplation of our ties to the places we live in.

"The homing pigeon is not merely able to find the roost from astounding distances; the pigeon seeks its home. I am a homing man. Away on solo trips, I am never quite whole. I miss family, of course, and neighbors and friends; but I also miss the house, which is planted in the yard, which is embraced by a city, which is cradled in familiar woods and fields, which gather snow and rain for the Ohio River. The house has worked on me as steadily as I have worked on the house. I carry slivers of wood under my fingernails, dust from demolition in the corners of my eyes, aches from hammering and heaving in all my joints."
--

"The word house derives from an Indo-European root meaning to cover or conceal. I hear in that etymology furtive, queasy undertones. Conceal from what? From storms? beasts? enemies? from the eye of God? Home comes from a different root meaning 'the place where one lies.' That sounds less fearful to me. A weak, slow, clawless animal, without fur or fangs, can risk lying down and closing its eyes only where it feels utterly secure. Since the universe is going to kill us, in the short run or the long, no wonder we crave a place to lie in safety, a place to conceive our young and raise them, a place to shut our eyes without shivering or dread."

--

"No doubt it is only a musical accident that home and womb share the holy sound of om, which Hindu mystics chant to put themselves in harmony with the ultimate power. But I accept all gifts of language. There is in the word a hum of yearning."

Moon Rising Over Fog

when one gets to iowa

it is best to write a song, which is what trish and i did today. it's about iowa and love.
We place our weary hands
In the fields that we work
And toss heaps of earth
To protect our fragile hearts
And we dig, we dig, and we dig
In Iowa.

We drove from Rochester to Cropseyville
Just to see you my dear.
Will you harvest my heart,
My sad and lonely heart,
My little Iowa sweet.

We may act a little shy
When we look in your eyes
But don't be confused
We were once made out of straw
And we swayed, we swayed, and we swayed
Down in Iowa.

We drove from Rochester to Cropseyville
Just to see you my dear.
Will you harvest my heart,
My sad and lonely heart,
My little Iowa sweet.

In the place where we meet
We let the corn grow in heaps
We walk through the felds
And let the dew stick to our knees,
And we sing, we sing, and we sing,
Down in Iowa.

Who'd think that all that love
Would come from one little seed
My lovely Iowa sweet.

Who'd think that all that love
Would come from one little seed
My lovely Iowa sweet.