2020 Review: February, the Unknowing Month

I think of February as the Month of Unknowing, because there was still so much I didn’t know and because there was so much that our elected officials did know, but chose to forget or ignore — to un-know. And that “unnocence” has cost thousands of lives and jobs, shattered health and families, and riven our country even further apart. I am trying to be hopeful that with a new administration in the White House and vaccinations in arms, we’ll be able to mend some of these rifts, but I do think we can’t expect politicians to take care of these problems unless we keep our eye on them and do some of the work ourselves. So be nice and play well with others, people.

Meanwhile, back to 2020.

The first of February, 2019, was the day my mother went to the hospital, the day we learned how ill she was, the day we were told she had little time to live. My mother, who had been an actress, had always wanted to play Hamlet; I always thought she should would have been a magnificent Cleopatra. At her funeral service, I quoted from the end of Enobarbus’ speech (the one about the barge) and, on the anniversary of the beginning of the end, my Shakespeare app served up the lines I quoted:

What do I make of this coincidence? Not much. It neither comforts nor upsets me. But I do think coincidences are usually kind of neat.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

February also started off with a repeat trip to the Monet exhibit. We were lucky to get to go twice, but I happily would have gone a dozen times. I’d seen a few Monets here and there before, but this exhibition made me understand Monet’s genius and artistry and feel the emotion in his paintings. Suddenly his work wasn’t just another pretty face.

I hadn’t known that Monet had worked as a cartoonist. This drawing reminds me of my grandfather:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Grandpa is the adult in the middle.

 

 

 

 

Many of the same paintings made me stop and re-contemplate them,

 

 

 

but the second time, others got more of my attention than they did the first time through.

 

 

 

This is a scene of the beach of Trouville, which reminds me of Gigi.

 

 

My new plan for our yard (which is a little larger than the frame of this painting):

      

 

 

 

I was, again, often taken by the details in the paintings.

 

Some of the paintings reminded me of California.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Most didn’t. 

   

It was almost impossible to get my camera to catch the colours accurately.

After the exhibit, we stepped out into an evening that was almost as beautiful as the paintings.

We walked over to Civic Center Park. It was one of those evenings when the sky changed measurably from moment to moment and each change was more striking than the last. (The Capitol was lit red for Women’s Heart Health, a good cause, but against the clouds, it did look a little ominous.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was the sort of sky that made me think of the word “firmament.”

 

Civic Center Park has a rather splendid colonnade,

one that was set off by the glorious beauties of that evening’s show.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The evening display ended on a somewhat ominous tone:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There were quiet days: more sunrises,

    

more sunsets, 

 

 

 

 

 

some snow.

 

 

 

And then another trip, this one eastward, to Kansas.

No going over misty mountains this time. Those were left behind for the stretching plains of Eastern Colorado and Western Kansas.

 

There was an odd, event-horizon sort of sunset.

  

 The cardinals were still living in the yard.

There were lambent sunsets.

 There was a full moon.

 

 

 

 

 

The creek near us tried to catch it.

So did the trees. 

 

 

 

 

The climbing ivy made some of the trees look green.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I did some cooking.

 

 

 

There were more sunsets.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I thought about my parents.

 

 

 

I rambled around at night.

The moon started to wane.

I rambled around during the day.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And then I headed home. The plane took off several hours late. This time the sunset was less event horizon, more nuclear:

And I was back to the view from my front door:

  The old moon in the new moon’s arms.

 

 

 

I was still riding the bus, running errands, going to appointments, visiting the book store.

     

  My indoor plants started to sense the coming of Spring.

The sun and moon did more of that rising-and-setting thing they do.


 

 

 

 

And February was over.

It’s 2021. Let’s Review: January, Pre-Pandemic

So it is another new year. I am having a hard time saying “Happy New Year” because, honestly, it isn’t. I hear everyone saying “Thank God 2020 is over!” but there’s been no miraculous, overnight transformation of the situations in which we all find ourselves. The Atrocity is still in the White House; McConnell still makes the Senate the Graveyard for legislation; COVID-19 runs rampant through the planet; here in the U.S., too many people refuse to wear masks or maintain a safe distance from others; people are hungry and homeless and losing health and hope. I think I shall feel a new year has started at noon on the twentieth, when Joe Biden takes the oath of office and the Atrocity in the White House has left the building. Maybe the end of the year will be happy, but right now, all I can wish us all is that we survive the first part of 2021. Then let’s see where we are.

Meanwhile, I have been going through my photos from last year. I take photographs as a way to remind myself to notice the world, to see the beauty, the memorable, the stirring aspects my small space, as a way to distract myself from my depression. Sometimes it even works. I have monkeys-and-typewriters¹ approach to photography: I figure that if I take enough photos, statistically, some of them have to be half-way decent. It’s one of the few theories I have that seems to pan out.

If you like, come with me on a review of what I chose to see through my cameras last year. Here are some of my photos from January. I have come to think of it as the Pre-Pandemic Month, because even though SARS-CoV-2 was making its still insidious way into almost every corner of every country, we had no idea that there would soon be a pandemic. I was too busy hoping against experience that our president’s impeachment would lead to his removal from office.

 

 One the first day of 2020, I went out into the world beyond my yard. I saw mountains,

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

and farms,

 

 

 

 

and the ponds along my bus route.

 

 

 

There were graceful wisps of clouds and the moon up early in the day-lit sky.

 

 

I was out with my family, and we lingered until evening. The mall was still decorated for the season,

 

 

and the star that’s lit on the the mountainside every year was still shining over the town.

 

 

 

Our tradition is to visit the Boulder Book Store on New Year’s to take advantage of their Readers’ Guild inventory sale. We did not go this year, and I find missing that visit to my happy place has sharply reminded me of how my life has changed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

We went out for dinner. We sat inside a restaurant. We didn’t worry about it.

 

 

 

I tracked the phases of the moon.

 

 

 

I tracked the changes to the pond (note the ice and all the geese).

I watched the sun set. And I watched the moon rise…

and set.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

AND THEN — I went to the Monet Exhibit at the art museum. It was astonishing —

especially the details.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I saw a whole — shoot, I can’t find the word (stupid aphasia; I’ve had it since the time I was on Prednisone years ago) — phase? group? category? set? of Monet’s work of which I had been completely unaware: the winter scenes:

 

 

I don’t have the artistic vocabulary to describe techniques or effects properly, but what struck me about these paintings were the co-existing qualities, the way they were simultaneously subdued yet vibrant, misted in frost while brightened by it, exciting and calming. The chill of the icy blues was almost palpable, but so was the warmth of the coral tones.

Some of these qualities were apparent in other paintings,

 even those in sunny regions,

 and foggy climes,

and temperate zones.

 

 

 

 

And of course there were water lilies. There none of the truly great and famous water lily paintings, but the ones in the exhibit were still breath-taking.

One prosaic note about the exhibition: the paintings were so numerous and the galleries so extensive that it took up two levels in the museum and, half-way through, visitors were allowed to take a bathroom pass, leave the exhibit, and return. I’ve never been to a show where one was allowed back in after leaving. My only complaint about the experience is that the museum was very firm in its policy of not letting me take any of the paintings home.

I haven’t figured out how to make movies work in my site, but I think if you click the link below, it will show you one of the “trees” on display in downtown Denver that evening:

Holiday “Tree”

Eventually the moon (Wolf Moon) got full.

It rose in a burnt-yellow colour, but brightened as it climbed the sky.

One of the books I got at the Book Store sale was Take Me With You, by Andrea Gibson:

I’m not entirely sure to what genre it belongs; it was on a sale cart. But several of the author’s observations stayed with me. This one seemed apt enough when I read it, but in retrospect, it now seems absolutely prescient:

I think, after last year and the beginning of this, we are going to have to learn to to say this and then find ways to speak our revival.

Some random shots of what caught my eye:

 

 

 

 

We took a trip to San Diego for a family gathering.

(“Far over the misty mountains cold
To dungeons deep and caverns old
We must away, ere break of day,
To find our long-forgotten gold.”
—J.R.R. Tolkien)

 

 

 

    

 

 

 

 

 

And spent a bit of time at the beach (though not long enough).

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

               

I saw this person walking along the beach for quite a while, collecting things in a basket. I wish I had known how to approach her (?) and ask about her gatherings without being forward. I feel there’s a story in this photo.

 

 

          

  

Look where we went:

Proof I really was on the Surprise.

 

 

 

 

Unfortunately, it was being renovated, so I didn’t get a lot of good pictures.

 

 

 

 

Back over the Misty Mountains…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

to the familiar light of home.

We attended the symphony. It’s almost frightening to think how dangerously reckless we were to go somewhere in such a crowd, but, like almost everyone, we had no idea was coming.

   

There were the usual interplays of light and shadow, real and metaphorical,

     

sunrises,

sunsets.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The pond stayed frozen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The moon waned.

 

 

 

 

 

And January was over.

___________________

1.”The Infinite Monkey Theorem is a proposition that an unlimited number of monkeys, given enough typewriters and an infinite amount time, will eventually produce a particular text, such as Hamlet or even the complete works of Shakespeare.

Dissolution, a Disaster, and the Disaligned: Louise Glück, W.H. Auden, and Anne Sexton (Happy Hallowe’en!)

We have a new U.S. Poet Laureate, Louise Glück. Ms. Glück was also recently became the latest  Nobel Laureate in literature. (That’s a lot of bay leaves). I couldn’t remember whether I had ever read any of Ms. Glück’s poetry, so I started skimming through her poems on a couple web sites — not a proper way to read poetry, I admit — and for reasons I haven’t begun to explicate to myself, none really spoke to me until I found this one, “All Halllows,” which, possibly because it’s a Hallowe’en poem, made me slow down to read it properly:

All Hallows
BY LOUISE GLÜCK

Even now this landscape is assembling.
The hills darken. The oxen
sleep in their blue yoke,
the fields having been
picked clean, the sheaves
bound evenly and piled at the roadside
among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:

This is the barrenness
of harvest or pestilence.
And the wife leaning out the window
with her hand extended, as in payment,
and the seeds
distinct, gold, calling
Come here
Come here, little one

And the soul creeps out of the tree.¹

I like the imagery, the juxtaposition of conflicting interpretations of the fields as indicative equally of foison and famine. The opening sets us up for the dissonance: Glück offers us the promise of a landscape being assembled, and she gives us that: building blocks of darkling hills, sleepy oxen, fields, sheaves as the evidence of the harvest’s bounty. But the landscape is also one of disintegration. The gathering darkness  will cause the visual dissolution of the scene, the oxen are now purposeless, the fields are stripped, and the sheaves are set to the side. I find it interesting that the sheaves are placed “among cinquefoil,” as if they need healing. And the moon is “toothed” — crescent? Or gibbous, with the rough edges showing? — as if menacing the scene or ready to devour the stored harvest.

And then we get the wife, the image of interiority and domesticity, set, presumably, in contrast to the world of manly harvest, though it is noteworthy that no males are mentioned, so she may have brought in the crop herself. She is, after all, the one holding the golden seeds (shades of Zeus and Danae?). The poem suggests the seeds are a payment, but her call is coaxing and the seeds seem to be a bribe or incentive to persuade the spirit of the tree to emerge. If the seeds are a payment, then the soul in the tree — an allusion to Ariel in The Tempest? — may be the spirit that has ensured the harvest. But it seems a timid and possibly wounded sprite: it is little and must be cajoled, and it “creeps” out of the tree. 

Then there’s the question of why it is in the tree at all. Is it a kind of dryad? Was it imprisoned like Ariel? Has the wife tamed it? Is it the ghost of a child whose grave is marked by the tree? Since it is All Hallows, it seems most likely that it is an apparition of someone who has died. Did the wife trap the little one’s soul to keep it close, to fend off mourning?

In some ways, “All Hallows” reminds me of Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts”:

Musée des Beaux Arts
W.H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.²

The first stanza is a rather good explanation of how Glück’s poem works: the juxtaposition of the work-a-day world with loss and tragedy. In the second, we get the same kind of rural scene with harvesting and then the loss of a child (if that is, indeed, what “All Hallows” depicts) as a part of that landscape. But, in the end, Auden’s poem is more removed from the sorrow. It is a paean to the insight of the Old Masters, to Art’s ability to negotiate emotion for us. It does not offer direct experience, and we hear nothing of Daedalus and his tearing grief at watching his son drown while being able to do nothing to prevent Icarus’ fall nor to save him.

But more, “All Hallows” reminds me of Anne Sexton’s “Her Kind,” a poem to which I return often. Both poems offer us housewives, though the two women are markedly different. One seems to be a career witch, the other more of a hobbyist. 

Her Kind
BY ANNE SEXTON

I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.³

The physical landscape of “Her Kind” is wider and in some ways less detailed than what we get in “All Hallows.” We see this witch both traversing the outside world and at home among her generalized possessions: “skillets, carvings, shelves,/ closets, silks, innumerable goods.” Her interior landscape is, however, excruciating delineated. The witch here, despite her healing work “rearranging the disaligned,” sees herself as wicked — though apparently she merely fantasizes about it: “dreaming evil” — and inhuman (“not a woman, quite”), mad, misunderstood, willing to die, perhaps even deserving to die. She ends defiantly, “waving [her] nude arms at villages going by,” but is wracked and tortured by the flames that bite her thigh and the wheels the crack her ribs. But both poems, “All Hallows” and “Her Kind,” make a point of contrasting the outside with the inside, of setting them in opposition to each other rather than seeing the two states on a continuum of experience. 

But there are also salient differences between the poems. The wife of Glück’s poem is alone, solitary, and seems to be safe and, to some extent, in control of herself and her environment. On the other hand, the woman of Sexton’s poem ventures forth to where normal people live and she makes friends with worms and elves. She actively attempts to set right what is out of place and distorted, and she recognizes her relationship to other women: they are of a kind, a natural grouping, one that is, I think, both chosen by themselves and imposed on them by the rest of society. And she/they/we pay a steep price for inclusion in that club.

*************************

 

  1. “All Hallows” from The First Four Books of Poems by Louise Gluck. Copyright © 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1985, 1995 by Louise Glück.  Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
    https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49605/all-hallows; 18 October, 2020.
  2. https://poems.com/poem/musee-des-beaux-arts/; 18 October, 2020.
  3. Anne Sexton, “Her Kind” from The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981). Copyright © 1981 by Linda Gray Sexton and Loring Conant, Jr. Reprinted with the permission of Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc.
    https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42560/her-kind; 18 October, 2020.

 

 

Inktober 2020: Day Thirteen — Dune

Dunes have to be sand dunes. Are there other kinds of dunes? Sand dunes are naturally kind of slippery because the sand slips as one walks up anyway; putting ooze on one is kind of painting the lily.

Therefore, to be possess’d with double pomp,
To guard a title that was rich before,
To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,
To throw a perfume on the violet,
To smooth the ice, or add another hue
Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light
To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish
Is wasteful and ridiculous excess.

— William Shakespeare, King John, IV.II.10-17

Inktober 2020: Day Twelve — Slippery

I know, I know — “slippery slope” is pretty cliché. But it seemed to work here. The strained and inverted syntax is supposed to reflect the opposing forces of gravity and the climber’s desire to get to the top of the dune. I’m not sure  it works; I confess my choices were dictated by what I could draw. What I had verbally sketched out was

…And gnashing teeth —
Lodged in a lethal throw
Against hope.

Disgusting,
The slippery slope she barefoot treads
Up the oil-slicked dune…

But I didn’t know how to draw “disgusting” on its own.

Inktober 2020: Day Eleven — Disgusting

I meant to start a new stanza, but I forgot to leave enough lines to skip any. “Disgusting” wasn’t as hard as “hope”; I’m not sure what that says about the way my mind works.

Inktober 2020: Day Ten — Hope

Ack. As if getting a verb yesterday wasn’t bad enough, today’s prompt had to be an abstraction. I mean — really? What are the options? There’s always the stand-by of Pandora’s box/jar; the potter could be throwing the container for the legendary woman who supposedly was endowed with all the gifts necessary to make a perfect woman. But I dislike the misogyny of the story.

Then there’s Emily Dickinson’s famous poem that seems to show up on home decoration plaques everywhere these days:

“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –
And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard –
And sore must be the storm –
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm –
I’ve heard it in the chillest land –
And on the strangest Sea –
Yet – never – in Extremity,
It asked a crumb – of me.¹
But the current ubiquity of the poem made the bird option seem trite. So I decided to go ahead and try an abstract representation. Right now, hope seems to me to be a fragile, fragmented thing, an emotion that is bright, but on the verge of disintegrating, rather like the lacy ice that forms on the edge of a pond or frost on a window.
1. Poetry Foundation, 19 October, 2020. Source: The Poems of Emily Dickinson Edited by R. W. Franklin (Harvard University Press, 1999)

 

Inktober 2020: Day Nine — Throw

Today’s word — throw — was difficult because my already unsatisfactory drawing skills don’t extend to comprehensible depictions of verbs. My first thought was to go with throw, as in throw rug or throw blanket, but I couldn’t see that going anywhere. So I pulled up the thesaurus and learned that throw also refers to a potter’s wheel. That option seemed much more promising than a blanket. So here we are:

 

 

Inktober 2020: Day Eight — Teeth

I had rather hoped to give this poem a bit more narrative structure, but I think it’s going to depend more on evocation of mood and feeling than on story. At least it’s Hallowe’en season, so I’ll try to keep it a little spooky.

Inktober 2020: Day Seven — Fancy

“Tell me where is fancy bred,
Or in the heart or in the head?
How begot, how nourished?”

(Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice, III. ii. 63-65.)

If one is a rodent, I would guess Fancy is bred in the better class of trash can. Remember Templeton at the Fair?