Paula's House of Toast

Darkness, cold, the winter coming on: all night the wind howled, and it howls still today. Last evening a loud, wind-driven rain suddenly rattled the windows. DK and I went out onto the porch to look and found it wild, warm: mid 50's, torrential rain, water sluicing downstreet, fog rising between houses, the spruce boughs whipped by wind. Today it's bright, and getting colder. Clouds in the west. Trees bare.

I have been thinking of Advent. I am trying to fathom Christ. The Dalai Lama taught: look to your own tradition. So I am looking back. The Christian images are at the neural bedrock, formed in childhood: manger, child, magi.

Advent looks ahead. So much in our life is aftermath: post-modern, post-911, post-Auschwitz, post-nuclear. But Advent is expectation, hope, waiting. Waiting for something that has been foretold, that we know will, has arrived. But it is expectation colored by all the aftermaths in which we live.

But truly, nothing has happened yet, in this moment, in this darkness, in this cold. And yet it has all happened, is happening. For now, there is nothing but the darkness and cold. We sit, open to it. Advent with and without hope, with and without expectation.

A fragment of a prayer: Come What may.


Meanwhile, An American Christmas, at the starter's bell, stampedes out of the gate.

I checked my "hit" monitor the other day -- it's amusing to see what google searches lead people here -- and one google search was "where's pharmawatch."

Pharmawatch is an Australian MD's weblog I'd linked to and wrote about , a wonderful and well-documented deconstruction of the often-sordid practices of Big Pharma -- their ethically shabby "trials," their mendacious and money-wasting advertisements, the thinly veiled doctor-bribery and biased "educational" activities of drug reps.

Read this

Pharma Watch

Then, for a perspective on the notice the site had received (British Medical Journal = Big, Reputable) , this

bmj.com Brown 326 (7395): 938a

Then savor the irony in the BMJ's review of PharmaWatch

"this site is a great example of the free speech ethic associated with the internet"

Unfortunately, it has now apparantly become an example of the intrusive, intimidating, free-speech-squelching power of large corporations and their lawyers.

They're watching us.

Never doubt it for a moment.

I returned to the riverwalk and, on a whim, brought my camera.

I felt rapacious.

I rationalized it: I wanted an image of the beautiful nameless grass so that I could continue my botanical taxonomic search through the winter. Plus, storing up images mentally and writing about them is just as rapacious, so why NOT photograph ? After all, I don't physically collect attractive botanicals for Martha Stewartian purposes. My rule: no picking allowed. I winced, last weekend, when DK plucked an strikingly cobblestoned, still-green leaf from a bush. Ouch.

   
Photo: Jack Dykinga usda

Today I thought of the Ray Bradbury story that I read probably 35 years ago -- the one where a small boy gets a camera, and proceeds through his beautiful world taking picture after picture, then eagerly awaits the developed prints. He is wild with anticipation -- imagining he's captured and will own that beauty -- and is bitterly disappointed when the blurry, badly exposed photographs arrive.

Or something like that.

I'm no photographer. I have an old Minolta 35mm, and, a long time ago, taped a reminder on its back:

f1.8 lg. ap., narrow field
f22 small ap., deep field

I'm on my own when it comes to remembering to take the lens cap off, remembering to focus and deciding on the shutter speed.

My pictures are often, well...you can imagine.

But nonetheless I snapped away: the pale ruddy-brown, ocrea encased seeds I originally thought were wild buckwheat; the tangled masses of dead burcucumber between the footbridge and the railroad bridge; berries -- waxy red ones; larger, soft, orange-red ones; berries in bright red clusters. I shot several magnificent tree trunks, the railroad bridge close up and the footbridge from the riverbend -- its gentle arc and sole pedestrian reminded me of the Floating World of Japanese prints. I took a picture of a still-green broadleaf bush with dusty-blue juniper-like berries, also unidentified. And, of course, several pictures of the beautiful nameless grass: chest high, pale brown, tall spare seedhead panicles, airy and graceful.

I wanted to take a picture of the tent person's campsite, but I didn't. I feel intrusive enough when I peer into the brush and locate it. A voyeur. A trespasser.

A woman walking a beagle stared at me as I blundered out of the underbrush at a particularly tangled and thorny spot.

Which brings me to the second theme of my walk.

There's seeing, of course. Camera and all.

But then there's the matter of being seen.

Having a cracked neck and being in a hard collar has thrown my body into the foreground -- the already-aging, plunging-headlong-into-menopause, scrawny, osteoporotic body. With its grayer-by the moment hair, and saggier-by-the-second skin. Last time my hair was this long my colleague -- a paragon of bluntness -- took me aside and used the word "disheveled." Another colleague, more tactful, once left an LLBean catalogue on my desk, a gentle reminder that perhaps a few new outfits might be nice.

(Literary aside. About eleven years ago, on my 40th birthday -- go ahead, do the math, I dare you -- I was reading the last volume of Updike's Rabbit books. I came across a paragraph in which he describes the texture of the buttock skin of middle-aged women. Rough and sandpapery, if memory serves. It set the tone for the next decade.)

Then there's the matter of the collar itself. It's not a small thing. It pushes up my chin and cheeks into jowls. No, let me rephrase that: into fucking jowls. The bad hair conceals the collar a little, but it's still evident. And it makes me feel conspicuous in a way that disconcerts me. It draws attention to me. People look -- some overtly, some stealthily. I feel like a freak.

Before the accident I'd begun to tell myself, with some chagrin, that aging was rendering me invisible. I no longer have that probably-imaginary refuge. I am old AND visible now. An object. The opposite of a sex object, which incites attraction. I am an aging, broken, mortal object, kindling repulsion. Memento mori.

Excuse me, would you ?

I think I need to go read "Sailing to Byzantium."

S.Bauer USDA NASA/Hubble

Whenever I find myself fretting about finances, I find it useful to recall the gospel passage about considering the lilies. It helps me cut through the mental toiling and spinning and get back to the present task at hand which was, this morning, taking a shower.

This device would probably work less well if I were having bona fide financial woes, and not just wallowing in fretful, catastrophizing overdrive.

Which leads me to ask: could I actually live a life of complete self-sufficiency, a life reduced to the barest necessities. The life, perhaps, of the person I call the river hermit, the inhabitant of the tent in the brush beside the river where I walk ?

I thought of him as I was lying in bed last night, and as I was making the bed this morning. Alone in the dark, maybe with a lantern; alone in the cold, with the winter coming on. Likely forced to adopt his residence not out of spiritual adventure, but out of terrible, painful necessity. I have been trying not to romanticize the river hermit. Just calling him that romanticizes him, I know. Maybe I should simply say tent person.

I like to think that my self-sufficiency prepares me for extremity. In my catastrophic fantasies I am always alone, being self-sufficient. Throw in a husband or a son and the scenario breaks down, becomes impossibly complex.

I could, I suppose, get a tent and set it up by the river, but it would be an artificial experiment; I could always go home, or be rescued. But even in a freely chosen retreat, with a safety net, could I endure privation ?

I don't know.

The more important question, of course, is living my own life. Just as it is, right here, right now.

Nonetheless, I think the comfort I take from "considering the lilies" is more than a cheap mind trick that happens to work to cut through anxiety. I certainly don't "believe" that "God" will provide me with any particular set of goodies, through faith or works or even grace: nothing so economical. It's like reading Julian of Norwich's famous "all manner of things shall be well" as not a particularly temporal nor practically optimistic statement.

One starts by meeting with clear attention whatever arises in the moment. By seeing the greed, hatred and delusion that arise and obstruct clear vision and compassionate action. Sitting, we glimpse that we are like the lilies of the field -- part of the world's glorious raiment, its ten-thousand things -- at whose empty, resonant center, all toiling and spinning stops.

I wrote a poem a few years ago about considering lilies. I had, I think, encountered a Stargazer Lily and realized that the root of "consider" -- con-sidere --
contains a star. (cf. sidereal). As does "desire" (cf. desiderata.)

It's about the beautiful insufficiency of words.

Lola was a patient I had as a medical student in Worcester in 1976; she was an Eskimo, and incredibly beautiful.

The two ungainly German words in the poem mean, respectively, "stargazer," and "lily-of-the-valley."

The latin is from the Song of Songs, the beginning of the second chapter: lily among thorns, apple tree among trees of the wood: so is my beloved.

Poem is circa 1999.


CONSIDERED LILIES

Six-petaled, upright
as wedding bells swung to full arc,
white stargazer lilies
open to cold heaven
while their obituary kin,
lugubrious and waxen,
nod and seem to stare
at the fragrant, upturned earth
from which, to which.

Consider them both, then consider
the lilies of the valley.
Small, nearly vanishing,
they pool with shadows
in the woods’ hollows.
To see them, you must kneel
inside a rising fume
of humus and scripture,
your cloud of knowing.

As you consider these lilies
consider, too,
sterngucker, maiglöckchen
lest the L's enthrall
you from your one desire.
Flush them from your thicket,
all of them, albino
blackbird, Lola from Yellowknife,
her black eyes and black fringe,

musculus, skittering
under the skin and beds
of the darkest ward, skittering
between levity and phlegmon
between charivari and likewake,
into the oldest anaphoras
sicut lilium inter spinus.
sicut malum inter ligna silvarum,
desideraveram.

Always stars ! Have you noticed ?
No ? Look closer, then.
Love-blind and mute as lilies,
you arch and crane
toward the blistering pinholes --
do you know them yet ? and yet ?
Your beautiful crayons blaze star-to-star,
consider to desire, seduce to console,
as you want and want and want and never get.

When I was very small, I imagined that a turtle, pulling into its shell, was retreating into a cozy little house: bed, lamp, little kitchen, radiator, all the necessities for a warm, safe, self-sufficient existence were in there.

In another favorite game, I'd stack cans of soup in a child-sized cubby hole beneath our kitchen counter. It was my den, my turtle's shell, my self-sufficient retreat.

(I note that my zafu is shaped like a turtle, and my zabuton is the size of a little room, a little hermitage.)

Later, I would stock the basket of my bicycle with things I'd need for a flight, alone, into the world. I had no intention of fleeing. It was all a game, a game in which I rehearsed self-sufficiency. I told my mother about this one. She was offended that I would imagine leaving.

Little wonder that Admiral Byrd's book about his winter cached under the ice in Antarctica -- with stove, food, victrola, books -- has held such a magical attraction for me. The title is, significantly, Alone.

The images in Margaret Morton's books "Fragile Dwelling," and "Tunnel" -- images of the rudimentary shelters constructed by urban homeless people -- move me in a similar way.

Byrd's winter ended disastrously. His stove leaked, and he was slowly poisoned by the fumes. His comrades had to brave the impossibly awful conditions to come rescue him.

Comrades. That struck a foreign note. It seemed, for that, a spoiled idyll. I had no quibble with the radio -- that remote tether to base camp seemed only to heighten the romantic solitude.

After I had my son, the animating images became more dyadic. They were of two sorts.

In the first, the mother/child unit is horribly menaced. The holocaust provided most of these images. I sought them out with an unhealthy passion, using their horror, even as I imagined my own infant smashed against a wall or torn asunder by soldiers, as a twisted reassurance of his safety. Here is a poem I wrote about that time. It's a Frostian dialogue of a sick game that a mother and father play while driving in the snow with their new infant.

In the second set of images, the mother and child are safe, cozy and warm together in a small, sufficient shelter. I am thinking of a page from Margaret Brown's The Runaway Bunny -- a famous children's picture book illustrated by Clement Hurd. The book's about a tiny bunny's various claims that he will run away, and his mother's counterclaims that she will follow and find him.

The final picture is a cutaway of a cozy rabbit warren under the roots of a big tree, just big enough for mother and son, soft, warm, well-lit, and well-stocked with carrots. (If you "look inside" the book at Amazon you can see this lovely picture a few clicks in.)

As my son has grown, the self-sufficient solitary has re-emerged. There is a wonderful book by Anneli Rufus, "party of one," that is subtitled "The Loner's Manifesto." She is a lovely writer, and discusses with insight and conviction the lives of people drawn to solitude. She sees the trait as virtue, not illness. Something to celebrate, not revile.

There's a biological substrate to it all, of course.

My marriage works because, along with intimacy, there is space. When I described the river hermit to DK he asked, jokingly, but knowingly, whether I was going to go off in my own tent.

At the scene of my accident last September I had to make a decision. My instinct is always, and was then, to claim I'm fine and go off and lick my wounds in private. My inner physician, thank goodness, won out (you idiot -- you've got terrible neck pain and two of your fingers are numb -- hadn't you ought to make sure you're not about to become quadriplegic ???)

It was hard for the caretaker, the one in control, the self-sufficient one, to say: OK, yes, take care of me.

But it was a relief, an "into thy hands" moment, a surrender.

And it was frightening. I identified a strange, disturbing satisfaction in the passive experience of being a patient. Something I'd always scorned and recoiled from when I'd detected it in my own patients. Being injured and cared for had uncovered an abyss of need in me so bottomless it might never be filled. I'd have to return to the underground rabbit den, to my mother and the over-arching, sheltering roots of the paternal tree. I'd have to develop Munchausen's Syndrome ! Become a drama queen !

Well, I do wax a little histrionic at times.

None of those things has happened.

But if my carefully maintained, isolating carapace of self-sufficiency cracked just a bit along with my C2 vertebral bone, it's probably for the good.