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As a result of this blog, however, I also overlay 6-month blocks onto the scholastic rhythm. It's totally arbitrary, decided at one point by a feeling that I was cramming too much onto one web page. But here I am, counting another block of time. Of course it begs the "how many more?" question. The one with no answer, at least in our tunnel-vision view. Some day there will be an answer. Hmmmm.
A good start for this block is that I'm working on a new piece. This also begs the question (lots of begging here tonight): "why do I make these sounds?" I don't know, but I do. I'm too tired right now to even begin to speculate -- as I know I have elsewhere in this now-bloated blog -- why I do this music nonsense. It makes me feel like I matter, somehow, but the paradox is that it really doesn't. It's a selfish thing. So there.
The fact is that I can't help but think of sound. The starting point for this new piece was watching the waves from one of our boat trips up in Maine this past weekend. I imagined a guitar-sound (I gotta guitar!) fragmenting like the spray of water, and then coming together to form semi-coherent patterns. I could hear it, obliquely, and now I feel compelled to make a real version. Not sure why, but it's there.
Maine: a great trip with my sis and bro-in-law John, with the cousins-minus-grownup-Lian. Family, another compelling thing impossible to "explain". Photos:
Flow is needed today, a temporary disconnect from the realities of life. Jill's mom, Ruth Lipoti, died this afternoon. Unlike Jill's father, Roy Lipoti, her death wasn't unexpected. Ruth had been struggling for several years, and at least she didn't have a lot of pain at the end.
Although her quality-of-life was deteriorating for the past several years, it was only in the last few weeks that Ruth began talking a lot about 'going to be with Roy', relating dreams she had of Roy to Jill. It sure seemed a sign of something approaching. I'm not a big believer in a God-fearing afterlife (nor would I want to be, to tell the truth), but I do think that the actuality of time/space is ineffable enough to us small-brained humans that all kinds of interesting possibilities remain. I like the idea of particular slices of existence remaining 'open' for some kind of eternity, and I certainly can imagine spending that eternity with those I love. We all die, but maybe that isn't such a bad thing.
Today we drove down to clear out the remaining items from Ruth's apartment. As we traveled, I thought about how Jill had come to learn all the shortcut/back roads to get to Medford Leas, the graduated-care facility where Ruth and Roy had retired. Useless? Yes, but how much has that knowledge formed who Jill now is, those weekly visits to her ailing mother?
We are the sum of our experiences, and our memories of those
experiences. I don't know that we can realistically jettison
any of these without fundamentally altering who we are. I suspect it
may be impossible... brain surgery, anyone?
RUTH E. LIPOTI (nee Gusky) of Medford, NJ, passed away on Thursday, August 12, 2010. She was 84. Born in Jersey City, NJ, she is the daughter of the late Victor and Evelyn Gusky and the wife of the late Roy Lipoti. She has resided in Medford Leas since 2000, moving there from Medford Lakes, NJ where she lived for 17 yrs. and from Wood Ridge, NJ. She was a Draftsperson and retired from Environ in Princeton, NJ in 1991. Prior to Environ, she had worked at Stone and Webster on the Nine Mile Point Nuclear Reactor, Siemen's Industries, GTE Information Systems, Uehling Instrument Company, Bendix Aviation and Bell Laboratories. She is the Beloved Mother of Dr. Jill A. Lipoti and her husband Dr. Brad Garton of Roosevelt, NJ. Relatives and friends are invited to her Service on Friday, Sept. 3, 2010 at 11:00 AM at the BG Wm. Doyle Vet. Mem. Cem. Provinceline Rd., Wrightstown, NJ. Funeral arrangements are by the Bradley and Stow Funeral Home, Medford, NJ, (609)-953-7600. (www.Bradley Stow.com)
I'm again thinking of memory, how it shapes existence. What were the memories being created by the 3000 dead of September 11? The thousands who die each day? What if they all had their own blogs, the attempt to shape memory (yeah...); what would they put forward? We've had another of our own personal time of powerful remembrance with Ruth's memorial last weekend. The times we create, the way we live, these all get dissolved into.. what? To only a few do they really matter, but that connection is of the greatest strength. Then it all evaporates, blown away by the passing of the arrow of time. Memory: "The lone and level sands stretch far away."
I was drifting off to sleep, and something -- maybe the position of my body, the sound of the wind outside, the warmth under the bedcovers -- reminded me, viscerally, of the safety and contentment I felt when I was young. Or at least that's how I recalled it. I felt, for no really obvious reason, good. Life seemed unjustifiably happy, untroubled, carefree. I was there, in that nice bed, and it was enough. I thought: "This seems an excellent trick of mind, to be able to be this way." A trick that I could invoke automatically when young, but was now difficult and elusive.
I wondered: "How could I make this rare feeling more common? Could I install a mental filter that might make the world better?" But then I thought: "What would that do to me? What kind of person would I become?" I wasn't sure it was such a desirable thing, to be that wrapped in bliss. All the time. I'm still not sure. It was a wonderful feeling.
All this came to me almost fully-formed as something I would write here in this blog. Here it is, almost two weeks later and I'm finally taking a few minutes to type it in. I'm such a lazy bum!
And a lot has been happening lately.
On the way over to church yesterday, Daniel said that fall was his least favorite season. I remember when I was his age that I would probably have said the same thing. Older now, however, I like the resonance it evokes. I remember when I first started liking October -- I had just purchased (then) Walter Carlos' two-album set Sonic Seasonings. The side devoted to "Fall" really grabbed me.
Darn, I wanted to post a small excerpt here, but I can't find the digitized version. Maybe tomorrow. As always, I had more to say about all this, too, but I'm tired.
This was one of my favorite lectures to do: it's about "production", or how to use the tools of the studio to build the sound of the music you record. We've spent several weeks describing the tools and techniques, and this is intended to showcase various ways that others (other 'producers') have used them. Essentially I get to play music I like and then talk about it. I love my job!
I have a set of standard works I usually draw upon to show different techniques, double-tracking, innovative reverb, pitch-shifting, etc., but I also bring in newer pieces that have been released more recently. This year I decided to change the opening of the class because of a CD that Peter Gabriel put out earlier this year.
Instead of jumping right into demos of various sounds, I said that production can really change the way music is received and understood. The example I used was the first cut on Paul Simon's Graceland album, The Boy in the Bubble. An aside: this was the first CD I ever owned, Jill bought it for me. Anyhow, I played this excerpt:
Then I played a version that Peter Gabriel had recorded for his recent release Scratch My Back:
I think I know already that there will be an effect of this that Lian can't predict. The Revlimid is still working for me, but (as I've mentioned) the "M-spike" is gradually increasing, showing that my myeloma is beginning to change. Dr. Pearse says that the course of this idiosyncratic disease can shift, and it's impossible to discern the future, but he has been discussing future treatment options with me in recent visits. At some point I may have to face some difficult times; of course that possibility exists for all of us. It will be a remembrance of the feeling I have right now, the pride and admiration I have for my daughter, thinking of the resolve she mustered to literally "go the distance" that will help me get through a stem-cell transplant, a stepped-up infusion schedule or whatever gets thrown my way. The lessons we can learn from our kids. The inspiration we can draw. THANKS, Lian! Jill and I are so proud of you and Daniel, our love is strong!
Above I also mentioned Walter Carlos' piece "Fall" from Sonic Seasonings. Here is an excerpt:
Here are a few pictures of the new landscaping in our back yard:
I need to hold these good feelings close, because the other reason the grey dampness seemed suitable today was the result of the mid-term election two days ago. Capitalizing on a sharp impatience of an electorate expecting an 8-year Bush/Cheney ransacking of our country and economy to turn around in 18 months, the Republicans managed to capture control of the US House of Representatives. The Senate, and of course the Presidency, is still in Democratic hands. The contemporary Republican party, unlike the party of my father, seems to aim primarily at the most selfish, self-absorbed, self-centered and greedy characteristics of our country. The driving interest seems to be power, not governing, and it will be to the detriment of our national future if their unthinking and uncaring agenda becomes standard policy.
Laying it on a bit thick, aren't I? I've tried not to inject too much politics in my writings here. As this blog has sorted out as a place where I've mainly done my own self-absorbed/self-centered musings on life, the root motivation has been the mortal connection that cancer has revealed. Politics has seemed almost silly in that context. Here's the connection now, though: one of the primary vows of the incoming Republican maniacs has been to "repeal the health-care bill". I can't completely understand why, and I also can't understand how polls that show an evenly-divided electorate on the health-care bill can translate into a MANDATE to do THE PEOPLE'S WILL and return to (what was by all accounts) a totally broken health-care system.
Selfishness, and perhaps a misguided belief that 'this can't happen to me'. How else to explain these attitudes? And how can I make apparent to these misinformed zealots that, for people like me, words such as cap on lifetime benefits and pre-existing conditions have a real and terrifying meaning? You want to go back to that?!?
Oh yeah, the other big target is the elimination of discretionary
spending. I guess it's important to do that in order to balance
the budget, although handing the wealthiest of the wealthy in our
country a fat tax cut has nothing to do with any financial balancing.
Discretionary spending... hmmm... cancer research, anyone?
See, I can be selfish too.
All this subconscious activity is probably because today is
one of those Really Big Days in an American life. More on
this later...
So here's the story: Way back in April, when long-time good friend and apartment-sharer Martha Colby decided she'd had enough of NYC and changed her life with a big move to the mountains of Utah, Jill and I thought of different things to do about our NY apartment situation. The easiest thing at first was to find another person to share the apartment with -- and we did. Unfortunately Columbia had changed various policies, and I was no longer 'officially' entitled to a faculty apartment nor was I supposed to share the apartment with a non-family member. It wasn't good, and I sadly let down a potential apartment-mate. I probably could have told lies lies lies through my teeth and worked things out, but it really didn't seem right. Well, it really wasn't right! Lies lies lies!
When we began investigating other possibilities, we came to the realization that, given the insanely bad real-estate market (for sellers) and insanely low interest rates (thanks for wrecking the economy, Mr. Bush!), we would be paying substantially less per month in mortgage payments and building fees than we were paying in rent to Columbia University. Yikes!
We started looking around at various places we saw listed on-line, and had the good fortune to connect with Kelly Cole, a real-estate agent for the giant NY firm Corcoran. Turns out that Kelly is pretty much the Upper-West-Side person to know, and we very quickly found several very nice condos and co-ops within our price range. It was just like being on HGTV!
Sorry I'm using so many italics and such in this posting, but it has been kind of a breathless day.
Long story short: we settled on a spectacular 1-BR in the Castle Village complex just north of the GW Bridge, put in an offer, and today we closed on the deal! Exclamation point! Italics!
I haven't written too much about the whole convoluted process here (and "convoluted" is a gentle adjective -- it amazes me that any real-estate gets sold at all in New York), because I started feeling like saying too much would somehow jinx the outcome. Yep, the process was that long and entangled. Supposedly we did it really fast, too.
We're really happy with it, and I need to start letting people know that things have shifted for us, much for the better as far as we can ascertain. My subway ride to Columbia from the place is about 20 minutes, not quite as convenient as the Columbia-housing place one block from main campus, but the area around the apartment is really nice. And it's ours. The American Dream! We're in debt again! How odd life can twist, sometimes.
I especially need to tell Martha, for I haven't said much of anything to her since she moved out West. Weird how our brains can turn a silly superstation (the don't-talk-about-it jinx) into something virtually real. Anyhow, thanks Martha Colby! The ripples from your move did good things for us!
How good? This is the view from our living room, I took the picture today after we were handed the keys:
What do I mean by this? Let me give a little self-constructed context: As I age, I am imagining more strongly various ancestral linkages. My paternal grandfather (Dr. J. Glenn Garton, I carry his middle name) was what we would now too modestly call a "quick study". Essentially Grandpa was intensely smart. I don't know exactly when he began college, but he was a licensed and practicing physician in his early twenties.
I don't believe I'm anywhere near Grandpa's level of intelligence, but I have noticed that I can quickly gain a superficial grasp of things. This is my fantasy linkage: I have some of Grandpa's genes! My problem is that this trick isn't properly paired with the strong work-ethic that Grandpa had. I don't recall a single night during my childhood visits to Iowa when "Doc Garton" wasn't called out at 2 or 3 AM (sometimes several times) to visit a sick patient. Back then doctors made house-calls, whenever needed. Grandpa always went. I sleep at night.
The way this plays out is that I can quickly see through a task in my mind and work out a pretty good solution. But then the Thought and Action confusion sets in, and I feel that I have already accomplished the task. Wrong! For example, I'm working with Damon Holzborn (one of our current graduate students) to implement a few interesting new features for our iPhoneOS project. This is the same software that I used for my iPhone/iPod app iLooch. The new features presented some interesting challenges, and I figured out how to make it all flow within our current framework. When I say "figured out", I mean I know exactly where in the existing code to make the changes, add a few data-structures, and cause it all to mesh together. I should hope I could -- I wrote the original code after all.
But after figuring all this out, have I actually sat down to make the modifications to the code? No! I'm a lazy idiot! I thought of it, so therefore it's done, right? Eventually I'll do it... maybe later tonight. Or tomorrow.
This pipe-dream procrastination normally doesn't cause any big troubles. Unlike Grandpa, people's lives aren't depending on the next sound I construct or the next line of code I type. However, I feel bad when my action-deferment may delay some niceness for people I respect and admire. This fall I got hit hard with a substantial pile of recommendations and evaluations. The good news is that I didn't defer them too badly and I made all the appropriate deadlines (I think!). In the process of doing them, I once again marveled at how strong the work is that people are doing -- thank goodness I no longer have to compete directly in "the game"! Some of the recent materials that people sent my way were just amazing.
One of my former students, Chris Bailey, is a case in point. He sent me a copy of his new CD Immolation Ritual a few weeks ago. His new work totally blew me away, especially the first two pieces on the CD. I've always been a fan of Chris' music, even doing a goofy re-mix of his work for my piece ssssand. I also know how nice it makes me feel when I get an uncommon and random piece of e-mail out of the blue from someone saying they enjoyed some of my music.
So have I written to Chris to tell him how much I liked his new work? No. I thought about it, though. What a dummy I am. To Chris and everyone else who has given me such good music to hear, I'm planning to drop you a note soon... maybe later tonight. Or tomorrow.
For the past few months, the 'stats' that Dr. Pearse has been watching have slowly inched upwards, showing that my myeloma is accommodating to the Revlimid I have been taking (check here and here and here for a few refs). As I described, the "M-spike" is a measure of monoclonal antibodies (i.e. antibodies that are all identical; i.e. bogus ones). This indicates the level of cancer activity. Over the past year -- after my initial remission ended -- it was .2, .3, .2, .3, .4, .4, .3, .4... etc. Roger said that when it hit .5 (I forget the units, I think grams/deciliter or something like that) we should discuss changing the drug regimen. At my appointment last month it was .5, and it probably will be .5 from the blood-work yesterday, too. This isn't really anything to get freaked out about, to put it in a bit of perspective I think my "M-spike" was over 3.0 when I was first diagnosed. Roger likes to be proactive about dealing with this stuff, though, and I tend to think that's a Good Thing.
So we discussed a number of options, the good news being that there are now a number of options, and settled on adding a new drug (Biaxin) to augment the Revlimid. It's a fairly benign drug, supposedly, but he also wants to start me back with some Decadron (the steroid from hell) to help with the efficacy of the Biaxin. I need to warn my colleagues and grad students, because happy things like chair-throwing and total freak-out may be possible again.
The good news is that the dosage of Decadron will be about 10% what I took in the wild-and-wooly days, but I'll probably still be randomly bizarre. At least now I have an excuse.
I wrote these down earlier today, sitting in our new apartment and watching the Hudson, thinking about what I would write here given the recent news:
I got a lot of work done, definitely the manic part of the drug. Software updates, a new piece I'm happy about, general odds and ends. The crash will most likely be unpleasant.
Music. Sometimes I really don't feel like I fit anywhere. I listen to the music. I miss my daughter. I miss my son. I miss my wife. What are these differences in perception? Oh the drugs.
But Thanksgiving tomorrow, and wonderful family around. I love this time of year.
Whatever the reason, I felt hit really hard by the decadron this week. I wasn't expecting it, because the dosage is much lower than my induction therapy. All of the feelings came back with a vengeance, though; the initial mania, the heavy crash, the general-body-badness, the drifting "chemo-brain" perception of reality. Even the weird dreams have returned in full force (last night I dreamed all my teeth fell out on the floor, but I just looked at them and puzzled over why I still had perfectly fine teeth in my mouth...).
In any case, this is my life for the foreseeable future. Yes, another adventure. I have noticed how it has dramatically re-motivated my writing here in this blog. Nothing like a stark reminder of mortality to make me feel like leaving some textual remnants behind. I've thought yet again about the purpose behind this blog. As I've said several times before, I originally imagined it as a way of inscribing Big Heavy-Duty Deep Thoughts for my kids, for vaguely-fascinated descendants, hapless readers who happen across this, all that extreme egotistical silliness. Yeah, Deep thoughts.
Instead, this blog has -- probably inevitably from the start -- degenerated into random superficial observations, reporting of various bodily conditions (like above), a fair amount of whininess, oblique references to personal/family life-stuff, strange confessionals, all that self-indulgent bloginess I imagined would happen at the beginning. Where else, though, can I try to let those I love know what a miracle I think life can be? Where else can I attempt to write the feeling of the yellow-green rising sunlight outside as I lay in bed this morning (oh the drugs), my family here in the house? I can't put it into words, but perhaps I can at least hint it. And music, of course.
We were also able to arrange an appointment right when they got to Indianapolis today for dad with the bone-specialist he has seen in the past, and the prognosis after the consultation seemed good. Mom and dad are safely back home now. Whew! What a time!
I, of course, drifted along most of the time in a haze of drugs. The combination of Revlimid and the Decadron really shifts your brain around. Total mania followed by pervasive 'wiftiness', with some general out-of-it alienation and weirdness thrown in for good measure.
The manic phase of the steroids is quite something. If employers found out how the side-effects of this drug can play out, I think they'd be dosing up the workforce in short order. I took my weekly tablets of Decadron this morning, and my productivity went berserk. Here are a few things done today:
The mania also manifests as semi-crazed ebullience, especially at dinner. One of the things I truly love about our family is how much we like to laugh. Not from derisive or mocking humor, but from the joy found in everyday (and sometimes unique-day) life. The stories I told during our holiday meals! The fun in memories! I described our high-school sophomore homecoming float -- it was supposed to be a bulldog but looked like a weird blue frog --and the fire that resulted in front of the reviewing stand from the model rockets we intended to shoot "dramatically" from the shoulders of the creature; I related the story of Lian's first day at nursery school; I told our kids about the 'property lines' Brenda and I had in the back seat of our car during long trips, and the mystical "smooooooke from the smoookies" and the story of how Gatorade was made (yes alligators were involved) that my sister half-believed on these same trips. I'll have to post these stories here later. "For the children...", yeah.
Jill, my amazing and wonderful wife, got to deal with all this as best she could. She also laughed the hardest at some of the recollections. I'm hoping the family who shares humor is strong and healthy. It sure feels that way.
I was cycling through various "states of being" while walking from Columbia's main campus to the CMC studios at 125th Street today. It was a powerfully blue and sparkling early-December winter day, and everything was continuously transforming, and I was struck again by the blatantly obvious: how the very fabric of our existence, the fundamental things we can point to and know are real, are determined by our perceptual apparatus (and of course the neurochemical decoding of sensory input that happens in our mysterious "seat of consciousness"). As the world was metamorphosing around me, I had an overwhelming sense that I was making it all up. Me and my chemo-brain drugs were creating everything.
That wasn't really right, though, as I realized that something was out there, goosing my senses. The world altered again, and I felt a part of a seamless continuum between internal consciousness and external physics. Not too long ago one of the academic buzzwords-du-jour was "embodiment", and today there seemed a kernel of truth in some of the post-post-modern rhetoric. The negotiation, the mediation (another tired old academic-speak term) between our evolved neural survival mechanisms and "that stuff out there" made a lot of sense. I was 'making it all up', but the fantasy I was constructing kept getting kicked this way and that by real-live externalities. Go figure that one.
I have more to say about this, I think, but the world just shifted again and I'm really tired. Time for bed.
But a lot of what I try to simulate in my music is some kind of life, or at least that's how I hear it. It also gives me an entry into understanding why I like music over speakers. What I do is enter into that virtual-reality scene, the musical signal allows me to feel through my body what the traces of the music carry. I remember talking with Jim Randall at Princeton about why much of Haydn's music bugged me. His reply: "Aha -- you can't get around the smell of the powdered wigs, eh?" Yep.
On the other hand, there is highly complex and seemingly abstract music that does seem to have that living 'kick'. In fact, after I walked to the CMC on the day described above, one of our graduate students (Bryan Jacobs, my TA for the MIDI course) presented his compositional work to the class. Even though it was extremely dense, non-metrical and complicated music, it had a drive to it. The class picked up on it. I was amazed at how well they enjoyed his music, radically different from what they normally hear. The whole time Bryan was playing his pieces, from his laptop, I was watching his fingers. Totally involuntarily, they were moving just above his laptop keyboard in sync with the gestures he had constructed in his piece. He couldn't help it -- he had that embodiment thing happening! Great fun.
I talked about this with Sam Pluta (TA with me for my graduate seminar) at dinner later that night. He's involved in a Columbia-rooted ensemble called Wet Ink that has been enjoying a fair amount of success here in NYC. I've been to a few of their concerts, and they are exciting. They play the kind of semi-modernist sounds that you think I might denigrate with the "oh how awful abstract music is!" aesthetic, but the music lives, it connects. I don't really like concerts, but the Wet Ink stuff does not translate well to recorded media, so my listen-and-pretend at home approach does not work for their music. They are a live ensemble.
Hmmmm, just wanted to say all this for some reason. Lots going on, last week of classes, Tristan Murail retired from Columbia tonight (more on that later, I've really grown to respect and admire him). Appointment with Dr. Pearse today, no big changes but the day's blood-work report hadn't appeared while I was there. Continue.
The biggest event of the week, though, was Tristan Murail's retirement reception. Yeah, I know Pierre Boulez was in town on Monday, but this was an evening of personal importance and a demarcation that will define a new time at Columbia for us.
I have really appreciated the chance to work with Tristan. It took a little time for me to grow this appreciation, though, especially harkening back to my obnoxious change-the-world, aesthetic fire-breathing days. I tried to capture some of that in my remarks at his reception. This is what I recall saying:
Time passed, and I began more and more to respect Tristan and what he did. I also found myself agreeing with him more often than not about decisions related to the Department. As Director of Undergraduate Studies, I also worked closely with his wife Françoise, and her skill and dedication to students meant a lot.
What meant the most, however, happened when I became sick. These are the personal things, the human connections, the moments that define who we are. All of my colleagues here at Columbia were wonderful, but some of the most strongest words of support came from Tristan and Françoise. I don't know if Tristan even remembers what he said, but it made a difference to me.
I began to think: "huh, maybe I better give this Murail music a closer listen." I did, and you know what? It's pretty good! You all realize that Tristan is a deep and profound composer, and I'm basically a shallow, surfacey kinda guy. But in Tristan's music, there are some shallow/surface sounds that are simply gorgeous.
Now that I'm beginning to fully appreciate Tristan, he decides to leave. Darn. How can we ever replace his presence? Being the techno-utopian believer that I am, I figure: there has to be an APP for that. In vain, however, did I search the App Store. No "Tristan" app was downloadable. I realized that I had to write my own. The result was the
I was upstairs sending e-mail to my friend Gregory Taylor, and I wanted to quote something from Daniel Lanois' new book I'm reading on my Kindle. I had to get my reading glasses to do this. I had my Kindle, and I had the case for the reading glasses, but no glasses. "Aha!" I thought, "I bet they are downstairs!" Downstairs I went, and in the kitchen I found the glasses. They were next to -- I'm not making this up -- a Christmas card letter that was opened exactly half-way. I recalled that while opening the letter, I decided it would be a good idea to replenish the water in our humidifier (it's really cold outside tonight). I went into the dining room to check the reservoir, and, yes, it was half-filled.
I knew that while I filled it I decided I needed to finish washing the dishes from dinner. Went back to the kitchen and THEN I finally finished washing the dishes. Half-done, yeah. Then I filled the humidifier, went back to finish going through the mail. I opened one card that had that sparkly-sequin touch on the cover photo, the little plastic bits that reflect blue/green/read/yellow as you move the card in the light.
Next thing I knew I had spent several minutes gazing at this card, thinking how much I liked that sparkly phenomenon when I was very young, thinking about when I was very young, and I snapped out of it, grabbed my reading glasses (so I thought) and went upstairs. Upon arriving upstairs, I discovered that I had left the glasses downstairs for some reason. I went back down, they were on the dining room table. Went back upstairs, remembered why I had set the glasses down: I had to go to the bathroom.
So I did. Then I came out, couldn't find the glasses. Went back
downstairs (this was now the third trip), no glasses. I am now writing
this, no clue where the mystery glasses might be. Oh humans. Oh me.
Oh brains who react strangely to external chemical influence.
How did we ever evolve 'purposeful behavior'?
Yikes!!!!!!! If I had to name only one film director I consider my favorite, it would be Herzog. I've read his Walking on Ice book. I think I've seen nearly all of his movies, except perhaps one or two of his most recent works.
There was a period in my life where his films really resonated, films like Stroszek, Woyzeck, Heart of Glass. In fact, there is a line at the end of Stroszek that sort of became my mantra for a few years in my early twenties. The story is about a Polish émigré (Stroszek) who has left Poland because his life is so dismal. He moves with his wife/girlfriend to Wisconsin, and of course nothing changes. The final scene takes place at one of those western-midwestern 'roadside attractions', complete with "authentic Indian" standing out in front to attract travelers.
Stroszek pulls up, it looks like it's late October or early March, virtually no one except the sad Indian is there. The sky is overcast, and Herzog's cinematographic ability to capture the feel of that kind of day is unparalleled. The place is a really run-down 'attraction', with a creaky chairlift going up a very minor hill. At the base of the hill are a number of oddball arcade things including a "dancing chicken" box. If a quarter is used to activate it, it sends a small electric current through a grid at the feet of a chicken and makes it hop around. I've actually seen one of these.
So Stroszek gets on the chairlift with a shotgun he's been carrying, and at the top we hear the inevitable retort. The next scene has several police cars with flashing lights around, the chairlift is still going. One of the officers gets on the radio to report the situation to HQ. He says: "Well, we got us a dead man on the chairlift, and... [this is the line that lodged itself in my brain]...
Simon said his father was a good dad, he used to take Simon on many of
his shoots. I'm inclined to believe this is true, because Simon seems
a really together kid. Simon seemed genuinely pleased that I liked
his father's work. He said he would tell his dad that his music prof
really enjoyed his films. Whoo-hoo!
I told Lian that last night was a special celebration for her. Total lunar eclipse. The process began about 1:30 AM and achieved totality close to half-past two. I decided to delay my bedtime to see at least the start of it. The night sky was clear, and I wanted to check out the roof as a sky-viewing platform.
It was a beautiful, crisp, clear night. I was surprised that there seemed to be no one else up to see the show, but then I turned the corner around around the elevator building in the center of the roof. The wind blasted off the Hudson with an icy coldness that cut through all of my warmly-layered clothing. Yikes! Then I looked up, and the cold faded (well, slightly) away. The moon was about 1/4 eclipsed, looking very unnatural. The way the umbra was cutting across the disk was just... odd. Something was very strange in the natural order of things. Sheesh, if I was an ancient Mayan and this was happening on the eve of the shortest day of the year I would be running to the nearest stela to carve my world-end predictions straightaway.
Two more things then happened that switched the experience from being something kind of cool and interesting into an EXPERIENCE. First of all, I noticed that the eclipsing moon had a perfect ice-ring circle around it. The bright white of the ring made the cut-up moon and the slightly brownishing color all the more unusual. Then as I was gazing at this sight, one of the warning/searchlights on top of the George Washington Bridge swept across the sky, drawing my eyes to the riot of lights making up lower Manhattan.
At that point, the cold wind cutting through me did melt away. Man oh man, what a view! What a scene! Sometimes I wonder how I get to be at some place, at some time, to experience these things and lock them into my memory. I will be revisiting this one for sure.
As I've mentioned, I've been thinking a lot about this memory-business lately. What do memories do for us? Why do they exist? What role does music play? Will I need them in the future to get me through rough times? After death? Before? During? In any case, my neurochemical processes are socking a few away for imperfect but vivid recall. Last night is one of them.
Another one, coming on the heels of Lian's birthday here, was what happened the next day after her birth when I returned home very early in the morning. She was born ten minutes before the solstice (hey, that's today!), and I came home to get some supplies to take back to the Princeton hospital. It so happens that I was there in time to watch the solstice sun rise. Just for fun, we had built a "fake stonehenge" in our back yard after visiting the real thing in England. The rocks (they came from upstate New York, a mystery: how did they get here?) are indeed aligned with the summer and winter solstice sunrise and sunset. I figured having an ancient and mysterious site on our land would raise our property value.
For some reason that morning at sunrise I felt it would be fun to pretend to play some Druidish/Merlin role to celebrate the birth of our daughter, so I grabbed some random spices from our spice rack (don't those Druids always do stuff with spices?). I positioned myself on the central rock of our "Stonehenge" and tossed a few pinches here and there, thinking what were probably very silly Druid-like thoughts. But even doing this totally bogus activity released powerful feelings of unbridled joy and possibility... it was an intense and wonderful experience. My incredible wife had given birth to the most beautiful little person I had ever seen. My family, my life seemed complete in a way I could never have imagined. Perched on top of my Roosevelt-henge rock, I felt like I was simultaneously dissolving in ecstasy and exploding in goodness and light.
I carry that memory, now. Forever. Maybe this is what remembering is for, to keep us sane in important ways as implacable eclipses remind us of our ultimate insignificance. Through memory, I can even take those relentless but starkly beautiful eclipses and make them my own.
Here are some pictures from the past weekend:
But of course one of the main events of the weekend was the traditional competition for the holiday pun-of-the-year. There never really is a winner of this competition, the puns are generally so awful that "win" would not be an appropriate descriptor.
In no particular order (except I'm going to put mine last!), here are the entries from this year. I'm missing one from nephew Bo, though:
Now as odd as that part of the dream may be, this is where it gets interesting. I realized that we were in a dream, and I could "step outside/above" the dream and fold it in a certain way. Then I could compress this folded packet and carry it. Then I could do it again, recursing on up into infinity. A totality of experience neatly folded and concisely packaged. It went "meta".
I hadn't written about this dream, because I had other things to do, plus it was just another strangely entertaining dream. Then last night I had a dream of writing this earlier dream here. In order to capture it I had to paste it as dots on paper(?). All the while I was doing it I had the feeling of floating 'outside' everything, almost like before when I could step-above the dream-action.
Does this suggest some place where consciousness can go beyond
our limited, linear reality? Can we shed the coil and float away?
I hope so, because it's kind of fun.
We went to pick up Lian at the airport, a contemporary version of the 'traditional' homecoming. All the Christmas-ey things are in place, in spite of the return of my cancer life is still pretty darned good. I'm doing my little Christmas Eve ritual, the big difference now being that Lian and Daniel are the ones who will be staying up late. I'm heading to bed shortly. The monks are chanting away on the stereo. There seems something more I should say to mark this year-measure, but I can't think of anything right now. Happy Christmas Eve!
This will be a multi-media blog posting, a few random items to get
put here before the end of the year.
First of all, here are the 'traditional' pictures of our Christmas
trees, taken Christmas Eve:
