I'm thinking of one of my favorite childhood memories, as a result of the post today on Time Goes By where there are mentions of many of the songs that were the playlist for the first decade of my life.
I can remember being about 8 or 9 years old. It is a warm, sunny summer day, and my cousin Dianne and are holding hands, skipping down Chestnut Street and singing
Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay
My, oh my what a wonderful day!
Plenty of sunshine heading my way
Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay
Mister Bluebird on my shoulder
It's the truth, it's actch'll
Ev'rything is satisfactch'll
It is one of those days when all seems right with the world. My cousin, ten months younger than I, is my best friend. Our mothers, who are sisters, often dress us alike. We have a close extended family. World War II is over. Rationing has finally ended, and we have just seen the Disney movie Song of the South -- the first Disney movie that featured live characters interacting with animated ones.
--the simple, heart-warming story of a boy, a girl, and the person of Uncle Remus himself, who becomes a living personality. Set in the nostalgic memorable days of the late nineteenth century, the story enacted by the living players take place on a lovely Southern plantation. It is a deeply moving, romantic account of a lonely and bewildered boy, left to his own devices when his father, an aggressive Atlanta newspaper editor, is caught between domestic responsibility and political challenge
At least that's how the Disney camp described it at the time. And, at the time, it enchanted me. Uncle Remus (the live, storytelling character) was a poor man, an old man, and a black man in a post Civil War America that offered few opportunities for him to better his life. Uncle Remus enchanted me with his humor, his compassion, his wisdom, his wonderful animal stories, his optimism.
The animal stories were conveyed in a manner in which they were not deemed as ostensibly racist by many among the audiences of the time; by the mid-20th century, however, the dialect and the "old Uncle" stereotype of the narrator, long considered demeaning by many blacks, as well as Harris' [the author] racist and patronizing attitudes toward blacks and his defense of slavery in his foreword, rendered the book indefensible to many. Without much controversy the stories became less popular.
Several years back, some people began to think that it's time to bring back the Song of the South, bring it to a much different audience, an audience that lived through the Civil Rights movement, an audience that celebrates Black History Month, an audience that can view the Song of the South through the lens of history.
Those who have criticized "Song of the South" have claimed that it makes slavery appear pleasant or pretends that slavery didn't exist at all. Nevermind the film is set in the years following the abolition of slavery. I always have thought the movie offers a good, honest representation of the lives that some black Americans lived in a time that really existed.
I would love to see Song of the South again. I'd love to see it with my grandson, who has grown up without being hampered by old stereotypes. I'll bet he would love Uncle Remus for the kind and entertaining man he is. At least he is, still, on the disintegrating film locked up somewhere in Disney's vault.
I've decided that the opposite of learning is forgetting.
Several mornings a week, as I sit at the table and drink my daily vitamin shake, my six and a half-year-old grandson gives me a memory test. Sometimes he shows me each of his little die cast airplanes and sees if I remember the name of each. He has dozens, and he knows them all. Sometimes he sets up his dinosaur models and tests me on the names of each of those. Each time I remember a few, but I forget the names of most from day to day -- even though he names each for me, speaking very clearly and explaining the distinguishing features of each.
As he learns, I forget.
On the other hand, as he learns, I also find out about all sorts of bits of information that I didn't know and didn't know that I didn't know. Of course, I forget most of it, but, at the time when he is explaining to me that whale sharks eat plankton, I find it interesting, both that I never knew that and also that it doesn't matter that I never knew that.
I forget. He seems to remember everything, and I think it's because being home schooled enables him to pursue learning about what interests him, whether it be tornadoes, fossils, war planes, or road construction. And, at the same time, he's learning that math, science, history, reading and writing are necessary to his understanding of what interests him.
His mom posted a unique perspective on what she has discovered that is important for kids to learn on her own blog.
We are definitely a bunch of avid learners in this extended household. Unfortunately, I am forgetting as much as I'm learning.
Hopefully, my son, who is on a learning curve regarding moving this blog to WordPress, will soon finish the job so that he can then forget it.
Soon. My new look will be up soon.
And, with it, a new photo of me, which my daughter is going to take for the little blurb about me that is going to appear in Vicki Howell's upcoming Craft Corps book.
And you thought that I was just a blogger. Live and learn. Except for me. I live and forget.
As I walk out of their little "office," where I had been using their desktop to do some late-night catching up on the Scramble games that I play with my friend in Saratoga, I come upon my daughter and son-in-law engrossed in their laptops. He's checking up on the latest presidential campaign issues, and she's going through her photos to find images that match the series of nature-based poems her father wrote. The television remotes lay on the couch where they were tossed. The only sound is the rustling of pages and the tapping of keyboards.
It's a telling scene for me. We have, as a family, embraced this technology for all that it offers our hungry minds. We are constant learners, thoughtful and curious. The Internet is our classroom.
And it is becoming so for my grandson, who is being home-schooled. He not only has his own XO Laptop; with his mom's help, he uses their desktop to look for and print out images for learning projects, such as identifying animals and their habitats. The world map that hangs from the mantle in their living room is a constant source of questions on his part that he knows have answers somewhere in the great net-out-there.
At the moment, I am without a laptop, and I find it a great inconvenience. My old one has a major problem with the port the power cord goes into so that the machine turns off as soon as it is turned on. Now it doesn't even start because I fiddled with it once too often.
I also recently caused the crash of the brand new laptop that I inherited from my once-husband. I guess I got too impatient with Vista, and I am convinced I want to stay as far away from that OS as I can. My plans are to have Vista uninstalled and have a different operating system put in. I'm even thinking about Linux.
It's interesting how quickly we have all adapted to this technology. I'm planning to have my laptop repaired before I move into my digs at my daughter's and son-in-law's, where wifi rules.
More to the point, I miss getting costumed up on Halloween.
At my last job (which lasted 20 years, and there's lots of reasons why), my boss loved Halloween, and every year we all dressed up and made the rounds of all the offices.
This is some of us as Snow White and some of her dwarfs. That's me on your bottom left, and that's my boss behind me. Other years we dressed as the Seven Deadly Sins, Hogwart faculty (I wish I knew what happed to my costume for that; I wonder if I loaned it to someone), gangsters, and, of course witches. I've forgotten some of the other themes we used. There are photos, somewhere, but it was all before any of us had digital cameras, and they were never scanned in.
Two years ago, when my boss retired, she chose Halloween as the day for her farewell party, and she urged people to dress in costume. Of course, I did.
About six years ago, I went to a few dance parties as Medusa.
I guess that's where my grandson gets his love of costumes. You sort of become whatever you wear.
So, will it be the beginning of a deeper understanding of how it ALL began, or the end of life as we know it?
GENVEVA, Switzerland - It has been called an Alice in Wonderland investigation into the makeup of the universe — or dangerous tampering with nature that could spell doomsday.
Whatever the case, the most powerful atom-smasher ever built comes online Wednesday, eagerly anticipated by scientists worldwide who have awaited this moment for two decades.
The multibillion-dollar Large Hadron Collider will explore the tiniest particles and come ever closer to re-enacting the big bang, the theory that a colossal explosion created the universe.
In case you're wondering how it's supposed to work, here's a little piece of informative entertainment:
If we make it through Wednesday, our next major worry will be election day -- which could mean the end of America as we know it (or rather would like to know it, again) if the GOP candidates win.
.... Palin is just a representation of a new dynamic that's tearing across the political fabric all around the world. She's the conservatives' answer to the new ''post-political'' challenge that Obama represents. However, it's worth noting that she still evokes old-style political responses, and that's all the people who will turn out to vote just to make sure she fails. The big turn-on among Republican voters will be reciprocated by the angst she arouses among others who have a visceral opposition to her.
From the beginning, Obama's candidacy has challenged this binary divide. He triumphed over Hillary Clinton by appealing to a new constituency. He positioned himself as representing a new way forward; using new formulations to overcome the seemingly intractable political impasses of the past. In the US, where voting is not compulsory, this still offers him a remarkable chance of becoming the next president. If he can retain the faith of the young and those who want change, he'll win. The key is to be able to mobilise these people, and keep them enthusiastic long enough to cast their votes.
Palin's supporters, on the other hand, are a known force. Although her style is a surprise and she seems new, she is just an evolution of a much older political formulation. She divides the world into republicans and democrats. Obama is attempting to move beyond these old concepts and appeal as someone who will deal with the underlying issues.
Of course, the Republicans don't want to campaign on the issues. Don't confuse them with the facts. They know what they believe.
Oh well, maybe after Wednesday,if matter and anti-matter cancel each other out, none of that will matter.
...Grace, that part of you that is fearless, that questions everything, that lives life unconditionally, gloriously, giving in to a freedom of expression so raw and primal that sometimes it leaves you breathless.
According to the website (same link as above):
SAVING GRACE stars Holly Hunter in an astonishing performance as Grace Hanadarko, a top-notch, forceful investigator whose wild personal life translates into a no-holds-barred approach to her detective work......Grace's mesmerizing journey involves facing both the internal and external demons that stand in her way.
I have never been a fan of Holly Hunter because most of the time I couldn't understand what she was saying. But either my ears and tv reception have improved, or Hunter has had some elocution lessons between last season and this one. I gave up watching it last summer. Now, I'm addicted to it.
For a while before his death in April 2008, non-blogger Myrln (aka W. A. Frankonis, i. frans nowak), posted here on Kalilily Time some kind of rant or other every Monday. Our daughter, who has salvaged his published, performed, and none-such writings, continues to send me some to post posthumously.
This is one.
SONG FOUND IN A DORY BOBBIN IN THE BAY IN KANKANEMONIOUS GULCH
Enter an old man who moves to a bench and sits. He wears a heavy topcoat, a suit, vest, old shoes.
Very deliberately, he begins going through his pockets and removing the contents.
Coat: one glove, a crumpled handkerchief, a cigar butt.
He removes the coat.
Jacket: one key, a stub of paper, a broken pencil, an empty matchbook, a red balloon.
He removes the jacket.
Vest: one paper clip, a creased snapshot.
He removes the vest.
Trousers: a second crumpled handkerchief, a penny, a hole in the pocket, a stone.
He sits, moving his hand from object to object without touching any of them.
Above the archway leading to my daughter's country kitchen is a long wooden plaque that says "Home -- Where you story begins."
The story of my grandson's 6th birthday party is not an unusual one -- tables lined up with white paper tablecloths on which the dozen young guests crayon while waiting for the cake and ice cream, members of the family and extended family bustling around each other and gathering around for traditional candle blow-out.
The theme of my grandson's party was a little unusual: Massachusetts State Trooper hats and badges and ticket books young guests created themselves. Even the cake was decorated with an image of the official State Trooper car.
What will be an oft-told family story, I'm sure, is my grandson's over-the-top exuberance as he acknowledged each gift, even the ones that weren't something related to being a cop -- and especially the full police outfit that I gave him and that he wore for the rest of the day. For some uninherited reason, he's enamored of authority-figure costumes -- police, fire fighers, FBI agents/spies, doctors, soldiers.... Go figure.
On the drive out to Massachusetts last Thursday, I listened to some beautifully written stories by American combat soldiers on NPR's Selected Shorts program (see Program 42 here). These were not stories about the inhumanity of war. Rather they were stories that reflected the sweet humanity and humor of the soldiers forced to fight the war, stories that reinforced the identities of these soldiers apart from the war.
While most of the ones read on the air were true, the most poignant to me was actually a work of fiction. It was about a female soldier taking her young son to the airport, where he would fly, alone, to his grandparents, while she went off to war.
Perhaps, some day, there will be no need for war stories.
The poem below by Billy Collins (one of Jim Culleny's daily poetry emails) makes me sad and angry and wistful and hungry.
I'm not hungry for sweets. I surely eat enough of those.
Rather it's a soul-deep hunger for the solitude to watch circles become salt, to reach for and conjure the words that make magic of metaphor.
And so I am angry that with each passing year I have had to move farther and farther from that place where destiny can be designed. And I am sad because those years can never be recovered. And I am wistful, finally, because that is what comes of and with age and the utter exhaustion of being someone else's keeper.
Design
Billy Collins
I pour a coating of salt on the table
and make a circle in it with my finger.
This is the cycle of life
I say to no one.
This is the wheel of fortune,
the arctic circle.
This is the ring of Kerry
and the white rose of Tralee
I say to the ghosts of my family,
the dead fathers,
the aunt who drowned,
my unborn brothers and sisters,
my unborn children.
This is the sun with its glittering spokes
and the bitter moon.
This is the absolute circle of geometry
I say to the crack in the wall,
to the birds who cross the window.
This is the wheel I just invented
to roll through the rest of my life
I say
touching my finger to my tongue.
I read books, listen to books, pile up books, buy books, lose books, lend books, give books, and love to get books.
But I don't make books.
(i don't "make book" either, which is the slang term by grandmother used back in the forties, when she would send me down the street to the bar where I would bet her weekly "10 cents, combination" on the numbers.)
Last month, a dear friend of mine sent me, as a condolence gift, a book that she had literally made. It's not just a book; its a sculpture of sorts, fanning out, when opened, with flaps containing her favorite quotes. It's got color and texture and is a book like no other.
And this is my favorite quote of her favorite quotes:
Forgiveness is letting go of all hope for a better past.
Yesterday's Myrln posthumous post was a poem with a "life as a garden" metaphor. Reading it made me think about how many of the legacies he left are what continue to grow from the seeds of his thoughts, his words.
While the "garden" has always been a life metaphor for me as well, I tend to use it in a different way. And that fact is also a perfect metaphor for how we related as spouses: we started in the same place, with the same need, but we went out from there in very different directions.
They gave me a garden
the size of a grave,
so I filled it with raucous
reminders of sense:
marigold nests,
nasturtium fountains,
explosions of parsley, and
layers of lavender --
forests of tomato plants
asserting lush ascendance
over scent-full beds of
rosemary, basil, and sage.
And waving madly above them all,
stalks of perplexing
Jerusalem artichoke,
an unkillable weed
that blossoms and burrows
and grows up to nine feet tall,
defying the grim arrogance
of gravity.
elf
may 02
My literal gardens are transient. When I move away, they decay away and are forgotten. Such is the nature of many of my legacies.
Once in a while, though, I need to believe in something permanent -- hence, the two lilac trees I planted back from the edge of the woods around this house, where my brother most likely will not mow or snow blow them down when I move away from here. Someday, new owners will look out the window at the acres of rotting windfall and scraggly brush and old shaggy trees and see two blooming lilac bushes -- a sepia landscape touched with unexpected color.
Myrln is gone, but his spirit remains with us in the power of his words:
From a scrap of paper on his desk -- quickly hand-scrawled, a stray thought, bit of story, strand of memory:
Dinner table – metal goblets
These goblets belonged to my mother. Asked us to drink a toast from them because had she lived she would have been 89 years tomorrow. She was 23 when she had me, and had only 4 more years left to live. There are 4 generations sitting here today. I ask you, in her memory, to remember to make the most always of the time you have with those you love and who love you. So, Mamma, here’s to you…salut…by remembering you, we remember ourselves.
salut
See www.myrln.com for information about the remembrance party being held in his honor on May 25, as well as plans for publishing his non-published works.
I do, however, wonder why so many people experiencing melancholia are now taking pills simply to ease the pain. Of course there is a fine line between what I'm calling melancholia and what society calls depression. In my mind, what separates the two is degree of activity. Both forms are more or less chronic sadness that leads to continuing unease with how things are — persistent feelings that the world is not quite right, that it is a place of suffering, stupidity, and evil. Depression (as I see it, at least) causes apathy in the face of this unease, lethargy approaching total paralysis, an inability to feel much of anything one way or another. In contrast, melancholia generates a deep feeling in regard to this same anxiety, a turbulence of heart that results in an active questioning of the status quo, a perpetual longing to create new ways of being and seeing.
[snip]
Melancholia, far from a mere disease or weakness of will, is an almost miraculous invitation to transcend the banal status quo and imagine the untapped possibilities for existence. Without melancholia, the earth would likely freeze over into a fixed state, as predictable as metal. Only with the help of constant sorrow can this dying world be changed, enlivened, pushed to the new.
Poets are friends with melancholy. All artists are. Probably scientists as well.
Monday was the day that Myrln (aka William Frankonis and my once-husband) posted his rants here on Kalilily Time. He wrote a great deal more than political rants, however, and from now on, Mondays will be the place where Myrln will post some of his best writings, posthumously, through the auspices of our daughter.
Snippets from “A Letter to My Grown Children” -- post 9/11 2001
[snip]
…We live in the Now. Sometimes drastic events make us aware of that simple fact we tend to forget or ignore; we always live only in Now. As Buddhism has been telling us for centuries. No matter how or how much the world changes, we can still live only in the right Now. How is ours to determine. We may mourn loss and worry what’s to come, but here we are – Now. And Now is sometimes good, sometimes bad; sometimes easy, sometimes hard; sometimes joyful, sometimes sad. But whatever it is, it is, and we have no choice but to live in it. Which, when you think of it, is a fine thing.
[snip]
It makes sense, then, to make Now the best possible o us because we never know. And that fact should teach us: no delaying, waiting around, procrastinating, habituating, sinking into torpor. Look. See. Be. Whether alone or with others, do it. Now…not tomorrow.
[snip]
So how do I know the validity of what I’m preaching? Because in many ways, I have always delayed Now for dreams-to-come or for fear of future consequences. But I know – Now – those dreams/fears will never come to pass. And even if the fears prove true in the end or the dreams went unfulfilled, so what? Why didn’t I at least make my Nows what I wanted them to be?
[snip]
Only love lives still in past and future. Strange thing, love. It’s why I can always say I love you Now, always have, and always will.
I got linked to this from a newsletter I get, and I'm sharing it here because it is a description, by a brain scientist, of the kind of experience she had that others might attribute to sensing "god."
Still others, back in the days of "dropping acid," often described something similar.
And others, yet, tried to achieve it through Transcendental Meditation.
It's not in the mind; it's in the brain.
Listen in as brain scientist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor tells of the spiritual experience she had during her own stroke. This euphoric experience transcends all formal religions and has been pointed to by quantum physics for years. Watch the video.
....she was conscious as she lost the left half of her brain. She remembers the day clearly, when she eventually curled up into a ball and expected to die. "I was shocked when I awoke later," said Taylor,... [snip] "I couldn't talk. I couldn't understand language. I lost all recollection of my life and lost all perception of my physical presence -- I was at one with the universe.
YouTube has the movie trailer and a whole lot more music video clips. These will get you up and moving, and reminded that you’re never too old to rock ‘n’ roll.
Just watch them offer their rendition of Donna Summer's "I Will Survive."
No other work of my childhood, and to a very large degree almost entirely at an unconscious level, likely did as much not just to steer me to an eventual appreciation of science fiction, but to an almost innate understanding of how deeply art in general, whether words or pictures or sounds, could implant itself into a person.
So nearly ends a beautifully written memoir by b!X about the death of Arthur C. Clarke and the influence that the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey had on his childhood aspirations and imagination. You should click here and read the whole Star Child post.
Like my son (and, actually, the whole of our family -- my daughter's wedding cake was topped with Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia), I, too, am a lover of the kind of science fiction that not only opens up possible new worlds, but also explores the kind of human spirit that will be necessary to make the best of those worlds.
My first exposure to sci fi was C.S. Lewis' Perelandra, upon which I stumbled by accident in my Catholic high school's library. As far as I was ever able to tell, it was the only sci-fi book on the library shelves.
I don't remember the sequence of my growing love of sci-fi, but I do remember watching Clarke's movie when it first came out -- a night out with my then-husband and another sci-fi fan couple. Our daughter would have been about 5 at that time; I don't remember her being with us.
But I do still remember the sounds, the visuals, the bone flung into the air that became a space ship, the appearance of the megalith, that last breath-stopping image of the Star Child.
This is for you, my offspring, both of whom have the gift of insightful sight.
Snapshot
Charles Tomlinson
for Yoshikazu Uehata
Your camera
has caught it all, the lit
angle where ceiling and wall
create their corner, the flame
in the grate, the light
down the window frame
and along the hair
of the girl seated there, her face
not quite in focus —that
is as it should be too,
for, once seen, Eden
is in flight from you, and yet
you have it down complete
with the asymmetries
of journal, cushion, cup
all we might have missed
in the gone moment when
we were living it.
Thanks to Jim Culleny's daily poetry emails for the above poem.
I can't remember when the last time was that someone sent me a Valentine. And it's apparent, as I continue to sort through all of the stuff I've been carting around all of these years, that I didn't think any that I got in the past were important enough to save.
Except for this one, from about 28 years ago, by the little guy who still thought is was OK to give his mother a Valentine card:
With this post is a reminder to often check out 3 quarks daily, a group blog for those who like to have their brains prodded.
I read the post that linked to this soon after I had a look at some photos that my amateur photographer daughter had been playing with, using some trial software. The item is about "computational photography" and is about innovations in digital cameras, but the concept includes innovations in software a well.
This landscape photo of hers, for example, she transformed to look as though it had brush strokes in it. This one turned into a watercolor.
What will these new technological capacities for creating "art" mean for the value (monetary, aesthetic, and historical) of the more traditional artist?
And it's not just the two-dimensional visual arts techniques that are changing. Creative writing has reached a new frontier as well. 3 quarks daily cites an article in The Guardian that reports:
The book-writing machine works simply, at least in principle. First, one feeds it a recipe for writing a particular genre of book - a tome about crossword puzzles, say, or a market outlook for products. Then hook the computer up to a big database full of info about crossword puzzles or market information. The computer uses the recipe to select data from the database and write and format it into book form.
Phillip M. Parker, the inventor of the system, gives his reason for inventing it:
"there is a need for a method and apparatus for authoring, marketing, and/or distributing title materials automatically by a computer." He explains that "further, there is a need for an automated system that eliminates or substantially reduces the costs associated with human labour, such as authors, editors, graphic artists, data analysts, translators, distributors, and marketing personnel.
"
I can't help wondering if the next steps will be to program machines to actually do the painting, take and make the photos, write the books, make the movies......
Will actual human creative processes become obsolete and will we become -- as we almost are already -- just consumers??
Will the offspring of Roomba leave no place for future Rembrandts?
