Tanglewood

“When a man in a forest thinks he is going forward in a straight line, in reality he is going in a circle, I did my best to go in a circle, hoping to go in a straight line.”

                                                                                         - Samuel Beckett, Molloy

Vasilis Avramidis, "Caretakers," 2012
140x100cm, oil on canvas

When you were a kid, did you ever dream of running away to live in the forest? To get lost? To go wild? To grow up? Would you be one of the beasts, bold and ferocious? Or another kind of creature, small and nestled spindly-legged in a bed of petals and thorns? Would you nest among hidden branches, migratory and ready to fly, collecting treasures only to leave them behind? Or would you plant yourself firmly in the dead leaves, sprout roots, nurture fungi in your shadows, and drink from what was hidden, always going deeper?

According to J. Crews in "Forest and tree symbolism in folklore," many cultures believe that trees function as "receptacles for spirits or souls." No wonder the forest can bring such company, offering fodder for so many childhood imaginings.

Yet the nature of the forest--and of the tree--is double-edged. The forest can be blinding, dense and frightening, endless and beguiling. The tree, though rooted, stands alone, often condemned to never touch another of its kind. Do we really wish to grow these kinds of roots? How do we know exactly where to cast our lot? At what point does the magic engulf us?

A lovely and painful song about what it means to decide to grow (roots) through love is "Tanglewood tree," by Dave Carter.

Tanglewood tree

Source

Love is a tanglewood tree in a bower of green
In a forest at dawn
Fair while the mockingbird sings, but she soon lifts her wings
And the music is gone
Young lovers in the tall grass with their hearts open wide
When the red summer poppies bloom
But love is a trackless domain and the rumor of rain
In the late afternoon

Love is an old root that creeps through the meadows of sleep
When the long shadows cast
Thin as a vagrant young vine, it encircles and twines
And it holds the heart fast
Catches dreamers in the wildwood with the stars in their eyes
And the moon in their tousled hair
But love is a light in the sky, and an unspoken lie
And a half-whispered prayer

I'm walkin' down a bone-dry river but the cool mirage runs true
I'm bankin' on the fables of the far, far better things we do
I'm livin' for the day of reck'nin countin' down the hours
I yearn away, I burn away, I turn away the fairest flower of love, 'cause darlin'

Love is a garden of thorns
   Love's garden of thorns, how it grows
And a crow in the corn
   Black crow in the corn hummin' low
And the brake growing wild
   Brake nettle so pretty and wild
   And thistles surround the edge of the
Cold when the summer is spent
   Dim dark hour as the sun moves away
In the jade heart's lament
   Lamenting a lost summer day
For the faith of a child
   Who nurtures the faith of a child
   When nothing remains to cover her eyes?
My body has a number and my face has a name
   My body has a number, maybe my face has a name
And each day looks the same to me
   Each hour like each hour before
But love is a voice on the wind
   This longing is a voice on the wind
And the wages of sin
   She cultivates the wages of sin
And a tanglewood tree
   In a tanglewood tree




Yet the tree is not only of this earth. It is also of the sky: "The medieval Cabbalists represented creation as a tree with its roots in the reality of spirit (the sky) and its branches upon the earth (material reality)" (Crews, 43). So we are not condemned to suffocation. There must be other ways to grow.

Blue Christmas tree

The twisting of roots is only one kind of entanglement. Perhaps as humans, we must follow not the roots under the earth, but the entanglement of all that surrounds us, the entanglement of the stars:

"Quantum entanglement is one of the central principles of quantum physics, though it is also highly misunderstood. In short, quantum entanglement means that multiple particles are linked together in a way such that the measurement of one particle's quantum state determines the possible quantum states of the other particles" (read more here).

Apparently, this works across time as well as space. We are deeply entwined, yet this is not an overgrowth, or a distortion of something that was once comforting and beautiful. It is our very nature, and it is how we survive.

So if we look skyward instead, and grow our roots toward the heavens, will we find ourselves less tangled? Will the space that is not nothingness, because it is different from black holes, fill us with the room to breathe? Will the divinity of the stars anchor us as we stretch to understand how we connect? I cannot imagine we would be so different from the rest of the universe that we could not trust this. Whether we call it faith, spirituality, love, or just following our nature, it is in this expansive tangle that we root in each other, the earth, and the stars, all enmeshed in that which we cannot see.

"For there is hope for a tree,

if it be cut down, that it will sprout again,

and that its shoots will not cease." 

- Job 14:7, ESV

Homing

Hestia, Greek goddess of home and hearth

To Hestia
by Hesiod

Hestia, you who tend the holy house of the lord Apollo,
the Far-shooter at goodly Pytho,
with soft oil dripping ever from your locks, come now into this house,
come, having one mind with Zeus the all-wise
draw near, and withal bestow grace upon my song.


This weekend I watched The House (spoilers ahead), a Korean animated film in which old, traditional homes are guarded by and are one with spirits who must face their imminent deaths as new, modern condos replace old, dilapidated buildings that are full of  mold and cracks. (See photographs documenting this process here, along with some unfortunate sexist comments.) These building spirits harbor a certain affection and intimacy with home owners, so much so that a carefully kept home will respond kindly to the rhythms of its family. This is a sad story, so skip the next three paragraphs if you don't want to know.

The film makes a clear argument for valuing the soul over the bank account, and it offers a strong, if heavy-handed critique of classism in contemporary (Korean) society, the role of the government in exacerbating poverty and dependence, and the overvaluation of all that is modern. It is understood that the new buildings will have no spirits to guard them.

In "Modernization and contemporary culture in traditional Korea," Ito Abito explains:

Traditional Korean society manifested, as Takashi Akiba long ago pointed out, a rather sharp cleavage between the life-orientation of the upper-class yangban and that of ordinary commoners. The yangban, absolutizing Confucianism, looked down on or ignored folk religion, but the coexistence of the two strata was made possible by their division into two social ranks. The new life-orientation developed in the cities in connection with the rapid social change of recent years, however, has exercised a profound influence even on agricultural village society through the Semaeull movement and other media. Members of the rural elite, quick to respond to the modernization and industrialization policy of the central government, played a leading role in abolishing or discontinuing traditional belief and practice, some in token of symbolic support for modernization, others in token of loyalty to the Semaeull movement. This resulted, on the one hand, in the diffusion of the Semaeull movement throughout the country as a new spiritual movement and, on the other, in the rapid destruction of the basis for cultural identity that existed in the traditional culture.

In the film, as the houses are torn down, the spirits go with them, leaving only keepsakes: small trinkets in which their favorite memories are stored, visible only to those who hold the marble that connects the human and spirit worlds. In the end, this delicate glass ball is smashed by a government boot in the mud, and the spirits, in their dying moments, become invisible to our heartbroken protagonist, who had happened upon the marble in a brawl with a stray cat (who is, of course, the God of Land). She who once longed to live in a shiny new condo, is dragged silently away from the falling walls.

What struck me about this surprisingly—though accurately—pessimistic tale was its lovely portrayal of what it means to have a home. At one point, the girl and her house's spirit happen upon a homeless man in a box. The girl screams, taken aback by the man. The spirit looks and also screams, taken aback not by the man, but by the idea that a person should sleep somewhere where there was no house, no spirit to protect him.

Of course it went beyond the walls and ceiling: every little bit of the house, the old wallpaper, the worn floors, was infused with a sense of belonging, of safety. That, in my view, is why home matters so much. There are places that feel like that, and they are sacred. Buck claimed that "'home' in the full range and feeling of [Modern English] home is a conception that belongs distinctively to the word home and some of its Gmc. cognates and is not covered by any single word in most of the IE [Indo-European] languages" (Online Etymology Dictionary). In Spanish, the corresponding hogar has its roots in the Latin term for fire (compare modern Spanish fuego); indeed, the hearth was the old gathering place, the center of warmth and social life (Diccionario Etimológico).



We feel that way around certain people, too—at home, safe. In her article, "The orphans among us," Sarah Johnston contemplates what it meant to her to finally find a family, as an adult, when her own parents had never provided a safe place, a refuge:

It took a year and a half before I would see their daily call and not think, “Why are they calling?” I had no idea there were people who’d call you every day.
     Eventually I did. Eventually it became the most natural thing in the world. The Bible says that orphans are placed in families; and for a long time I believed in that and mistook having a family as the end, — the prize in and of itself.
     But what I have found — and what I pray the orphans among and inside us discover —is that being a part of a family, in time, stops erasing the pain of abandonment and starts being about the power of the future. It begins with an orphan and a family, but it ends with one trajectory being propelled into another.

The desire to be where we feel we belong is strong, and we are not alone among the species. Holly the cat recently became famous for her 190-mile journey on foot back to where she belonged.

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Underwater breathing (when the trolls come)

Trolls in The Hobbit

Sometimes those who seem to love (or understand) only what is big and loud trample what they have never even noticed was there. Sometimes what they trample upon is the sensitive person's treasure, the tiny miracle the quiet visionary has been holding in her palm.

Carved Eggshells by Beth Ann Magnuson

She says in a whisper, too trusting, wanting so much to share the joy, "Look. Look at this little piece of me. It is the most beautiful thing I know to be mine." 

An excited troll lumbers over and smash--it is gone. He did not even know something could be that small, that intricate, or that holy. 

Her devastation is chalked up to childishness. "Bah!" says the troll. "I see nothing here! Why do you waste time?" 

When violence is caused by insensitivity, by a lack of perception of what one sees so clearly, who is to blame? How to cry foul?

Music Box from subBlue on Vimeo.

In a gifted mind, where worlds are intricate and sensitive, this destruction can become the daily bread, simply a way of life:

One of the most common experiences of gifted children is a unique way of perceiving. They make more abstract connections, they synthesize diverse experiences, and they make sophisticated conclusions at an early age. Not that the gifted child's unique perceptions are always "true" to the rest of us, but they are powerful. The result is a child growing up with a reality somewhat different than the reality of her peers -- and often different from her parents, teachers, and allies.

Villa Epecuen, Argentina

Because they are different in other ways, gifted children are often isolated anyway. Somehow these multiple tendencies toward isolation reinforce one another to the point where the majority of gifted children feel lonely, left-out, or different.

This combination of unique perception and its concurrent isolation yield an emotional vacuum. After all, for most of us, our emotional selves develop by "bouncing off" of all those around us. (Joy and Loss: The Emotional Lives of Gifted Children, Joshua Freedman and Anabel Jensen, PhD)

As adults, we learn to live with it. Kind of. Despite the wreckage it will cause in our jobs and relationships, we go underground sometimes. It is sometimes at the bottom of the ocean, where sounds are muted and all is touch and flow, that we breathe best, and we remain unshattered.

Source

In The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, Andrew Solomon writes, "Mild depression is a gradual and sometimes permanent thing that undermines people the way rust weakens iron. [...] Like physical pain that becomes chronic, it is miserable not so much because it is intolerable in the moment as because it is intolerable to have known it in the moments gone and to look forward only to knowing it in the moments to come. The present tense of mild depression envisages no alleviation because it feels like knowledge" (p. 16).

It seems to me that this is more than a feeling of knowledge. Instead, it is often linked directly to knowledge. In a world of trolls, knowledge is a liability. How to extol the virtues of complexity to a boss who demands that you create something "fun"? How to present the ecstasy of subtlety to an audience seeking more "pizzazz"? To them, their way is obviously better.

So we hold our tongues, and sometimes our breath. And sometimes we dive down for air.

Don’t Tell Anyone
by Tony Hoagland

We had been married for six or seven years
when my wife, standing in the kitchen one afternoon, told me
that she screams underwater when she swims—

that, in fact, she has been screaming for years
into the blue chlorinated water of the community pool
where she does laps every other day.

Buttering her toast, not as if she had been
concealing anything,
not as if I should consider myself

personally the cause of her screaming,
nor as if we should perform an act of therapy
right that minute on the kitchen table,

—casually, she told me,
and I could see her turn her square face up
to take a gulp of oxygen,

then down again into the cold wet mask of the unconscious.
For all I know, maybe everyone is screaming
as they go through life, silently,

politely keeping the big secret
that it is not all fun
to be ripped by the crooked beak

of something called psychology,
to be dipped down
again and again into time;

that the truest, most intimate
pleasure you can sometimes find
is the wet kiss

of your own pain.
There goes Kath, at one PM, to swim her twenty-two laps
back and forth in the community pool;

—what discipline she has!
Twenty-two laps like twenty-two pages,
that will never be read by anyone.

Source: Poetry (July/August 2012).

Touchdown

Today we witnessed the touchdown of NASA's rover Curiosity on Mars. It has already sent back its first pictures.

How exciting to glimpse other lands, other stones! I often thought as a deeply star-gazing child upon whom gravity worked harder than most, such that I dragged myself and later rolled and tumbled across the floor, that I would be the first to sign up to leave this planet, a first colonist.

Yet, as I age, I realize that am deeply attached to the earth, as echoed in Caetano Veloso's love song to Earth, "Terra."

Eu sou um leão de fogo                        [I am a lion of fire
Sem ti me consumiria                           without you I would consume myself
A mim mesmo eternamente                  myself eternally
E de nada valeria                                 and it would matter nothing
Acontecer de eu ser gente                   that I happen to be a person,
E gente é outra alegria                         and a person is another joy
Diferente das estrelas...                       different from the stars...]

 

This attachment goes beyond humanity. Anthropologist and primatologist Dawn Prince-Hughes, in her memoir Songs of the Gorilla Nation: My Journey through Autism (which I recommend; see a good "non-review" here), writes of her experience of walking and standing, of pulling her body upright, as a painful separation:

Physically, I thought about how standing up on two feet leaves you exposed. One's naked belly and chest and genitals are all uncovered and laid bare, as if standing has lifted a great warm cover made of the sacred space between body and ground. Like a plant uprooted, with the last of its anchor and succor falling in abandoning clods, we stretch up to the sky and let the close and nourishing earth fall away. This standing had often been too much for me to bear, and when it was, I would go and curl up somewhere, nursing the raw wound that my upright front had sustained in the million-year tearing away that my ancestors had undertaken. (p. 121).

In explaining her affinity with the gorillas she studied and worked with and loved, she explained:

What I found I had always had with the gorillas was such vulnerability and ferocity and love. Our similarities were beyond perseveration, a need for space and a space for hiding; we were always drawing inward and exploding outward, sharing laughter out of fear and sharing a ferocious sense of justice, beyond mere caring. Our similarities also went beyond a difficulty dealing with the human race, sensitivities to the world around us and to the stereotyping in the face of the soullessness all around. Our affinity met in being filled with archaic darkness and persisting memories of a time when all things were one. (p. 122)

Sacred Rock. Machu Picchu, Peru.

We are earth beings. Now, perhaps always, as New York Times contributor Adam Frank somewhat sadly pointed out in his piece, "Alone in the Void."

Since time immemorial, the earth stones have been watching our growth. Do we not caress them and spill our tears and blood into this great rock? And our waste, too, and our bombs of rage? What better than the earth to serve as witness to all promises, all covenants made between living beings? Who better to know when we have forgotten ourselves?

Image found here.

Come now, let us make a covenant, you and I. And let it be a witness between you and me.” So Jacob took a stone and set it up as a pillar. And Jacob said to his kinsmen, “Gather stones.” And they took stones and made a heap, and they ate there by the heap. Laban called it Jegar-sahadutha, but Jacob called it Galeed. Laban said, “This heap is a witness between you and me today.” (Genesis 31, 44-48)

For all it has seen, the stone, the earth, like a stillness we can create in our own spirited flesh, offers the relief of an energetic, living silence:

Thomas Aquinas said that beauty arrests motion. He meant, I think, that in the presence of something gorgeous or sublime, we stop our nervous natterings, our foot twitchings and restless tongues. Whatever that fretful hunger is, it seems momentarily filled in the presence of beauty. To Aquinas’s wisdom I’d add that silence arrests flight, that in its refuge, the need to flee the chaos of noise diminishes. We let the world creep closer, we drop to our knees, as if to let the heart, like a small animal, get its legs on the ground. (from Stirring the Mud by Barbara Hurd, © 2001 by Barbara Hurd, from Tricycle)

I do not think that have ever felt the earth so keenly, so close, as when I lived in Mexico. There, in Cholula, at the foot of the great volcano Popcatepetl, artifacts of tiny clay faces, rain gods and jaguar-men, surfaced around the edges of ancient dusty roads. When the volcano erupted, the ground would rock slowly, like being rocked in the arms of someone who has forgotten just how little you really are.

Cholula with an erupting Popocatepetl. From A Gringo in Rural Mexico

Here is a poem of mine about the land of Cholula. The title, Huellas, has several meanings, including footprints, fingerprints, traces, and tracks. (The story of Footprints was one of my favorites as a child, and I carry a hint of this into the poem as well.) (Trigger warning)

Huellas

I

Five hundred years ago, a burned white man broke

ground for Catholic rites, the pyramid cradling

gold-spun idols. Today, a child crawls underneath mud

stone upon stone in small doorways, ancient

stories painted on the walls where her ancestors knew

one day she would laugh, remembering how

everyone always leaves a trace of what was, even

if it was not worth it. Even if we are lost in the end.

II

She is a cherub, round and brown

like the angel cheeks: they cried wax tears

where her mother knelt in a copal cathedral.

That whole month her knees were bloody

and she kept those flowers she picked

dried and thirsty among the saints

the day the youngest of her dozen

came home, defiled and married, but home.

III

At the market on Wednesdays, downy

chestnut-skinned fruit is split open to seduce

buyers who will suck out the burnt orange

dripping mamey, only to say it is not

yet ripe, let me try another, because

the uncut ones always taste best

and cherubs who do not run home fast

will most certainly get eaten alive.

IV 

The golden hour thickens in vapor,

lightening pouring red through woven cloth

windows. Just about any two bodies here

know each other to be sacred and hold

like a cross against the salted earth,

against the stumbling gait of those damned

by ancient pictures and buried ash. Volcanoes

boom and the ground, it breaks, it trembles. 

© 2010 J. Aaron

Mutable caress: On water, impermanence, and trust

I grew up with my toes in the Willamette River.

Crossing the Willamette River
Eugene, Oregon, February 21st, 2011
(from I'd rather be riding... )

I loved to stare at it, immerse myself in it, float down it in a passive stance that once sent my mother flying into the current screaming. I had shouted a contented "Bye!" as I floated past and away. At the ocean, I would stare out as far as possible, convinced I could see the curve of our planet, and then the sky as a dome above, and me so tiny there, seized by deep passion.

Why such love, such fascination?

In its nature, water teaches us impermanence, in the Buddhist sense of the term:

According to the teachings of the Buddha, life is comparable to a river. It is a progressive moment, a successive series of different moments, joining together to give the impression of one continuous flow. It moves from cause to cause, effect to effect, one point to another, one state of existence to another, giving an outward impression that it is one continuous and unified movement, where as in reality it is not. The river of yesterday is not the same as the river of today. The river of this moment is not going to be the same as the river of the next moment. So does life. It changes continuously, becomes something or the other from moment to moment. (from Urban Dharma)

Loblolly Creek, Gainesville, Florida
© 2011 by Friends of Nature Parks

Impermanence goes beyond philosophy. It is a basic state of nature in physics as well. For a more technical discussion of this notion in both Buddhism and modern physics, see Victor Mansfield's 1998 article, "Time and Impermanence in Middle Way Buddhism and Modern Physics," originally a talk given at the Physics and Tibetan Buddhism Conference at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The other day, on a rainy walk to the local creek with my dear friend and her dog, I witnessed such a lesson in very simple terms. The dog was thrilled with a tennis ball that we had discovered, and he was chasing it and carrying it around as he bounded up and down the creek. Spotting an interesting stick, he placed the ball in the shallow water. A few minutes later, tiring of the stick, he returned for the ball, only to find that it had disappeared downstream. He looked up to us, confused. Why is my ball gone? Who took it? In our grief and our loss, we often look skyward, confused. Why? But this is just the nature of the world, as gentle and as reasonable as the flowing creek. And we do not mourn each ripple as it flattens and disappears. We call such perpetual motion beautiful.



Yet this is not really about loss, but about change. In its nature, water also teaches us a kind of permanence. It is liquid, gas, or solid. It is internalized and externalized. It remains a continuous, dynamic entity, paradoxical in its changing faces. And it is in the continuity and connectivity that we find something akin to hope.

Ecclesiastes 1:7 All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.

Conceptual Photos by Olaf Mueller

Systematic, apparently chaotic, and deeply faithful in its journeys, in its ebbs and flows, water offers us a territory of trust.

There is also another water we all know: the primal water of the womb. When else are we embraced so entirely and so safely? When else are we touched by another so completely? The healing, often magical power of touch is a taste of what we once knew: nearly total connection, before the first shock of becoming separated and, perhaps, feeling lost.

Camelia Elias, in her blog Taro(t)flexions, writes of the honesty evoked through touch and visualization:

Underwater: Photos by Erin Mulvehill

Whether imagined or not, touching is a participatory rather than an individual move. When we say, ‘I’m touched,’ about something, we first get the visuals in place and then the abstractness of the situation. Touching is therefore quite magical. For instance, there is a powerful relation between asking people to imagine things and physically touching them. Touch relating to visualization is the most complicit of acts. When people allow you to touch them in that way, they strip naked for you. Yet their nakedness only serves to give way to a translucent light right into their souls.

When water encircles our bodies, we are also vulnerable and touched. This offers another reminder of our erstwhile selfless selves, a vague yet urgent thirst for the unity we knew in a time beyond memory.

Yet the water out here is not insular. It carries us or it passes us by. It cannot bear to stay still. Still waters stink and fester. Stagnant, they invite diseases and no longer draw our loving gaze.

My Willamette is not a pretty opal shine, steady and posing for a grateful human eye. This is my Willamette:



"Nothing was, nothing will be, everything has reality and presence" (Siddhartha, Herman Hesse, trans. Hilda Rosner, 1951, p. 87).

And perhaps herein lies its true lesson: even in the constant flux of relationship, the objects carried away to unimagined lands, the memories that ripple as the wind and time transform their edges, and our own selves as we erode, nothing is really lost, and we are still safe. And we are greater than we think. Through all of this, the water embraces the life it carries, the rivers still find each other, the ocean still looks to the moon. And yet nothing is ever the same.

Siddhartha listened. He was now all ears, completely absorbed in his listening, completely empty, completely receptive; he felt that he had now learned all that there was to learn about listening. He had often heard this all before, these many voices in the river, but today it sounded new. By this time he could no longer distinguish the many voices, could not tell the gleeful ones from the weeping ones, the children’s voices from the grown men’s; they all belonged together, the lament of longing and the knowing man’s laughter, the cry of anger and the moans of the dying; it was all one, it was all interwoven and knotted together, interconnected in a thousand ways. And all of this together, all the voices, all the goals, all the longing, all the suffering, all the pleasure, all the good and evil, all of this together was the world. All of this together was the river of events, the music of life. And whenever Siddhartha listened attentively to that river, that song of thousand voices, when he listened neither to the sorrow nor the laughter, when he tied his soul not to any individual voice, entering into it with his self, but instead heard them all, perceiving the totality, the oneness, then the great song of a thousand voices consisted of a single word, which was om, the absolute. (Siddhartha, Herman Hesse, found here)

In what is left, do we find the soul of us, the divine spirit, the one sentience? Is that what we water-leaning, toe-dipping creatures truly seek?

The unexpected and the brain

In an article based on a study entitled "Unsupervised statistical learning underpins computational, behavioural, and neural manifestations of musical expectation", forthcoming in Neuroimage, ScienceDaily notes:

Music has a grammar, which, like language, consists of rules that specify which notes can follow which other notes in a piece of music. According to Pearce: "the question is whether the rules are hard-wired into the auditory system or learned through experience of listening to music and recording, unconsciously, which notes tend to follow others."

The researchers asked 40 people to listen to hymn melodies (without lyrics) and state how expected or unexpected they found particular notes. They simulated a human mind listening to music with two computational models. The first model uses hard-wired rules to predict the next note in a melody. The second model learns through experience of real music which notes tend to follow others, statistically speaking, and uses this knowledge to predict the next note.

The results showed that the statistical model predicts the listeners' expectations better than the rule-based model. It also turned out that expectations were higher for musicians than for non-musicians and for familiar melodies -- which also suggests that experience has a strong effect on musical predictions.

 Read more here.

One song that makes my brain feel a little tweaked by unexpectedness is "Conversations in Silence I":

Conversations In Silence I - Nashville Chamber Orchestra

Another piece that does this by (in my amateurish opinion) using the "end" note as a "beginning" is Schumann's "5 Stücke im Volkston, Op.102: 2. Langsam" (which starts at 3:20 in the video below). This one is much subtler than the one above in its unexpectedness. But it is enough to move me repeatedly.



If the "rules" of music are not "rules" at all, but rather the consolidation of experience, the nature of language, as sister to music ("Double dissociation between rules and memory in music"), seems clear: it is an accumulation of experience, not an imperfect activation of inherent rules. Linguists Joan Bybee and James McClelland argued for an experience-based model for language in their article, "Alternatives to the combinatorial paradigm of linguistic theory based on domain general principles of human cognition."

I wonder, then, if what "moves" us in music is also what "moves" us in language. Proust wrote of the breaking of habit, the intrusion of the unexpected, as the ticket to the richest memories, a cognitive flowering of the senses. Beckett viewed language as "a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it," and he wrote of wanting to bore holes in the language, to create something new (or new nothingness) (see Disjecta). And in Beckett's pitted and hole-filled texts, deep within the nothingness, lies a melancholy hopeless hope. It is like trying to think of what might be outside our universe, beyond where the big bang has expanded space.

Sometimes we encode concepts like unexpectedness into our grammars. See Leonard Talmy's work on the notion of "force dynamics" in language, and an article in Cognitive Linguistics on the grammatical marking of social unexpectedness in Spanish, "Quantitative measures of subjectification."

Our (at times perverse?) pleasure in the unexpected, despite our everyday hunger for structural predictability, gives us new eyes, new ears, and yes, over the centuries, new tongues.

Freedom, movement and pleasure

Feeling like a tree...
Originally uploaded by hajlana

Freedom means you are unobstructed in living your life as you choose. Anything less is a form of slavery. --Wayne Dyer

In the wake of the Haiti earthquake, it is hard to write about anything else. Upon seeing images of trapped bodies, dead and alive, on a small island, I can't help but think: they have no way out. So I'm thinking about movement as freedom, freedom as life, life as pleasure. Perhaps the last connection should not be made (it is generally naive). But for my purposes today, life as pleasure. (We'll leave Beckett out of this for now.)

In a recent article in French Studies, Ullrich Langer argues that the Renaissance poem offered pleasure because the poem was a landscape without constraints. All we ever want is to be able to sail away.



I am full of wanderlust, always. (I like something about the lady in this video; I find her rendition of this song touching. See lyrics.)



The trip is not always perfect, but the loneliness of human nature is less cruel when discoveries are being made.Joni Mitchell's entire album Hejira is about journeying.



To donate to help the trapped people of Haiti, here are some suggestions:

Grassroots International
Partners in Health
Haiti Emergency Relief Fund

I leave you with a 1962 video of Katherine Dunham, an American ethnologist and dancer in Haiti, who fell in love with the dances associated with Haitian vodou. After a brief interview (in French), you can see the dancing.

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Whimsy

I'm not one to think of myself as a softy, but I'm certainly in a whimsical mood today. What evokes the whimsical in me? That funny sweet feeling of tender other-worldliness? Here are some tastes, sounds, texts, and other elements that pull me that direction:

Prairie smoke (Geum triflorum) flowers.I have never seen them in real life, and am sure they cannot grow in Florida since they are hardy through zone 4 only, but I imagine that if fairies were to have a garden, this would surely grow there.

The smell of old homes warmed by the sun and enclosure, perfumed by the lives of women who have inhabited them for decades: layer upon layer of richness contrasted with the fresh, cool air of early spring. Proust, in his À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), writes of such rooms, such smells:

C'étaient de ces chambres de province qui—de même qu'en certains pays des parties entières de l'air ou de la mer sont illuminées ou parfumées par des myriades de protozoaires que nous ne voyons pas—nous enchantent des mille odeurs qu'y dégagent les vertus, la sagesse, les habitudes, toute une vie secrète, invisible, surabondante et morale que l'atmosphère y tient en suspens; odeurs naturelles encore, certes, et couleur du temps comme celles de la campagne voisine, mais déjà casanières, humaines et renfermées gelée exquise, industrieuse et limpide de tous les fruits de l'année qui ont quitté le verger pour l'armoire; saisonnières, mais mobilières et domestiques, corrigeant le piquant de la gelée blanche par la douceur du pain chaud, oisives et ponctuelles comme une horloge de village, flâneuses et rangées, insoucieuses et prévoyantes, lingères, matinales, dévotes, heureuses d'une paix qui n'apporte qu'un surcroît d'anxiété et d'un prosaïsme qui sert de grand réservoir de poésie à celui qui les traverse sans y avoir vécu. L'air y était saturé de la fine fleur d'un silence si nourricier, si succulent, que je ne m'y avançais qu'avec une sorte de gourmandise, surtout par ces premiers matins encore froids de la semaine de Pâques où je le goûtais mieux parce que je venais seulement d'arriver à Combray: avant que j'entrasse souhaiter le bonjour à ma tante, on me faisait attendre un instant dans la première pièce où le soleil, d'hiver encore, était venu se mettre au chaud devant le feu, déjà allumé entre les deux briques et qui badigeonnait toute la chambre d'une odeur de suie, en faisait comme un de ces grands " devants de four " de campagne, ou de ces manteaux de cheminée de châteaux, sous lesquels on souhaite que se déclarent dehors la pluie, la neige même quelque catastrophe diluvienne pour ajouter au confort de la réclusion la poésie de l'hivernage; je faisais quelques pas du prie-Dieu aux fauteuils en velours frappé, toujours revêtus d'un appui-tête au crochet; et le feu cuisant comme une pâte les appétissantes odeurs dont l'air de la chambre était tout grumeleux et qu'avait déjà fait travailler et " lever " la fraîcheur humide et ensoleillée du matin, il les feuilletait, les dorait, les godait, les boursouflait, en faisant un invisible et palpable gâteau provincial, un immense "chausson" où, à peine goûtés les arômes plus croustillants, plus fins, plus réputés, mais plus secs aussi du placard, de la commode, du papier à ramages, je revenais toujours avec une convoitise inavouée m'engluer dans l'odeur médiane, poisseuse, fade, indigeste et fruitée du couvre-lit à fleurs. --Marcel Proust

He died in 1922. See this video from 1962 (in French), which discusses his unique legacy. 

Forget-me-nots, humble little blue flowers of the north. I remember seeing them as a kid in Oregon, growing like weeds on the side of the road. They were a sweet melancholy kind of flower, small, simple, in primary colors. Yet not wanting to be forgotten. Reminding us to pay attention to the everyday fantastical.


Joni Mitchell's "Amelia" has a funny chord at the end of each verse. Joni is known for her strange chords, but this one always has moved me. When I hear it, I feel like something inside my chest is being pleasantly twisted.

Ice cream bean fruit, or Pacai, which became my most sought-after fruit after trying it in Mexico. This funny pod has large black seeds covered in what looks like fuzzy white cotton. As the name indicates, the white fuzz is creamy and sweet. So good and otherworldly! See more of Dave's images here. In Puebla they call it something else, but I can't remember the name anymore.

Spanish moss at sunset, when it glows orange or pink. This was one of the phenomena that most amazed me when I moved to Florida. I remember looking up at the trees and exclaiming, "What in the world is that?" It seemed like something out of a horror flick, but then, like something out of a dreamland.