The world of measurement

In “The Art of Possibility,” Rosamund Stone Zander writes about “the world of measurement”–that place constricted by time and judgment, scales and comparisons, where we live most of our lives. It is the world of scarcity and rules, bounded by the lines we are not allowed to color outside. It is not a creative place.

As I grow and develop, I increasingly move away from the world of measurement–when I remember to.  When I am aware that it is encroaching, I’ll fight back by rooting myself securely in the present. In traffic, stopped at a red light,  I’ll take  my hands off the wheel and let them rest calmly in my lap until it’s time to move again. The sense of hurry, of urgency, dissipates. Walking, I continually notice new things in familiar streetscapes. I marvel at the parallax, watching the shapes of trees and buildings shift in their relationships as I move. Time falls away.

You know the times when you are not in the world of measurement: when you are immersed in a book, when you are playing a musical instrument, when you meditate–whenever you are so engrossed or detached that you lose track of time. Time, the ultimate measure, ceases to exist.

I should go to work now, but writing matters more. That it can matter more is a function of how far I’ve come. My needs are not what they used to be–or rather, not what I thought they were. The Universe has different ideas … or maybe not ideas so much as impellings. I am impelled in different directions because I am deciding to listen to the Universe instead of fighting it–or fearing it. Increasingly, I step away from the world of measurement into the world of possibilities.

What is impelling me to get to work “on time” today is a lamb shank. I took it out of the freezer  a few days ago, and I need to cook it. But that takes an hour or so, even in the pressure cooker. I need to go to work early enough so I can get home in time to cook that lamb shank for dinner. My planning for today is based on lamb-shank time.

Except for now, for these minutes at the keyboard that might make me “late.”  This is not measurement time, not lamb-shank time. It is writing time. And when I am writing, time has no meaning at all.

Orange cart woman

I mention the woman with the orange plastic grocery cart in Early Morning Writing. Here is more about her.

Across the street (Belmont), some local color: A woman in a parka of many colors pushing an orange plastic grocery cart piled with belongings — a green sleeping bag on the bottom, a purple coat and pillow on top. Faster walkers pass her, bundled up against the cold. She stops: readjust the load. She stops: dig in her pockets. She pulls the knit hat over her ears and rebegins to push. Perhaps she has a destination.

She disappears beyond the parked cars and picket fences of Belmont. More people, everyone in warm hats, pass. It’s the time of year when birds’ nests appear, captured in the skeletons of trees, embarrassed that the sheltering leaves have been torn away.

It’s Sunday, and many people are out walking despite the cold. A skateboarder sails past, erect and lordly on his streamlined passage, all in black except for the red backpack that matches the board. More folks walk by, in dark mufti, all with hats. Not a colorful day; everything seems to be browns and blacks and blue jeans.

From the bus, a few minutes later, I look for the orange cart and the woman pushing it. But I don’t see her. Lovers meet on the street and kiss. A couple walk hand in hand. A woman walks a dog on a leash. But the woman with the cart is gone, run home to her bolt-hole, disappeared with the fairy folk.

About a week later, I see her again. Now the woman had a yellow cart and is accompanied by a man in a leather hat. As they push their carts up Yamhill in the drizzle, he shouts to me, “Smile, the weather will get better.”

“It’s great now!” I reply. The rain feels good after so much dry sunny weather. He nods and smiles in agreement, and they walk on.

Question and answer

Question posed to me on Flork:
I’m interested in this ‘reinventing’ yourself and how do you succeed?
Is this an age thing? I’m struggling enormously with new things. Fear to be trapped in what I am
Eva

My answer:
It may be that the key to reinventing yourself has to do with getting past fear. By that, I don’t mean conquering fear, because it’s not a fight. Fighting fear in what paralyzes you. It’s more like getting around fear, just walking around it as you would walk around a dog chained to a tree. You’re aware of it, you’re not ignoring it, but you’re not going to do what it wants, either.

At night, as I am going to sleep, I often ask myself, “What are you afraid of?” And an image comes up of some thing or some feeling that I dread, and I just keep asking questions. “Why do you feel that way?” “What do you want to happen now?” “Why are you afraid?” “What are you afraid of?”

Your fears don’t like to be examined head-on. They’re like deer in the headlights, transfixed by the glare. They can’t stand it. And if you keep the spotlight trained on them long enough, if you keep asking What are you afraid of?, if you keep drilling down on them, they will have no recourse but to evaporate.

The wind

I remembered Amstendam and thought about the wind.

First, there was a canal. Dark brown, still water, curved into combed wakes as boats pass, flags as brave as happy dogs’ tails. How can a city be so quiet? Trams slip by, bicycles wheel almost silently. You walk, down the brick-lined tree enfolded canalsides, up over the slightly humped bridges, pushing through the stream of air; it curves into combed wakes as you pass. We all create a wind as we walk. Is this, then, a wind, an air story?

A boy pulls his bike down the stoop, its tire bouncing on the pavement. He props it against the railing as he shrugs on his backpack, then mounts and is off in one continuous, dancelike movement. The wind ruffles his hair as he rides, pushing it off his forehead, mild May wind, roiling behind him in the wake of his passing.

The winds of all our passings are roiling memories. Where there are many automobiles, the winds become a hurricane, too fast, screaming by, scouring out our thoughts instead of nourishing them. The winds of our passing when we are not involved in it, when we are not walking or pumping pedals or pulling oars, those winds blow too furiously for us to keep up. But silly humans, we think we can.

Yiddish Lullaby

Robert has come across a lovely little video on YouTube. It’s a traditional children’s song sung gently in Yiddish. There are subtitles, but they’re in Hebrew, so here’s the story (you could also sort of figure it out from the pretty animation):

It’s winter, and a little boy is sad for the tree. He’s afraid it will be lonely now that the birds that nested there have gone away. He imagines himself as a little bird perched in the tree, keeping it company.

He tells his dream to his mother, who weeps because she’s afraid he won’t come back. At least, she tells him, wear your scarf. So the boy puts on the scarf, and then his coat, and then his galoshes. By then, he is so tired he doesn’t want to go outside after all, and he climbs into bed and goes to sleep.

And that’s what a lullaby is for.

Early morning writing

I just ran across this long, weird writing exercise from 12/8/2002. The date stamp is 5:43AM. It reads like a long, lucid dream.

The cold underbelly of the year. Birds’-nest weather. Too late for flying geese. The time of single sedges, shivering in the wind that scatters the top of the snow. The hare limps trembling. A stable light is burning. Light is so much more meaningful now, so much more important, so much warmer, Warmth. It’s cold. My fingers tremble. Hard to believe that in an age where the fingers tremble on a laptop keyboard. Writing in the cold morning in a little pool of light. The holiday lights still on in the house across the street. I have to write harder, faster, work harder, faster to keep ahead of others who want to write. Strange how that bothers me.

The cold underbelly of the year. The children venture out only after they have put on two pair of trousers. The extra bulk feels strange at first, then you become used to the swaddling feel. Thick fingers in knitted gloves. Thick forehead in a fleece cap. No snow, nothing making it worth going outside. Just cold pavement and a gray sky outlined by the black branches with an occasional birds’ nest. Your hair, mother says, is like a birds’-nest, but you don’t want to take the trouble to comb it, yanking on the ends, it doesn’t hurt if you are careful but you just don’t want to take the time. Lazy, she says. For years, you think you are lazy, when all the time you are just rearranging your priorities. You wonder if you could bring a blanket with you to wrap around, swaddling you like Jesus. Comfort against the cold.

You are outside in gray trousers on a gray day waiting for a gray bus to take you to the yellow complexity of the library. A smell of dust and cold clothing mixed with books and books. I am out of love with books and libraries. I continue to like the feel but the contents are farther away. My love affair with paperbacks is over. The woman with the orange cart — maybe she has paperbacks stowed inside. A world away in romance, not the cold gray streets but the infinite possibilities of love in an envelope of danger, love, story. Can’t. Most of my tripping these days, the out of body travel–the out of body imagining, that is–takes place in the bath. Warm, sinking, feet on the tile drifting dozing, warm. I am warm in the tub and the orange cart woman is living in her teal and pink dirty coat, working her jaws, eyes ahead no eye contact. No children, few children in this neighborhood. Young things with metal in their faces, dressed in black and tattoos, and old folks with orange carts. The bus stop man, in his 40s, clean good looks, is also out of place here. Most in their 40s are toothless recovering drunks. The wolves are running. Never forget that. Not to be paranoid, just watchful. The bridegroom comes, be ready.

Be ready. Be. Do. Be. Be. Be present. Don’t watch your feet when you walk, don’t kick at the leaf mold. Watch the houses, the cats that watch you back, the lights, the gray sky beyond, the shape of winter bushes, some bulb growth is starting to appear, fooled by the unseasonably warm weather. Yes, warm, although cold is coming. But none of my recollection tinged with rain because rain has not been. The leaves are dry and the wind knocks them to dust. The wind is cold and sere but not wet. Nothing is wet. When the wet comes, will I get back some ability to dream? Will I every sleep again?

Not quite warm enough. Then hot flashes. When will it end? Why is it like this? Move into imagination. Key words. Pull a few out of the jar. Herbs, verge, chasm. Pick 2? I hear a bell, just once, a jingle. A single bell chiming and chiming in the wind, a one-note wind chime. Unusual. At the verge of consciousness. The verge, the edge, the lip of the chasm. As you move, into the chasm, over it, past the verge, no turning back. All I can see is white, like snow but solid like paper. Substantial. Cold. Lonely. Oh, so lonely.

Walking on the knive’s edge of a paper like a razor it cuts your finger, a drop of red blood. Smeared on the paper on the edge of book. What will Mother say? You are so messy. You escape over the verge, into the chasm, Down, down into whiteness. It gets warmer, There is a jungle at the bottom, curious monkeys staring at you through stylized vines. No movement yet, no wind, no cold pavement. The earth is brown and warm. The air is humid and warm, But you can still breath. You had wondered if you could. You have a leopard’s skin over your shoulder. It’s just warm enough. There’s nothing here for you, though. The monkey won’t move, except its eyes, following you. The chasm has deposited you in a dead end. Eyelid trembles. The hibiscus trembles, a wind coming on, a wind portending wetness, the gales gust up and the rain slams into you so hard you can’t open your eyelids. When you finally can see, the monkey is gone and all the vines are flattened in the gale. It’s a warm gale, though, and although the skin covering you is soaking, you are not cold. Still, it’s a bit unpleasant.

You find shelter in a bamboo hut. A roof, two long benches and a radio. A man comes in and ignoring you uses the radio. Calling down a plane, warning it away, but it is so short of fuel it has to land here. He talks it in, stress and grief edging his voice. FInally, over the roar of the storm and the beating of the heavy rain, you hear the engine of the plane. Carrying the mike, the man walks to the door of the structure and peers into the gale. He can’t see it, of course. The pilot has instruments. The plane lands, clumsy, but safe, trundling to the edge of the strip, one wing in the jungle. The pilot, a woman, unhurt. The man, in stress and grief, unkind to her. She is pregnant. Flying and pregnant. No wonder he’s upset. They hug and caress and couple in the hut, uncomfortable but needing, you are by this time long gone. You can intuit the lovemaking but are forbidden to see it. Not fair, to them. You don’t matter.

The rain ends, the jungle dries out. The man makes the hut more comfortable. Builds a bed. She can come to term there. Not her first child, so she knows what to expect. He is present but not helpful. She labors and breathes and there is a child. Quiet. She breathes into its eyes and it awakens and smiles. Babies don’t smile. This one does. The mother smiles back and knows that this one is special. She gets into the plane and flies back with the baby to the other children, waiting patiently with a nana in a big pillared house, starched linens on the beds, the kids run wild with the children who live in less grand places, the nana approves. The mother moves back with the special baby, the smiling baby. Curiously, the other children don’t mind the baby’s specialness. They, too, are seduced by a smile. In crisp starched shorts. Because it’s warm and humid, the starch wears out over a day, but the nana has fresh ones ready the next day.

He will always remember from his childhood the scent of starched linen, starched cotton, shirts and trousers that were crisp but not scratchy. A sanity of starch in the limp humid climate of the capital. Noisy, honking cars with dirty exhaust. Dirty buildings. Dirty streets. But scrubbed children in clean linen and cotton. Somehow above it all. Special. Too special. Groomed for more than this. Post-colonial kids in an amber time warp. Playing all over town, nothing is forbidden. He sees the poverty of the waterfront, follows the intriguing curry smells of the small streets. Finds hidden gardens, carefully tended herbs, hibiscus, hydrangea and bougainvilla. Everywhere, even in the most distressed neighborhoods, there is beauty. Old stones, the sudden green glimpse of weeds, trees courageous against the edges of derelict buildings.

He knows it can’t last. He grows, the child recedes. This is not the special child, but an older brother. He has to rescue the special child, the girl, Darkness. She has never learned to speak. She smiles, solemn, big eyes following him, black curls, creamy skin. Not mocha, like his. He loves his skin, warm, lovely next to the white linen, the natural colored linen of the suit he has now that he is older. Good bones in his face, a solemn face but dimples when he smiles. He has been everywhere. He understands. He can grieve for the suffering and understand how hard it is to make it better. He will try though. Going to university. But he has to take Darkness with him. The mother has gone off again, in the airplane, with the other children. It is up to him to be the saint.

Darkness is special, but not easy. He teachers her to speak. Not easy. She says strange, oracular things. People take to asking her questions, and hearing an oracular answer, slip her a coin in their awe. Even the poor give her money. They are in awe of her power. Darkness has no knowledge. She just smiles, a smile that seduces any who see it. Her smile and her brother Angle’s dimples open all sorts of doors. They get on a boat to come across the sea so Angle can go to college. No airplanes for them, thank you. They get an occasional postcard from their loving but distant mother, now flying her airplane in Myanmar.

Angle goes to college in France, walking every morning while Darkness goes to the bakery and gets them some rolls. She speaks to the bakers and they are in awe and give her the rolls for free. Soon they are so much in awe that they deliver the rolls.
Things she says:

Alpha commodore leaves when record failing not come here today please

Arcing sandy cloves cleave lessons after greenery

Sheets may linger yet leavening may lounge

Carry your wristwatch with rings gleaming circuit

Boom distraught boom

Rich rich toffee rich apricot buy apricot

IBM at seven and one-eighth

Eclipse

A total eclipse of the moon was visible from the West Coast of the U. S. in the early hours of the day yesterday. I asked my mother, who prefers that I call her Pearl, whether she was going to watch it. I was pretty sure that at 93, she might not want to get up at 2 a.m. and find a vantage point (her apartment faces north). She pointed out that she had seen a lunar eclipse in my company a few years ago. I had absolutely no recollection of this, but she remembered the event in great detail. So I looked it up (e-mail if you want to know how I did it)–and she was right.

Here it is, from September 26, 1996:

Something celestial. Something terrestrial.
Something for everyone. Astronomy tonight.

Celestial matters. Maura Seger writes of a dragon flying over the moon on iridescent wings. I don’t think of dragons much, but they have intruded a bit of late.

The moon has been my buddy these many years. I’ve been content to see it solitary and aloof, hung aloft the night and all the Keatsian so on. But a week ago and more, the light at the end of the day came at a slant under clouds. Trees and houses were bathed in a brown-yellow light — quattracento light, a light that was more common in Minnesota, or at least in childhood. The fall light of my youth. As mellow as old cracked varnish.

The clouds above that light were massy and bright, struck also by the dying light. They scudded stately across the sky, preceded by little smudgy gray clouds, vapors that did not benefit from the strength of the beams.

Now and again, a hole had been punched in the clouds by a giant’s hand, and each was rimed with silver light. The edges of the clouds were licked with pink and purple.

I was watching the clouds move across the sky that day. I was in the parking lot at the Burlingame Fred’s, and really should have been watching where I stepped instead. But I was hypnotized by the march of the clouds and drunk on the perfection of the light that had been everywhere on my drive over.

Then, as I was watching, the clouds moved a bit more and there was the moon, almost grinning at its cunning in playing this hide and seek. My buddy, nearly full, as pleased to see me as I was to see it.

Then today was the eclipse of the moon. We came late, Maggie driving, to the cemetery, where there was a grand view to the east. Only the edge of the moon was visible above the shadow, and as we watched, it was entirely quenched.

So then we went and had some pizza. Lyza and Pearl had pepperoni. I had something with goat cheese. Maggie had nothing and said she did not feel good. Hey, I’m the one who stayed home with the headache. Pearl had never seen a lunar eclipse in 82 years.

We sat around for half an hour or so, then stood in a field at PSU until the moon started to reappear. It was brighter, now that the sky was dark instead of pink and hazy. Lyza disappeared home. We walked Pearl back and admired the emerging moon on the way home. Jupiter glowed steadfastly just below. Or was it Saturn? Some big planet.

At home, the neighbors had set up a telescope on the cul-de-sac. We could have seen the whole show from here. I took a last look throught the opera glasses I was carrying. My buddy was halfway back.

Another wind

A spell and a bird, and the mournful, angry blasts of the train in the distance. A chill wind on a summer’s day; the breath of death or the divine. She doesn’t know. She often feels it when the train is heard, far off, beyond the rumble of traffic and the incessant chatter of birds.

She has learned to ignore the wind. She knows it’s the breath of God, and God is no friend of hers. And yet she won’t be whole until she accepts the wind, lets it become a part of her, the breath to her bones. I sit here afraid of sounds, of interruptions that will derail my intent, a weak reed to begin with. But if I plug my ears, I won’t hear the birds. Exactly my point. I may be as afraid of sound as she is of wind.

Wind is more essential, however. You need to breathe; you can live without hearing. As the years go by, she feels the wind more often, more insistently. Come with me, it whispers, softly at first. But every year, it pushes harder. She feels it every day, then every hour, every minute. By the time she gets to middle age, it’s howling. Her senses fill. The dust it raises clots her eyes and ears, fills her mouth, scours her skin. Still she resists.

The wind, a hurricane, batters her day after day. Her husband leaves. Her children turn away. In the whirlwind of her mind, time loses its meaning, day and night and sunlight and starlight all twisting into one long undifferentiated strand. Her bones knit with her organs, nerves and sinews entwined with flesh, her lungs holding out the longest, far longer than her heart. And yet she will not yield. She would die first. She is sure she is.

Finally, God gives up. There is an inhalation. The winds die down. They flutter away, dissipating into whispers. They recede like an ebbing tide. Figuring that, like the tide, the winds will turn, she still resists.

Then, when the world is calm, there is the still, small voice. I’m sorry, it breathes, moving just enough air to bend a single blade of grass. All is silent.

Then, in the distance, a mournful train. Close to her, birds call in voices she has not heard in years. The day is sunny. There is no breeze. She weeps.