sugar maple turn

I recently (like, yesterday) read a book by the poet/mortician Thomas Lynch, Bodies In Motion and At Rest. He speaks with eloquence, humor, and a caustic sort of understatement about death and words, how they relate and don't, what he's learned from each of them. It's quite good. I haven't read much of his poetry, but this poem was included in the book and I liked it so here it is, for you so you can hopefully enjoy it as well. He said that it arose from his solution to writer's block: take one object in your house, one object you can see from your house, one thing you read in the paper, and one thing you saw on television, and then try to relate them all.

A Note On The Rapture To His True Love

A blue bowl on the table in the dining room
fills with sunlight. From a sunlit room
I watch my neighbor's sugar maple turn
to shades of gold. It's late September. Soon...
Soon as I'm able I intend to turn
to gold myself. Somewhere I've read that soon
they'll have a formula for prime numbers
and once they do, the world's supposed to end
the way my neighbor always said it would -
in fire. I'll bet we'll all be given numbers
divisible by One and by themselves
and told to stand in line the way you would
for prime cuts at the butcher's. In the end,
maybe it's every man for himself.
Maybe it's someone hollering All Hands on
Deck! Abandon Ship! Women and Children First!
Anyway I'd like to get my hands on
you. I'd like to kiss your eyelids and make love
as if it were our last time, or the first,
or else the one and only form of love
divisible by which I yet remain myself.
Mary, folks are disappearing one by one.
They turn to gold and vanish like the leaves
of sugar maples. But we can save ourselves.
We'll pick our own salvations, one by one,
from a blue bowl full of sunlight until none is left.

of soup and friendship

Today I had a genuine day off, the first in far too long. I didn't do much: read a bit, drank coffee alone at my desk--I've fashioned myself a bit of a me-corner, with photos and my computer and a notepad and a green plant that smells like limes when you rub the leaves--embroiled myself in some various forms of correspondence, and called it a day. For the first time in weeks and weeks I felt like I wasn't running myself ragged, and god, that felt good. I wasn't entirely unproductive, though. I made soup.

My friend Rose-Anne and I did this thing a while back that we called the Tandem Posting Project; every other week we choose a topic and we both wrote a post about our reflections on and around that idea. We talked about long-distance friendships, favorite recipes, and even dirt, but eventually writer's block and a trip to Europe got in the way and we haven't resumed yet. I feel guilty about this, but I'm uncertain I'm up to the task of writing anything--much less something topical and with a deadline--and so the project has languished in a corner of my mind, waiting. But tonight I made a soup from Rose-Anne's blog, a pumpkin soup with chewy hominy and tangy tomatillos that I just freaking loved, and it occurred to me that I have a pumpkin soup recipe of my own to offer up. And so! A homage to the on-hiatus Tandem Posting Project.

Pumpkin Black Bean Soup

The funny thing is that even though I've been utterly overwhelmed by basically everything lately, my cooking has been going really well. I cook nearly every night, mostly new recipes, and I'm more willing to adapt things all willy-nilly and just sort of go with what I think will be good. Sometimes this is mediocre--there was a weird cauliflower moment a few weeks ago, for instance--but often it's not too bad. This recipe is loosely adapted from (seriously, folks) www.pumpkinsoup.org, a website dedicated entirely to pumpkin soup recipes. I've never had much of a love for sweet soups, so it was a relief to discover last year that there were good savory ones out in the world, lovingly collated by some pumpkin soup aficionado out there for my own personal benefit. This one--it's in the International Pumpkin Soups section--has bite and creaminess, and I love the use of black beans, chilies, and coconut milk together.

Rose-Anne, this recipe isn't as elegant as yours always are. I'm afraid my memory is bad, and I don't always remember what it is that I do when I cook. I don't measure or time, and this might well be wrong in several different ways, so be vigilant if you try this at home. Consider this a rough draft, but one that I believe will work just fine. I enjoyed your soup, and if I ever refine mine I'll serve it to you some autumn visit.

Ingredients:
2-3 tsp olive oil
1 onion, diced
1-2 jalapeño peppers, seeded and diced
2-4 cloves garlic, diced
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp thyme
1 sweet potato, peeled and cubed
1 can pumpkin puree or equivalent amount fresh pumpkin puree
4 cups vegetable broth
4-6 cups water
2 cans black beans
1 can coconut milk
salt and pepper to taste
lime juice to taste

Heat the olive oil in a large soup pot, and saute the onion until it begins to become translucent. Add the jalapeño, garlic, cumin, and thyme and saute for another minute. Add the broth, water, and sweet potato to the pot and bring to a boil; reduce to a simmer until the sweet potato becomes very soft, roughly ten to fifteen minutes. Coarsely mash with a potato masher, then add the pumpkin and black beans and simmer for ten more minutes, adding more water if the soup seems too thick. Add the coconut milk, salt and pepper. Serve with lime juice on the side, to taste.

the secret garden

“[S]ecrecy hides far more than what is private. A private garden need not be a secret garden; a private life is rarely a secret life.” –Sissela Bok

…but what about where the private life is a secret garden and it has always been off-limits to you? And what if you respect those limits because you think you know what’s inside them? It’s you who would be keeping secrets then…” –Sue Halpern

When I was a kid my dad would go on weeks-long working trips in the Grand Canyon, and while he was gone my mom and I would stay up all night together watching Politically Incorrect and then whatever came on after Politically Incorrect or old Hitchcock films, eating food that I can’t even mention without shuddering now, stuff we never ate during daylight hours or when my dad was home. We once stayed up until 2 AM together watching a show about people with weird “supernatural” abilities because I was insistent that I wanted to see an old woman called the Human Cork. Another night my mom read me the infamous vomit scene from Steven King’s The Body (the filmed sequence in Stand By Me really can’t compare) and we laughed until tears rolled down our faces, until my entire body hurt and we were stifling giggles, trying not to wake my sister. Those nights, and that night in particular, I felt closer to her than I ever have before or since. I think it’s because we were sharing a secret, because we’d made a privacy out of the two of us and it existed independent of the rest of our lives.

But what is private, and what is secret? I’ve been going over these questions a lot lately, as it is obvious to me that a decrease in my immediate access to privacy, not to mention solitude, caused some pretty severe distress, mentally and emotionally. And here’s something: as the amount of privacy I had decreased, the amount of secrecy I required increased pretty dramatically. As the amount of time I had to engage with myself on a one-to-one basis (so to speak) began to disappear, I found myself retreating in lockstep into behaviors that felt furtive, like I needed to hide away some stolen moments for myself like a squirrel with a cache of nuts for the hard times ahead. I went invisible on gchat, I only listened to music when I was alone; when I got a night to myself all I ate was instant mashed potatoes just like my mom would have, and as I ate I think I understood her a little bit better. I think I’ve desperately needed control over some part of my life, and so I began controlling tiny things and calling them secrets, actions that were only for me. Maybe it was the same for her, and I’m retrospectively proud to have been let in on the game.

Secrets aren’t inherently bad, and I think that actually they’re one of the keys into the mystery of desire for solitude. Privacy, at least in the American sense, means getting to choose what you want to show other people, and secrets are what you choose not to show. You can share privacy with as many people as you care to, but secrecy is usually a more personal matter. Most of my secrets are silly: foods that I only eat while alone, the need for an occasional night where I drink too much wine and read and get all adamant in my journal about the nature of beauty or whatever. Others carry more weight, but I find I’m bad at keeping the big ones. If it’s important enough, it’s usually important enough that I want to discuss it. Either way, the less privacy I have the more important my secrets become because, when I don’t have as much control over my privacy my secrets start to define more clearly who I am when I’m alone.

Because even though my secrets feel silly and small to me, I hold them close because they remind me of who I am as a solo entity, when it’s just me in here and out there and I’m not thinking about anybody else at all. No matter how much I care about them, other people are always a factor to be considered when I think about what I want to happen next, another variable that I can’t control. My small secrets wouldn’t hold up to the scrutiny of others, and so they become a symbolic stand-in for the solitude that is no longer as prevalent in my life as it was a year ago. The joys of eating gross comfort food or of a solo listen-through of a favorite cd increase exponentially when these actions become secret; they become precious, because they are for me and me alone. I could let other people in if I chose—as my mother did with me during those long preteen nights together—and sometimes I do (I just told y’all about the instant mashed potatoes, for instance), but for now I’m mostly guarding them carefully. A secret is insurance against the encroachment of others, no matter how welcome that entrance might be. Sometimes, you just need something that belongs only to you.

sweet home

Over the weekend I moved, of all things. We’d been looking at places, weighing the merits of a three-bedroom, a two-bedroom, or two one-bedrooms--being in a triad complicates housing, among other things--before deciding on the last option, but the move was still an almost complete surprise. We filled out an application for a one-bedroom in a designated low-income complex, which turns out to be an incredibly complicated process, and it took a week to get all the paperwork—proving our residency, ability to pay rent, income, job status, etc.—sufficiently completed. Eventually, however, we were declared officially poor (we're half a yuppie, my boyfriend says) and on Friday we were finally approved; because of my work schedule, we decided against all common sense to move on Monday.

Whew, is all I have to say. I feel like I haven’t sat still in days, between work and moving and cleaning the old place and being in the very baby beginning stages of setting up the new apartment. But even though this apartment is still overrun with full boxes and empty bookshelves (Don’t even freaking ask me how many boxes of books we had. A LOT) and my spices are all buried beneath some blankets in the giant box that nearly killed me getting up the stairs, I’m already ridiculously happier than I was. I think this apartment will be an excellent argument for space’s impact on mental health.

I wrote a few months ago about how my apartment, my old apartment, had gone rather suddenly from being just a space I lived in to being a home. Well, shortly after that it went from being a home to being something else entirely. My space, while perfect for one inhabitant, proved to be entirely too small for two cohabitants (two and a half, really, since my girlfriend was visiting for about half of every week), two cats, and more books than you can shake a stick at. The apartment went from cozy to claustrophobic, and my insomnia and the lack of a second room to flee to led to me spending many, many nights quelling my restlessness in the bathroom, writing with my back braced against the tub. It made me so sad, watching a place I loved become something akin to prison, someplace that made me itch to leave almost as soon as I entered. People would laugh when I told them I’d spent the wee hours hanging out in my own bathroom, but really it made me deeply sorrowful and more than a little crazy-feeling. If you aren’t home when you’re home, what’s left?

Here, even with the boxes, there is already space. It’s been so long since I’ve lived somewhere with, for instance, a hallway. There are three closets. I set up the bones of my kitchen tonight and my god, I choked up: a full-sized, brand-new stove and refrigerator greeted me when we got here, and there’s even room for a bookshelf. My cookbooks are finally home as well, it seems. It’s almost alarming, the space. A coffee table, really? I am so in love with the idea of what this can become for me, geographically and creatively, that I can barely wait. I hope to be writing at my desk in the living room soon instead of the bathroom; I hope to drink coffee on the couch in the morning and write my goddamn heart out. The worst part about losing my sense of home was that I couldn’t write a word. I hope the drought is over, or at least beginning to be over.

But here’s to new homes, to sharing space with loved ones while preserving your own life, to being happy where you are. Loving where I am makes me want to love the whole damn world, and having a home makes all the difference. I think I’ll love it here.

what we want from what we lost (Berlin, part two)

My guidebook had this to say about my last museum: "Berlin's Jüdisches Museum, the largest Jewish Museum in Europe, celebrates the achievements of German Jews and their contribution to culture, art, science and other fields... [T]he exhibit also includes one section about the Holocaust, although this is by no means the museum's entire focus. In fact, what makes Berlin's Jewish museum different is that it looks at Jewish history beyond the very narrow context of the 12 years of Nazi rule." I’m sure that’s true. In fact, I wanted to see the special exhibit on Jews in comics, but it cost extra and so I somehow only saw the Holocaust section, and while I guess it shouldn't be surprising that it was an emotional experience it was emotional in a way I wasn't expecting.

What was so profoundly disturbing had somewhat less to do with what I was seeing than with where I was seeing it. The exhibit itself, on the lower floor of a very unassuming building, is surprisingly sparse: a handful of windows set into the walls, each with a small token from somebody's life and a note describing their eventual displacement or murder. There are two longer hallways, the Axis of Exile and the Axis of the Holocaust, and they are intersected by a third hallway, the Axis of Continuity, which leads back to the surface. Many museums attempt to somehow thematically link themselves to their subject via architecture, but this was the only space I’ve ever been in where the intent was to make the visitor uncomfortable, unsettled. The three axes intersect at odd angles, and the floors subtly slant; the walls are perfectly white, the lighting cold, and display windows are set flush with the walls so that the long hallways appear unbroken and clinical. That’s it: three hallways, some exhibit windows, a few artifacts.

The Axis of Exile, which deals with displacement during World War II, leads to the Garden of Silence, a square of twenty-foot-tall stone pillars—the only right angles present anywhere in the exhibit, I was informed—reaching towards the open sky and filled with low-growing trees. Teenagers were playing hide-and-seek between the columns, their echoes surrounding me, and I could see blue overhead; even though I was stumbling over the rocky ground, thrown by the endless columns and the still-slanting floor, the air took away a little bit of the disorientation I was feeling, and I stayed there longer than was necessary, craning my neck to see the clouds. Then I went back inside, to the Axis of the Holocaust.

At that point I was still okay. I walked slowly, reading each plaque and looking at every artifact. I’ve been to a few concentration camps, and what I remember from those is their attempts to overwhelm me: rooms full of shoes, hairbrushes, hair. They try to tell me that I can never understand the number “six million”, that I can’t even come close. The Jüdisches Museum took the opposite approach, sneaking in through tiny details and abstract representational force. The end of the Axis of the Holocaust is an empty room, the Holocaust Tower, with tall grey stone walls and a completely black ceiling. The angles were so completely wrong and the silence was pushing every sound back; the echoes, unlike the almost friendly ones from the teenagers in the Garden of Silence, came at me so loudly that I fled in a panic after less than a minute. There was nothing there, but somehow I was more horrified than it is possible for me to express because there was nothing there. It was shocking, the emptiness of that chamber.

I left not only the room but the exhibit, fumbling for my backpack in the locker, in a rush to exit this nauseating place that felt so quietly and viscerally horrifying and be back in the normal world. In my haste I stumbled out the wrong door and ended up in a garden that seemed benign but which I couldn’t seem to find my way out of, although I could see people in deck chairs, presumably at the museum café, sipping drinks and watching me as I stumbled around. Every gate was locked; every stairway led back to where it originated. At first I laughed, nervously, and acting nonchalant because of the drink sippers—who, frankly, seemed more menacing by the second—but after ten minutes I was walking faster, tugging at doors and trying not to run. After fifteen I was nearly in tears. When I finally found the door I had come out of I burst through, breathless, disoriented and wild-eyed. I ran to the actual exit without caring if I was drawing looks, ran out the doors and to the children’s playground next door. I wrote and sat and ate some bread and cheese and blueberries—blueberries were a great comfort, somehow—watched ants run around on the bench beside me, recovered. Eventually I left, quietly, and went home, went to bed. It was all I could do.

one of the cities in which i loved you (Berlin, part one)

In Berlin, I mainly did two things: I walked to museums, and then I walked around inside of museums. Travelling alone made me realize how many of my prior travels had been based around themes like "let's find a good place to eat lunch" or "let's sit around and talk to each other about what we see and then maybe have a beer". Without those fallback positions, I discovered pretty quickly that I had no idea what to do with myself, which is when I started hitting the museums.

I went to seven museums in three days, which would have been tiring even if I hadn't been walking probably seven to ten miles of urban sidewalk each day on top of that. I learned about the fishing boats of Pacific Islanders and saw photographs of Depeche Mode, looked at still lives of garden gnomes and wondered at partially destroyed Greek friezes, all beauty and decay and silent stylized struggle. I went to a contemporary art gallery housed in a revamped train station decked out with neon lights, and I went to the Zuckermuseum, which I thought would be a candy museum but instead turned out to literally be about sugar; ironically, it was staffed by the sourest people I met on my entire trip. I saw a lot of stuff, but I would say that I had exactly two truly moving experiences in those three days, moments that were divorced from the intellectual coldness that can accompany a museum visit or seven. These two things have been tumbling around in my head ever since. This is the first one.

---

Usually when I see famous pieces of artwork I end up feeling a little let down. They look exactly and unexcitingly like their reproductions or there are too many people around--hey, Mona Lisa, I'm looking at you here--or I end up psyching myself out, thinking "Is this neat because it's famous, or is it famous because it's neat? What am I enjoying here, art or fame?" When something bypasses all of that, it's incredibly shocking.

I saw the bust of Nefertiti at the Neues Museum (New Museum) on my first day, almost as an afterthought. I wasn’t excited about it; it wasn’t something I’d ever felt a desire to see, and I assumed it would be underwhelming. Instead, when I rounded the corner into the room where the bust sits alone, the shock I felt took me completely by surprise. The sheer presence, the vitality of this piece of painted limestone was like nothing I’ve ever felt before, like what I imagine people mean when they speak about seeing something supernatural. It wasn’t a reaction to the beauty of the work—although it is beautiful, much more beautiful than you’d guess—but, I think, to the intent of both artist and model. I think that for a piece of art to cause a skeptical visitor to shake 3,300 years after its creation, the force put into it must have been incredible. It felt huge and almost menacing; I stood trembling, riveted, trying to decide whether I felt like crying or running away or throwing up.

I ran away. After maybe three minutes, I turned and fled. After I had recovered--maybe twenty minutes, during which time I saw very little although I passed by many things—I went back. The impact was gone, except for an echo of the awe and fear. I left the museum soon afterwards, and spent the rest of the afternoon in the Tiergarten, trying to recover.

falling down

Just a brief update, although I hope to really write something tonight. It's 11 PM and I'm not even remotely tired, so... We'll see. At any rate, I wrote something for my friend Louise recently. It's about my terrible horrible no good etc. etc. trip to Germany, and the book that put it all in perspective by being incredibly awesome. Read my thing, and then read the book. It's called The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, and it's just as fantastically beautiful as its title. Good night, and good luck.