Keeping vigil

Arc
by Amy M. Clark

My seatmate on the late-night flight
could have been my father. I held
a biography, but he wanted to talk.

The pages closed around my finger
on my spot, and as we inclined
into the sky, we went backwards
in his life, beginning with five hours
before, the funeral for his only brother,

a forgotten necktie in his haste
to catch this plane the other way
just yesterday, his wife at home
caring for a yellow Lab she'd found
along the road by the olive grove,

and the pretty places we had visited—
Ireland for me, Germany for him—
a village where he served his draft
during the Korean War, and would like
to see again to show his wife

how lucky he had been. He talked
to me and so we held
his only brother's death at bay.

I turned off my reading light,
remembering another veteran
I met in a pine forest years ago
who helped me put my tent up
in the wind. What was I thinking

camping there alone? I was grateful
he kept watch across the way
and served coffee in a blue tin cup.

Like the makeshift shelter of a tent,
a plane is brought down,
but as we folded to the ground,
I had come to appreciate
even my seatmate's breath, large
and defenseless, the breath of a man
who hadn't had a good night's rest.

I listened and kept the poles
from blowing down, and kept
a vigil from the dark to day.

"Arc" by Amy M. Clark, from Stray Home. © University of North Texas Press, 2010

Niche

"Do you read a lot?"

"A little. Being read to is nicer." She looked at me. "That's over now, isn't it?"

"Why should it be over?" But I couldn't see myself talking into cassettes for her or meeting her to read aloud.

"I was so glad and so proud of you when you learned to read. And what nice letters you wrote me!" That was true; I had admired her and been glad, because she was reading and she wrote to me,

But I could feel how little my admiration and happiness were worth compared to what learning to read and write must have cost Hanna, how meagre they must have been if they could not even get me to answer her, visit her, talk to her.

I had granted Hanna a small niche, certainly an important niche, one from which I gained something and for which I did something, but not a place in my life."

Page 195, 'The Reader' by Bernard Schlink.
Translated from the German by Carol Brown Janeway.

Movie adaptation by Stephen Daldry.

Towel Day :)

Towel Day is celebrated every 25 May as a tribute by fans of the late author Douglas Adams. On this day, fans carry a towel with them to demonstrate their love for the books and the author, as referenced in Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy :) :) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towel_Day)

See pictures and details of events that happened yesterday, world-wide - http://towelday.org/

The original quote that referenced the greatness of towels is found in Chapter 3 of Adams' work The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

"A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.
”
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Is there a time......

Beautiful song and video - heard it first in 1997 thanks to our dear friend Claude, a big fan of Brian Eno, who sent me back from France with a suitcase full of cassettes.......

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-d9NhZ_IuFc

More info about the song, the film and the context: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Sarajevo

"The film Miss Sarajevo is a documentary by Bill Carter about a beauty pageant held in the midst of war-torn Sarajevo, Bosnia. The winner was a 17-year-old blonde named Inela Nogić. Carter traveled to Sarajevo in the winter of 1993 to offer humanitarian aid and quickly found himself in the heart of the conflict. He lived for six months in a burnt-out office building, subsisting on baby food and whatever water he could find in the rivers and sewers and delivering food and medicine to those in need."

Miss Sarajevo

Is there a time for keeping a distance
A time to turn your eyes away
Is there a time for keeping your head down
For getting on with your day

Is there a time for kohl and lipstick
A time for cutting hair
Is there a time for high street shopping
To find the right dress to wear

Here she comes
Heads turn around
Here she comes
To take her crown

Is there a time to run for cover
A time for kiss and tell
Is there a time for different colours
Different names you find it hard to spell

Is there a time for first communion
A time for East Seventeen
Is there a time to turn to Mecca
Is there time to be a beauty queen
Here she comes

Beauty plays the clown
Here she comes
Surreal in her crown

Dici che il fiume
Trova la via al mare
E come il fiume
Giungerai a me
Oltre i confini
E le terre assetate
Dici che come il fiume
Come il fiume...
L'amore giungerà
L'amore...
E non so più pregare
E nell'amore non so più sperare
E quell'amore non so più aspettare

[Translation of the above]
You say that the river
finds the way to the sea
and like the river
you will come to me
beyond the borders
and the dry lands
You say that like a river
like a river...
the love will come
the love...
And i don't know how to pray anymore
and in love i don't know how to hope anymore
and for that love i don't know how to wait anymore
[End of Translation]

Is there a time for tying ribbons
A time for Christmas trees
Is there a time for laying tables
And the night is set to freeze

O lijepa, o draga, o slatka slobodo,
[dar u kom sva blaga višnji nam bog je do...]

Songwriters: The Edge; Eno, Brian; Clayton, Adam; Mullen, Larry Jr; Bono

A comforting space

"It goes beyond just keeping in touch; as many people assert – you don’t have to talk with friends every day in order to remain close. However, there is something intensely special about being involved with good friends on a daily basis. The feeling that you not only know what is going on but actually play a role in each others lives is rewarding. There are times when I get a bit depressed thinking about all of the ‘shit-shooting’ that I miss out on with my friends when I’m not at home.

I know it must sound odd, but I guess it’s fair to say that I sometimes miss the mundane details of my friends’ lives. Even with the help of technology making communications incredibly inexpensive, unavoidable things like time differences and vastly different living environments make picking up the phone and talking about how good lunch was, or the strange characteristic of quick-dry shirts smelling pretty nasty after being wet (they do, don’t they?), rather difficult.

The nice thing about the emails I received today was that they covered not only the “here’s what’s been going on in my life for the past few months” but also more random “slice of life” things; food, fears, gripes about coffee. Moreover, when reading the emails, I could hear my friends’ voices, their inflections, their expressions, and their mood. They were almost like a stream of consciousness, where for a brief moment, I was hanging out with my friends again in a comfortable and comforting space."

http://www.backpackinginasuit.com/2010/05/having-good-day.html

The Kora

"Toumani Diabaté is one of the most important musicians in Africa. Toumani plays the kora, a harp unique to West Africa, with 21 strings.

Toumani was born in Bamako, the capital of Mali, in 1965 into a family of exceptional griots (hereditary musician/historian caste); his research shows 71 generations of kora players from father to son."

http://www.myspace.com/toumanidiabate

Abandonment

“…..But with Sparky [Charles Schulz, creator of Snoopy comics], it’s a sense of being abandoned, a fear of abandonment, that he’s talking about. When he rode the streetcar with [his mother] Dena, he was afraid that as more and more people got on at the stops, and crowded in between her and him, that she would get off without him. He struggled all his life with a package of anxiety, a sense of abandonment and of not being loved. His expression of that aloneness was continual, and in interviews he often said he felt alone—which is a strange remark for someone with five children. But for Sparky, it was a powerful myth, and very effective.

Everyone I talked to said he was fun and funny, that he loved life, but it was complicated because he’d draw close to someone and then pull away."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21181520/site/newsweek/?GT1=10450

On Being Charlie Brown

"The American assumption was that children were happy, and childhood was a golden time; it was adults who had problems with which they wrestled and pains that they sought to smooth. Schulz reversed the natural order of things ... by showing that a child's pain is more intensely felt than an adult's, a child's defeats the more acutely experienced and remembered. Charlie Brown takes repeated insults from Violet and Patty about the size of his head, which they compare with a beach ball, a globe, a pie tin, the moon, a balloon; and though Charlie Brown may feel sorry for himself, he gets over it fast. But he does not get visibly angry.

" 'Would you like to have been Abraham Lincoln?' Patty asks Charlie Brown. 'I doubt it,' he answers. 'I have a hard enough time being just plain Charlie Brown.'

"Children are not supposed to be radically dissatisfied. When they are unhappy, children protest--they wail, they whine, they scream, they cry--then they move on. Schulz gave these children lifelong dissatisfactions, the stuff of which adulthood is made.

"Readers recognized themselves in 'poor, moon- faced, unloved, misunderstood' Charlie Brown--in his dignity in the face of whole seasons of doomed baseball games, his endurance and stoicism in the face of insults. He ... reminded people, as no other cartoon character had, of what it was to be vulnerable, to be small and alone in the universe, to be human--both little and big at the same time."

David Michaelis, 'Schulz and Peanuts', Harper Collins, Copyright 2007 by David Michaelis, pp. 245- 247

The Man in the Yard

My father told me once
that when he was about twenty
he had a new girlfriend, and once
they stopped by the house on the way
to somewhere, just a quick stop
to pick something up,
and my grandfather, who wasn't well—
it turned out he had TB and would die
at fifty-two—was sitting in a chair
in the small back yard, my father
knew he was out there, and it crossed
his mind that he should take his girlfriend
out back to meet him, but he
didn't, whether for embarrassment
at the sick, fading man
or just because he was in a hurry
to be off on his date, he didn't
say, but he told the little,
uneventful story anyway, and said
that he had always regretted
not doing that simple, courteous
thing, the sick man sitting in
the sun in the back yard would
have enjoyed meeting her, but
instead he sat out there alone
as they came and left, young
lovers going on a date. He
always regretted it, he said.

"The Man in the Yard" by Howard Nelson, from The Nap by the Waterfall. © Timberline Press, 2009.

Ask

".....The only person who had every really asked her questions was her husband, and that was because love is a constant questioning. In fact I don't know a better definition of love."

So says Milan Kundera in Lost Letters. After the death of her husband, Tamina cannot get close to any of the men who try to woo her and is locked in her aloneness in a strange land. One day, she realizes what it is that bothers her so much about them, what it is that is missing. They are always talking about themselves, the things that happen to them, what they did, the places they went to - rarely did they ask, so how have you been, what fills your days, are you happy, what do you think of when you have that far-away look in your eyes.

So many relationships that slide into imbalance, because one person always asks the questions, and the other is too locked up in his/her self to bother.

How was your childhood, have you flown kites, are you warm, why are you sneezing, will you call me when you reach, do you beleive in ghosts, what's your favourite colour, do you know the smell of mummy-cat tummies, did you ever eat toothpaste, can you turn cart-wheels, what was your great-grandfather, can you touch the floor without bending your knees, what is your earliest memory, do you like rolling on grass, and why did that shadow pass over your face the other day when we were laughing with friends at the restaurant?

Ask.

Jan 18, 2004.

Ordinary People

Walking on the road, you pass so many people. Some look confident, purposeful, well-dressed, well-maintained. But the majority appear so ordinary, wear ill-fitting clothes, unfashionable footwear, have too much fat or too little, nothing remarkable about them, nothing attractive.

But yet someone somewhere eagerly waits for this unimpressive man to come home every evening.

Someone's entire world turns around the strength of this frail-looking woman.

Someone's very purpose in life hinges on this brash youngster cutting through traffic.

Someone knows only the shelter of these old arms each time their world begins to crumble.

Someone will count hours, minutes, and weep like a child when this pock-marked face alights from a long-distance train.

Someone will cave in, crack up, and never be the same again if this one person disappears from the face of the world.

There are no ordinary people.

Drive carefully.

Brother

Arvind. Little brother from university days, dragged down by the whirlpool in the blue ocean I so loved. Who died because the warden and VC refused to give a car to rush him to the hospital. Why do you come back to haunt me after all these years, you whom we grieved with all the bitterness of youth against unfairness? Where are you now, what have you become? Do you still watch the waves tempting other young students on that beautiful coast? Do you still wander those hostel corridors resonating with youthful laughter? Or have you closed yourself in anguish unable to see the face of your mother who never recovered from losing her only child?

O little brother, did you, like Phlebas, pass the stages of your brief life as you entered the whirlpool*? Is death by water a death without resurrection, without rebirth, without hope of another chance?

Give me your grief, let me carry it for you, may your boyish shoulders bear only the weight of the arms of friendly angels....


*"Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.

A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.

Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you. "

Part IV: Death by Water
From 'The Wasteland' – T.S Eliot

Jan 28, 2004

On the road

30 Oct 03, Thursday

One morning while driving down the busy road from M Circle, I notice this man on a bike moving very slowly in the fast-moving traffic. Then I notice the tiny little stray puppy running between him and the road divider. The man was purposely riding slowly shielding the puppy and preventing him from moving left into the traffic where he would be crushed to death without a doubt. And the puppy unaware of danger so close at hand was happily running a marathon in the straight line he was forced to run in, once in a while turning to look at this funny guy keeping pace with him.

"There is more to admire in people than to despise". So says the character of Bernard Rieux in Camus' "Plague", after 9 months in a plague-ravaged city.

Goodness is all around us, though it rarely makes it to newspaper headlines.

Too late

As we grow older we develop long sight and have difficulty seeing what's near. But in matters of the soul, perhaps it works the other way around? There is a saying that God hides things by keeping them near us. In our youth, our eyes fixed on distant oases, we pass nurturing wellsprings unaware. As we grow older, we start noticing the treasures right next to us, we start valuing people whom we took for granted earlier, we recognize blessings.

But all this, after we have spent our youth chasing mirages while we let what could have sustained us wear away with our thoughtlessness and neglect.

At times, the fatted calf may be killed and a feast laid out to celebrate our return*. But at other times, the prodigal could well find that there is no one at home any more, that it is just a little too late.

Ref: The Parable of the Prodigal Son. Luke 15: 11-32 , The New Testament.

Nov 14, 2003

Sometimes

Sitting alone on a rocky coast one calm grey monsoon morning, watching poor fishermen cast their nets into the sea, wait patiently for hours, pull up an empty net, move to another place and try again, I re-learn the lesson: Sometimes there is fish, sometimes there is no fish.

Sometimes our hands seem too small to hold all that we have been given. At other times, all we can see is the gap between our fingers.