Bright Star
Kevin and I watched Bright Star last night. It’s a recent movie that had been recommended by several friends, and my friend D’s review finally pushed me over the top: I was ready to rent it. The movie is by Jane Campion, based on the doomed love story of John Keats and a young woman named Fanny Brawne; his sonnet to her, “Bright Star,” may or may not have been the last poem he ever wrote. The movie is beautifully composed, and though I’m not sure how entirely accurate it is (apparently there was another woman, in real life, to whom Keats was somewhat attached during the same time period, and for whom he wrote a poem), the plot is distilled into a story of young love. This shows my age, but I was very sympathetic to the dilemma Fanny’s mother faced: she recognized that her daughter was falling in love, and her warnings were gentle and compassionate, and her silent presence was so deeply loving as she watched her daughter suffering the heartbreak of an impossible connection. Because, of course, the pairing was impossible. Keats was already ill with tuberculosis (and considering how contagious the disease, I cringed every time he coughed while embracing healthy, young Fanny). But just as imposing was Keats’s lack of a living. His poetry was admired by some influential friends, but scorned by critics. (Not that at the best of times poets ever make much of a living). When Keats died, at age 25, he believed he’d left nothing immortal behind. I can still remember writing an essay on “Ode to a Grecian Urn” in the last exam I ever sat in undergrad. Nothing is immortal; but that poem–and its beautiful concluding lines: ” ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ that is all / Ye know on Earth and all ye need to know”–have lasted a century and a half, more immortal than most earthly things.
Ultimately, for me the movie was a true and unabashed recognition of young love, and of the passion experienced in a first romantic pairing. And it was also about artists and the making of art, and how painful the process (“I am writing again,” Keats says at one point; and I understood so well, how the writing comes and goes), how little it can be relied upon yet how impossible not to pursue if it’s what one must do. It’s no way to make a living. Never has been. Never will be. It exists unconnected from worldly success. There is no way to predict what will last; yet that sense of grasping at the immortal is probably what drives most artists to create. A strange paradox. There’s no point in making art if you’re only making it to attempt to make yourself immortal; yet you probably wouldn’t make it if you weren’t tapping into the threads of human experience that are essentially immortal: death, birth, love, creation, beauty.
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On another subject altogether … my baby. My baby is two years old today. He was born around 7 o’clock in the morning, so when we woke, Kevin and I reminisced about that vivid and intense hour of labour that preceded his arrival. It was a panicked hour, our midwives got lost, and about forty-five minutes into the wait Kevin called a neighbour (luckily a midwife!) to come and help. She arrived almost exactly at the same moment as our midwives. I still remember Kevin saying, his hands gently on me, “Please, don’t push. Don’t push. Don’t push.” He was more panicked than I was, because I was entirely focused on what was happening in my body. And we both remember the midwives taking the stairs two at a time, arrived just in time to rescue Kevin from having to catch our baby. Albus remembers that we called at 7:05 to report the arrival of their new baby brother (the kids and Kevin’s mom were all spending the night at my mom’s). AppleApple remembers that they asked what colour the new baby’s hair was, and we said, “Red.” Ha! Honestly, we couldn’t imagine having any child without red hair, and spent the next few months examining his locks for signs of colour. Now, I can’t imagine him as anything but what and who he is. Happy birthday, son.
(Bottom two photos by AppleApple!).
Photographic Memories
Not sitting here with the inspiration to write. But look at these photos. Yesterday, Kevin and Albus cooked the evening meal together: coconut chicken with baked rice, bouillabaisse, and fruit smoothies for dessert. Last Sunday, Fooey and Kevin cooked French onion soup (above, Fooey is monitoring the progress of the toasting bread in the toaster oven). Their other memorable meal item was a cheese and fruit plate for dessert.
I also had to include this photo of AppleApple wearing her Grandma Linda’s jacket–from when Grandma Linda was a little girl. It is hand-sewn, though I’ll have to ask who did the sewing. AppleApple disappeared into her own mysterious world yesterday, dressing up in the jacket, and a white collared shirt, a black bubble skirt, and tights, and pushing her hair off her face with a band. She looked so beautiful. I found her sitting on her fabric box in the girls’ bedroom, serene and lost in thought. I never found out what she was thinking, though it looked like it might have been sad. I sat on the floor, asked my questions, received no answers; and so sat quietly just watching her. I thought about how there will be so many things that she does and thinks that I will never know, and though it was difficult, I understood that I would respect that distance, not scrabble to break it. As long as she knows I’m here if she needs me. (The photo was not taken at that moment, but later in the afternoon when she was busy taking photos of her own. The other day I heard her camera beeping, and realized she was setting it up on the 10-second delay so she could take self-portraits. Um …. And Albus has been taking photos and making movies, too, on his own–very old–digital movie camera. No shortage of documentation at our house. The only trouble will be narrowing our evidence down to a few iconic images, which is all that ever lasts; if even that could be said to last, in a family’s memory, for however long a family remembers).
Ahhhhhhhhhh ….
Ahhhhhhhh.
That is sound of me breathing deeply and sighing it out, like the body needs to do and craves to do sometimes. And then you discover that you’re sitting with shoulders hunched up to ears, and jaw clenched, and you let it all drop down and soften.
Because it’s been two weeks since I’ve had this privilege: the still and empty house, emptied of children and husband, and only mine, for three hours exactly. I’m the only one of us who gets this privilege, come to think of it, since the children are never left here solo, and Kevin’s privilege is to work away from home at an office. I’m grateful to be here, right now.
I am trying hard not to think about CJ in his new pull-ups at nursery school. He was not so keen to go this morning, though the last few times he’s loved it–running out the door with a cheerful “bye-bye Mom!” (Yes, he calls me Mom. C’mon, kid. Couldn’t we do Mama for at least another year?) But it’s been two weeks since he’s headed off to nursery school. Plus, the potty training. That’s enough to throw anyone off balance.
Just ask me.
The constant checking and reminding, the spidey senses alert to the cues, the way I can intuit, even when he is out of sight, that he’s paused and we need to rush for the potty. It’s bizarre. It’s also comforting to know how tuned into him I can be. And hopefully I can be that tuned in to all my kids, when I need to be. Because I’m not always so tuned in. Writing tunes me out. Tunes me elsewhere. Sometimes it tunes me so distracted that the world goes on around me and I respond, but through a haze, so that afterward I remember the things that really happened as if those were a dream, and imagination was reality. Or, worse, that absence was reality.
I’ve been thinking about going deep. What it means and what it takes to get there … to the depths, to the core; that place that is more metaphor and idea than something tangible. I think that to get at the profound emotions, at a profound understanding of the world and one’s place in it, to get perspective, which brings calm, you need time. There isn’t a substitute for sustained time to focus the mind.
Yet, it happens that often I write something profoundly moving and real in a flash.
I believe those flashes of light don’t come out of nowhere. There is hidden work that gets done while I go about my everyday, alighting on surfaces and meeting multiple demands. Effort doesn’t pay out instantly. Experience can’t be bought or faked. There are no short-cuts.
This morning, I greeted the silence by playing piano. I’m not a fabulous piano player by any stretch of the imagination, but I love the way I’m able to let go and be inhabited by rhythm. When I’m in the right mood, I crave the feeling of fingers on keys, getting inside something larger than myself. I don’t even think. It’s not great music, but it feels amazing.
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Here’s something funny, though I’ll have to paraphrase, from poet P.K. Page who died last year. She said that a census-taker came to their door, and she gave her occupation as “housewife.” Her husband asked why she hadn’t said “writer.” (At this point in her life she’d been writing for, oh, about forty years). And she replied: You know I don’t feel comfortable claiming to be a writer, I’m so uncertain about my talent, etc. To which her husband said, But you are a writer. You don’t have to claim to be a good one.
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Next on the morning’s silent menu … upstairs to the attic to search through old files. Then some writing. I am writing a story for children. It’s short. And maybe profound. And came at me all in a heap, unexpected, while I was working on the potty training and serving lunch to three preschoolers. It didn’t make me a better mother to write this story down, and that’s the damn truth. The question is: did it make me a better writer? Or worse, the question I should really stop asking, but somehow cannot: does writing it down matter? Mindless question. Mind over matter.
Dindl and Pindl
Around the same age, all the children had imaginary friends, or made-up words for which we couldn’t discover definitions. Albus had Bappy and Bumberknock. AppleApple had Amy and Damey. Fooey had a mysterious word that she used with alarming frequency (considering we had no idea what it meant): Teacock. She also called all animals “didi.” (Oddly, CJ did the same thing for a brief time). And, now, CJ has Dindl and Pindl, sometimes pronounced Dinder and Pinder. Dindl and Pindl are constantly up to unknown but dramatic activities that call for a lot of arm-waving and expression. Albus just told me his theory that Dindl and Pindl are CJ’s swear words. This actually sounds plausible.
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I used the fast-forward method today, on advice from a friend, and plied CJ with massive amounts of sweet sweet nectar (apple juice, which he never gets to drink) … and therefore sped up the whole potty training process. The only difficulty was turning it off at the far end of the experiment when it was time to go OUT to the kids’ music class. Our big accomplishment of the day was establishing that underwear is different than a diaper: it’s meant to stay dry. We went through about five pairs during the establishment phase, and now he’s been in the same pair since 2pm. Pretty remarkable. A good day’s work.
And now with supper still on the table, lunches to be made, Fooey tormenting Albus, potty trainer on the loose, AppleApple practicing piano loudly, a huge full-house tidy required this evening … I’m escaping to do 90 minutes of yoga in a steaming hot room. Any wonder such an event feels like a holiday? Sadly, this means Kev is left to swim through the disaster … I have no advice to offer him.
Challenge/Reward
In today’s yoga class, which seemed to catch me feeling more tired than usual, I kept thinking: this sucks and it’s hard. Fortunately, the instructor seemed to catch the vibe (which might have been everyone else’s too, who knows), and asked us to take our thoughts elsewhere if something negative was coming up. So, I changed it to: this is challenging, and it might be rewarding. Not quite thoroughly positive, but all I could muster. And it helped.
This week’s classes have brought out a few Big Thoughts. One, that I always have a little more to give. I always do. I don’t think that I do, I can’t imagine it could be possible, but if asked to give a little more, reach a little further, hold a pose a little longer … it’s there. I can. This is a strengthening metaphor for the whole of my life. The only thing holding me from giving more is my own belief that I’m spent, and that I can’t.
That said, my other Big Thought was that pushing toward my potential is a delicate balance of being compassionate while asking more of myself. Compassion isn’t about letting someone off the hook, it’s about recognizing the frailty and vulnerability and strength in another person. Even if that person is oneself. The more I practice yoga, the more open I become to accepting my weaknesses, and the difference in my practice from session to session. It’s humbling. Some days I feel strong and energetic. Other days it is more of a struggle. And pushing through on the days of struggle leave me with a greater sense of accomplishment afterward, while on my strong days the sense of accomplishment is accessible within the practice itself.
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In other news … CJ has been peeing on his potty with more consistency–and a lot of pride. The other evening, he timed it with dinner and got a hearty standing ovation from his family. I am almost considering hunting in the attic for some toddler-sized underpants, but I’m not sure how quickly to move with that next step, especially since he gets cared for out of the house and by other people more often than the other children did at the same potty-training point. At this point in the training, once the body awareness is there, it’s a pretty big leap to being consistent all day long. It requires an adult with spidey-senses on the alert. Full-time. For at least a week or two. And when training this early, it also requires spare pants in the diaper bag. If he’s ready, I’m ready. No pushing.
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Finally, can I just say … I was pretty disappointed in myself for not enjoying March break more. More precisely, for not enjoying being with my children non-stop during March break more. However, it did make clear that last summer’s writing holiday will not be happening this summer, not unless I crave a nervous breakdown. I’ve become accustomed to having time to pursue my own work. I need it now. Even when it sucks and it’s hard. Because, yes, it is also challenging and potentially rewarding.