M.E. Breen

December blog = bad magpie. I’ve spotted a hundred beauties, absurdities, ironies, mysteries, and even picked up a few, but none of them made it back to the nest. December is an errand-heavy month, and nothing makes squash of ideas like errands. Today was like this: teeth, laundry, windex, coffee, email, straighten, litter, library, chiro, bank, Rx, sandwich, vacuum, laundry, broccoli, baby socks, dog, trash, dishwasher, tea, mailbox, rice bowl, computer, Pulp, pack.

But in between straighten and litter, something really great happened.

A long time ago I found an insect fossil on the beach. I’ve found a few of these over the years, with waxy bits of wing or abdomen visible, and they are all cool, but this one was amazing: a pale gray stone, a black thorax and all four wings stretched out, and so perfect you could make out the membranes on the wings, and the thing is trapped in a web, and the web is trapped in the rock.

I brought it home and kept staring at it. I made J and my mom look at it about ten times each. And then I lost it. I searched for days. I did that stupid thing where you feel a loss so much you think it couldn’t have just happened, there must have been an actor, and I blamed the cat, and also, though I didn’t say it aloud, decided a thief must have broken in and taken my fossil instead of the computer.

Almost two years passed. I still thought about the fossil. I decided I was remembering it as being more awesome than it was. And then I found a second almost perfect one, a sort of negative to the image of the one I’d lost. It had a light body and tattered wings caught in a dark rock. I decided I shouldn’t hold onto things so much, especially things I had stolen from nature, so I gave it to my niece.

We have house-sitters coming, people I haven’t met, and I wanted to do what I could for them about the dog chair. I sort of fluffed and punched pillows and sniffed but not too deep, and then I thought, what the heck, I’ll vacuum under the seat cushion. And there, amid the kibbles and coins and drifts of sand and unspeakable crystals of cat litter — there it was! My pale fossil! My lost beauty! My sign to let go but not forget, and to have faith in memory and imagination, because it was every bit as splendid as I remembered.

I’m actually not packed, though Pulp is playing, and the plane leaves plenty early, and the dog’s best outfit is wrinkled. So I bid you goodnight, and good holiday, and good year, dear magpies, dear fossils. See you in 2011!

I’ve been reading Adam Phillips’ book On Balance.  I started reading near the end, which I almost never do, because near the end happened to be the chapter on fairy tales. Reading that chapter was like eating bacon. All the ideas were distinct and tasty and salty and kind of obvious, in the way that sometimes complicated ideas expressed very, very clearly can seem obvious. But that was last night. Today the bacon has turned back into the pig. A greased pig, no less, at the county fair. Ha! Pig revenge. I can’t keep hold of any of it.

Instead I keep thinking about the very last section of the book, after the fairy tale chapter, titled “Forsaken Favourites.” It’s about falling out of love with writing you loved when you were younger, and how when you go back and read the thing you loved and realize it isn’t all that good, that you are too good for it, there follows this awful feeling of having been had. You feel defensive of your poor, passionate young self who didn’t know any better. For Phillips, the great betrayer is Dylan Thomas.

“It is as though, in retrospect, I would like to have been more foolproof, a terrible thing to want. Clearly, we can never trust ourselves, we can only risk ourselves. Our disillusionments must be the key to our tastes. The mystery is why such vehement unmaskings are required. Why we can’t just move on. Hopefully, what we learn from our mistakes is that we shall go on making them.”

And then I turned the page, anxious to know why I can’t recover from the embarrassment of making my mom listen while I read Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” aloud five times in a row in our hotel room in Dublin in 1992.

But that was it! That was the last line of the book! There were a few pages of acknowledgments and what-not at the very end, so you couldn’t tell, page-wise, that that was going to be the last line. And then I thought, he did that on purpose! He wanted the reader to end on a mistake, and then go on.

That’s okay with me. I like that sort of thing. I also like to have someone smart endorse my mistakes, or at least my mistake-making. The experience he describes, though, the falling out of love, the discovery that “virtually everything I valued [about Thomas] as an adolescent . . . annoys or bores me now,” — to me this isn’t just one of the many adult corrections to teen fixations. To me this happens all the time, every day, about all sorts of things. One moment I’ll take pleasure in something and the very next moment I’ll be disappointed by it. It’s like a hyper-compressed form of maturation. Sometimes, like when I’m watching Glee, I’m pleased and disappointed at the exact same time.

I don’t think this is about my adult self schooling my inner tween/teen/twenty-something, and I don’t think it’s about guilty pleasures. I think it’s about death. It’s about the thing you love changing before your very eyes. So when I watch Glee, my pleasure/disappointment is two-fold:

1) I know I’m enjoying something more than the thing actually merits, which is to say, my enjoyment is partial, but I’m willing myself not to be critical in order to enjoy more fully, which is sour-sweet, and 2) the thing I am sourly-sweetly enjoying is hurtling toward the end of its forty-fifth minute. The thing I love is running out.

When I look at the cats sleeping in their bunk beds (one draped over the back of the armchair, one on the seat) I feel pleasure. They look cute, etc. But then I lean in to scratch Big Orange under the chin, and he meows, or yawns, and I smell his breath like unto a thousand graves, and my pleasure disappears. I know his teeth are bad, and that he’s getting old, and that he’ll die, and then I start to notice all the other fragile unkempt uncute things about him.

But it’s not the cat’s (and by extension my own) mortality that ruins my pleasure. It’s my impatience. I disturbed the scene. In my hurry to connect, to have him respond to me, to be even more cute, to be more so I could have more, I transformed peace into worry. It’s like I can’t stand for something just to sit. I can’t bear to wait, even when the thing I’m waiting for I want never to come. I am running out the thing I love!

Which, ok, returns us to mortality. Phillips says that sometimes we find a person so appalling the only thing we know how to do is fall in love with them. Later we fall out of love with them because, hey! They’re appalling! You can float the comforting illusion that the person changed, you both changed, etc., when really you only returned, bravely or wearily, to the original truth. But when it is a book you stop loving, there can be no question about what changed. Only you have changed.  The book is a mirror, but also a monument. It sits there, year after year, and you return to it and say, what was I? Who was I, to have loved you? Still, the book endures, and even with the end of your attachment, even with that crummy sense of having been taken in by someone you trusted, the book’s very durability becomes a reflection of your own durability, and not just your durability, but your progress, your refinement, your excellent, excellent taste.

But the old cat, the old cat you loved as a kitten, and in his fat middle-age, and now in his dotage, the cat who showed you how constant you were, how steady your love, how immune to his increasing demands and bad temper — when he dies, when he runs out, then the younger self, the self of passionate, misguided, appalling and appalled love, who had bad taste, who risked her heart, is embraced, without the slightest disillusionment, by the current self, who, with the very same heart, loves so wisely and so well.

Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,
Out of the mocking-bird's throat, the musical shuttle,
Out of the Ninth-month midnight,
Over the sterile sands and the fields beyond, where the child
   leaving his bed wander'd alone, bareheaded, barefoot,
Down from the shower'd halo,
Up from the mystic play of shadows twining and twisting as
   if they were alive,
Out from the patches of briers and blackberries,
From the memories of the bird that chanted to me,
From your memories sad brother, from the fitful risings and
   fallings I heard,
From under that yellow half-moon late-risen and swollen as
   if with tears,
From those beginning notes of yearning and love there in
   the mist,
From the thousand responses of my heart never to cease,
From the myriad thence-arous'd words,
From the word stronger and more delicious than any,
From such as now they start the scene revisiting,
As a flock, twittering, rising, or overhead passing,
Borne hither, ere all eludes me, hurriedly,
A man, yet by these tears a little boy again,
Throwing myself on the sand, confronting the waves,
I, chanter of pains and joys, uniter of here and hereafter,
Taking all hints to use them, but swiftly leaping beyond them,
A reminiscence sing.

Once Paumanok,
When the lilac-scent was in the air and Fifth-month grass
   was growing,
Up this seashore in some briers,
Two feather'd guests from Alabama, two together,
And their nest, and four light-green eggs spotted with brown,
And every day the he-bird to and fro near at hand,
And every day the she-bird crouch'd on her nest, silent, with
   bright eyes,
And every day I, a curious boy, never too close, never
   disturbing them,
Cautiously peering, absorbing, translating.

Shine! shine! shine!
Pour down your warmth, great sun!
While we bask, we two together.

Two together!
Winds blow south, or winds blow north,
Day come white, or niqht come black,
Home, or rivers and mountains from home,
Singing all time, minding no time,
While we two keep together.

Till of a sudden,
May-be kill'd, unknown to her mate,
One forenoon the she-bird crouch'd not on the nest,
Nor return'd that afternoon, nor the next,
Nor ever appear'd again.

And thenceforward all summer in the sound of the sea,
And at night under the full of the moon in calmer weather,
Over the hoarse surging of the sea,
Or flitting from brier to brier by day,
I saw, I heard at intervals the remaining one, the he-bird,
The solitary guest from Alabama.

Blow! blow! blow!
Blow up sea-winds along Paumanok's shore;
I wait and I wait till you blow my mate to me.

Yes, when the stars glisten'd,
All night long on the prong of a moss-scallop'd stake,
Down almost amid the slapping waves,
Sat the lone singer wonderful causing tears.

He call'd on his mate,
He pour'd forth the meanings which I of all men know.
Yes my brother I know,
The rest might not, but I have treasur'd every note,
For more than once dimly down to the beach gliding,
Silent, avoiding the moonbeams, blending myself with the
   shadows,
Recalling now the obscure shapes, the echoes, the sounds
   and sights after their sorts,
The white arms out in the breakers tirelessly tossing,
I, with bare feet, a child, the wind wafting my hair,
Listen'd long and long.

Listen'd to keep, to sing, now translating the notes,
Following you my brother.

Soothe! soothe! soothe!
Close on its wave soothes the wave behind,
And again another behind embracing and lapping, every one close,
But my love soothes not me, not me.	

Low hangs the moon, it rose late,
It is lagging--O I think it is heavy with love, with love.

O madly the sea pushes upon the land,
With love, with love. 

O night! do I not see my love fluttering out among the breakers?
What is that little black thing I see there in the white?

Loud! loud! loud!
Loud I call to you, my love!

Hiqh and clear I shoot my voice over the waves,
Surely you must know who is here, is here,
You must know who I am, my love.

Low-hanging moon!
What is that dusky spot in your brown yellow?
O it is the shape, the shape of my mate!
O moon do not keep her from me any longer.

Land! land! O land!
Whichever way I turn, 0 I think you could give me my mate
   back again if you only would,
For I am almost sure I see her dimly whichever way I look.

O rising stars!
Perhaps the one I want so much will rise, will rise with some of you.

O throat! 0 trembling throat!
Sound clearer through the atmosphere!
Pierce the woods, the earth,
Somewhere listening to catch you must be the one I want.

Shake out carols!
Solitary here, the niqht's carols!
Carols of lonesome love! death's carols!
Carols under that lagging, yellow, waning moon!
O under that moon where she droops almost down into the sea!
O reckless despairing carols.

But soft! sink low!
Soft! let me just murmur,
And do you wait a moment you husky-nois'd sea,
For somewhere I believe I heard my mate responding to me,
So faint, I must be still, be still to listen,
But not altogether still, for then she miqht not come immediately
   to me.

Hither my love!
Here I am! here!
With this just-sustain'd note I announce myself to you,
This gentle call is for you my love, for you.

Do not be decoy'd elsewhere,
That is the whistle of the wind, it is not my voice,
That is the fluttering, the fluttering of the spray,
Those are the shadows of leaves.

O darkness! 0 in vain!
0 I am very sick and sorrowful.
O brown halo in the sky near the moon, drooping upon the sea!
O troubled reflection in the sea!
O throat! 0 throbbing heart!
And I singing uselessly, uselessly all the niqht.	

0 past! 0 happy life! 0 songs of joy!
In the air, in the woods, over fields,
Loved! loved! loved! loved! loved!
But my mate no more, no more with me!
We two together no more.

The aria sinking,
All else continuing, the stars shining,
The winds blowing, the notes of the bird continuous echoing,
With angry moans the fierce old mother incessantly moaning,
On the sands of Paumanok's shore gray and rustling,
The yellow half-moon enlarged, sagging down, drooping,
   the face of the sea almost touching,
The boy ecstatic, with his bare feet the waves, with his hair
   the atmosphere dallying,
The love in the heart long pent, now loose, now at last
   tumultuously bursting,
The aria's meaning, the ears, the soul, swiftly depositing,
The strange tears down the cheeks coursing,
The colloquy there, the trio, each uttering,
The undertone, the savage old mother incessantly crying,
To the boy's soul's questions sullenly timing, some drown'd
   secret hissing,
To the outsetting bard.

Demon or bird! (said the boy's soul,)
Is it indeed toward your mate you sing? or is it really to me?
For I, that was a child, my tongue's use sleeping, now I
   have heard you,
Now in a moment I know what I am for, I awake,
And already a thousand singers, a thousand songs, clearer,
   louder and more sorrowful than yours,
A thousand warbling echoes have started to life within me,
   never to die.
O you singer solitary, singing by yourself, projecting me,
O solitary me listening, never more shall I cease
   perpetuating you,
Never more shall I escape, never more the reverberations,
Never more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent from me,
Never again leave me to be the peaceful child I was before
   what there in the night,
By the sea under the yellow and sagging moon,
The messenger there arous'd, the fire, the sweet hell within,
The unknown want, the destiny of me.

O give me the clew! (it lurks in the night here somewhere,)
O if I am to have so much, let me have more!

A word then, (for I will conquer it,)
The word final, superior to all,
Subtle, sent up--what is it?--I listen;
Are you whispering it, and have been all the time, you sea-
   waves?
Is that it from your liquid rims and wet sands?

Whereto answering, the sea,
Delaying not, hurrying not,
Whisper'd me through the night, and very plainly before
   daybreak,
Lisp'd to me the low and delicious word death,
And again death, death, death, death,
Hissing melodious, neither like the bird nor like my arous'd
   child's heart,
But edging near as privately for me rustling at my feet,
Creeping thence steadily up to my ears and laving me softly
   all over,
Death, death, death, death, death.

Which I do not forget,
But fuse the song of my dusky demon and brother,
That he sang to me in the moonlight on Paumanok's gray
   beach,
With the thousand responsive songs at random,
My own songs awaked from that hour,
And with them the key, the word up from the waves,
The word of the sweetest song and all songs,
That strong and delicious word which, creeping to my feet,
(Or like some old crone rocking the cradle, swathed in sweet
   garments, bending aside,)
The sea whisper'd me.

-Walt Whitman

I have been to Cloud’s Rest. Today a strong wind is blowing off the water, and I’d like to say the wind lifted me off the living room floor, carried me fourteen blocks and set me down on the green carpet amid the blond wood furniture and the fountain sounds and the tissue boxes. In a way the wind did carry me, because today something of extraordinary difficulty suddenly became easy. Or as they say at Cloud’s Rest, We do what we can, when we can.

The situation: I have a bad back. Probably this has something to do with rowing. Being a rower is sort of like being a human can opener. Your legs are the force, and your torso is the lever, and your arms are hooks, and the oar is the metal loop thingy, and the water is the top of the can, and you pry, pry, pry, with every stroke. (Ok, that was pretty bad. Just watch the big twins in The Social Network.)

Anyway, the torso-lever needs to be strong so it doesn’t collapse into lactic embryo position in the second half of the race. To keep it strong, our coach had us do this exercise circuit called the Iron Girdle. Or maybe the Iron Corset. Anyway, it had a medieval and wicked sounding name and it did not produce the kind of smoothacious abs you see on the cover of Self magazine. These were mighty, mighty abs, and we were mighty ab-havers. I want to say we were the human versions of Zenyatta, but a) that would imply we won a lot and b) I just looked at some pictures of her and they make me want to cry. I have lots of thoughts on Zenyatta, maybe for another post.

Anyway! The problem with the iron girdle is you can’t take it off, and if you don’t continue to do fifteen varieties of crunches x 1000 reps x three days per week it just sort of shrinks and softens until you are left with ol’ bandy waist. And then the little vertebra who were used to being so firmly yet gently held, so well parented, by the back and abs, go squoosh, and you start to walk around all monkey-arms-droop-chin, and then you get a bulging disk.

This disk of mine, this pal, this traitor, this poor soul, this derelict, this criminal, this orphan, has been bulging for about ten years. Most of the time if I walk a lot and do my dead bug exercises (lie on back, flail limbs) I’m ok, but lately, not ok. Lately much wallowing in the twin dark pools of pain and self-pity. And, for the longest time, I would not go see a doctor.

Here’s why, I think. While this pain is most certainly happening in my spine, it does not feel like part of me.  I feel bedeviled by it. I mean, I buy the whole abs-turned-to-suet medical narrative, but what my superstitious heart suspects is that this is an evil visitation– not a punishment, but a test. The demon has landed on me, and if I wait long enough, if I endure, it will fly away again.

But why not fight? What if the demon is laughing and rubbing his leathery hands together because I thought they also serve who only stand and wait, but they totally don’t! They get served!

So I took up arms. I called the doctor. I called the nurse. I called the lady with the alligator purse. And today I went to Cloud’s Rest Healing Center. My top general is tiny and gentle and wears beads and soft purple fabrics, but she did shoot some kind of laser into my back and tapped me with some kind of wooden mallet. These, and her hands, seem like the right weapons to drive the demon out. It all seemed like magic.

But here’s the real reason to go to the doctor, whatever kind you choose: the doctor sees other people just like you, all day long. Stuck at home on my back, I’d started to take on the pattern of the rug. The pets stepped on me and over me. They did private pet things in front of me they don’t usually do. It was like I wasn’t there, but I was there!

Cloud’s Rest restored my authority (ok to fight!) and my humanity (ok to suffer). The whole place is designed to treat people with exactly my problem. All the plants and the fountain and the foam rollers and the cushioned benches — all for us! The clean old carpet, the crumpled paper cups. That place has been there since the 80′s. There aren’t enough demons in hell.

Of all my faults, dithering is the greatest. Morality-wise, envy is worse, as is excessive self-regard (popularity-wise), but the fault that makes me gnash my teeth and tear my hair is dithering.

Take today, for instance. The Giants are having a victory parade downtown for winning the World Series. I grew up in Berkeley, across the Bay, and as a kid I went with my mom and my sister to a lot of Oakland A’s games. The library gave out tickets as part of an ongoing reading contest and my sister read approx. one billion books per week. I pulled my weight in the Encyclopedia Brown and Animals Do the Strangest Things categories.

But I’ve been to my share of Giants games, too.  I brought my down sleeping bag to Candlestick Park and tried to hop all the way from the stands to the parking lot, like every other kid. I’ve eaten garlic fries at the new park. I like the Giants. I like professional sports in general, though I don’t like The Franchise, and the two can be hard to separate. Whenever a player appears who is too wholesome, shy, homely, devout, profane or weird to be fully commercialized, I get excited. That’s part of why I like the World Cup and the Olympics so much. The athletes seem more human, less brand, and the stakes (national pride! centuries of mutual loathing! ) are legit.

But back to the Giants. This team boasts some truly eccentric and awkward dudes, and the fans are beside themselves. I find their energy and sincerity and diversity moving. Once I got the hang of listening to games on the radio, I really dug it, and when the Giants won Game Five I ran downstairs and watched with my neighbor while the TV camera showed each player’s response to the win. I thought with a happy pang of my rowing days and how it felt to win a big race. My neighbor and I hugged and grinned. The dogs took the firecrackers and whoops and honks in stride.

So the question today was, Do I go to the parade?

Points in favor:
Happy fans
Little kids in sports gear
Feeling part of something
Unlikelihood of another such parade in my hometown any time soon
I want to see that guy with the beard and the 188 IQ

Points against:
I hate crowds
Little kids in sports gear
What if I have to wait forever to get a train home?
The only orange shirt available to me has a Detroit Tigers logo on it

Really these points were part of the great dithermash in my brain that went something like this:

I want to go so I can say I did something. I want to be part of the world instead of just an observer. But wouldn’t you be observing even if you went? Is being a fan fundamentally passive or active? Will you even remember it if you go? Will the kids whose parents take them remember? Do we do things only so we can remember them later? If I went and remembered, would the person I remembered be real, or just a con my present self is trying to pull on my future self? Am I a watcher passing myself off as a doer? Are the parents pulling the same con on their kids? Are these things ever fun or do we go as a sort of investment in the future, so we’re sure we have things to remember and know we didn’t waste our life? Doesn’t professional sports market exactly this form of nostalgia, along with Giants onesies? So am I a dupe? Am I a misanthrope? Are we all trying to meddle with the past before it is the past, making it happier or neater or clearer than it is/was? Do the marketers know this? Don Draper knows this. What kind of a person thinks about this stuff instead of just getting on the train? What kind of person stays home and writes about thinking about going instead of going? If I hate crowds is that lame? If I’m worried my back will hurt from all the standing around is that superlame? Would it be poserish to go since I’m not really a fan? Would the right shirt make me a fan? Or can I go because I love my city, most of the time? Will I feel lonely if I go? Will I feel lonely if I stay? I don’t really want to go. I want to go! No, you want to say you went. You want to tell a story about your life that is different from your life. Do I wish my story had a different protagonist? How is enacting all that by getting on the train different or better than sitting at home and writing about it? Is physical activity superior to mental activity? Is that why we love sports? Because they do stuff and we think about doing stuff?  Who are you trying to impress? Why does it feel like a failure not to go? At what am I failing, precisely? If this is something for other people to do, why is that? Why am I not that person? Why is my neighbor not that person either? Do I want to be that person? Clearly I wonder about her. But curiosity is not the same as desire. Is curiosity the opposite of commitment?

I never made a decision. I just knocked around until it was too late and the car with Willie Mays in it had already gone by.

But here’s the coda: by writing about it, I recovered from it. For better or worse, this is the record I kept.  The wrong orange shirt, the right record.