Speaking well of Ford, Orwell, and Toer

Continuing with my embryo tradition of "the gleaning of great mentionables," that is, what I refer to in previous posts as my sharing great quotes and points of view, recollections, musings from the nonstop procession of literary gods and goddesses whom I have been reading, see Feb. 26, I have for you here Richard Ford, George Orwell, and Pramoedya Ananta Toer.

First, from the Indonesian version of Albert Camus, we have Mr. Toer's Child of All Nations.  Below, the narrator reflects on witnessing the sailing away of his young, beloved wife:

     The sun was moving slowly, crawling like a snail, inch by inch across the heavens.  Slowly, slowly--not caring whether the distance it had traversed would ever be traversed again.

     The clouds hung thinly across the sky, unwilling to release even a single spray of drizzle.  The atmosphere was gray, as though the world had lost its multitude of colors.

     The old people teach us through their legends that there isa mighty god called Batara Kala.  They say it is he who makes all things move further and further from their starting point, inexorably, towards some unknown final destination.  A human blind to the future, I could do no more than hope to know.  We never even really understand what we have already lived through.

     People say that before humankind stands only distance.  And its limit is the horizon.  ...There is no romance so strong that it could tame and hold them: the eternal distance and the horizon.

What killed me is the sentence "We never even really understand what we have already lived through."  I just love it.  I'm more than halfway through the novel, the second in his Buru Quartet.  It is not an easy, simple, humane life that Toer writes about, this turn-of-the-century (1901-ish) Dutch-conquered land of the future Indonesia.

From Richard Ford's book of short stories, Rock Springs.  This is a selection from the last story in the book, "Communist."  It's the narrator's response to a question his mother asks, that is, if she is still very feminine, she's 32, but she needs his truthful approval.

     And I stood at the edge of the porch, with the olive trees before me, looking straight up into the mist where I could not see geese but could still hear them flying, could almost feel the air move below their white wings.  And I felt the way you feel when you are on a trestle all alone and the train is coming, and you know you have to decide.  And I said, "Yes, I do."  Because that was the truth.  And I tried to think of something else then and did not hear what my mother said after that.

     And how old was I then? Sixteen. Sixteen is young, but it can also be a grown man.  I am forty-one years old now, and I think about that time without regret, through my mother and I never talked in that way again, and I have not heard her voice now in a long, long time.

What wrested my heart was the mention of the geese, that he "...could still hear them flying, could almost feel the air move below their white wings."  I've heard them, the mammoth glides of geese in their v-formations in Colorado, not just their honking but their wings.  And my sister Robyn has felt the air displaced, while walking or working in her garden, by the thousands that have flown overhead, east and west, constantly.  So it really resonated with me.  I highly recommend Rock Springs.

From George Orwell, in a piece he wrote toward the end of the war in Europe, from As I Please: Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters:

     So long as one thinks in short periods it is wise not to be hopeful about the future.  Plans for human betterment do normally come unstuck, and the pessimist has many more opportunities of saying "I told you so" than the optimist.  By and large the prophets of doom have been righter than those who imagined that a real step forward would be achieved by universal education, female suffrage, the League of Nations, or what not.

     The real answer is to dissociate Socialism from Utopianism.  Socialists are accused of believing that society can be--and indeed, after the establishment of Socialism, will be--completely perfect; also that progress is inevitable.

     ....Socialism is not perfectionist, perhaps not even hedonistic.  Socialists don't claim to be able to make the world perfect: they claim to be able to make it better.  And any thinking socialist will concede to the Catholic that when economic injustice has been righted, the fundamental problem of man's place in the universe will still remain.

I loved this little bit.  I have many socialist tendencies, and I know sometimes everyone goes too far somewhere, but like Orwell says, they "claim to be able to make it better" not perfect.  And that I adhere to.  I also loved the little bit about pessimism.

Well, thanks for listening, and leave the light on for me, will you?

Speaking Well of Muriel Spark and Glenn Gould

A fabulous by-product of reading biographies is the gleaning of great mentionables, great quotes and points of view or recollections that though not yours you get to claim in a way because you've read the book, you've "done the work," at least, in some fashion.  No? Yes?

What's the point of reading a book if you can't revel in it, if you can't praise it and talk about it to the point of exhaustion, that is, when appropriate?  I just finished Jasper Fforde's early novel, The Eyre Affair, and posted the cover and my gushing about it on Instagram.  It's what one does! Yes? No? And during my sojourn in Colorado, if I was going to be awake until the wee hours of the morning because of pain medications and my broken ankle and shattered shin, I might as well (and I did) use those hours to good advantage by taking delight in Horace Afoot by Frederick Reuss, Brazzaville Beach by William Boyd, The Square by Marguerite Duras, The River Between by James Ngugi, and A German Requiem by Philip Kerr.

So, preamble aside, let me boast the renowned Canadian classical pianist, Glenn Gould (1932-1982).  The 1989 biography by Otto Friedrich was a fascinating experience, to say the least.  For instance--

    “I’ve always had some sort of intuition,” Gould once said, “that for every hour you spend in the company of other human beings you need X number of hours alone.  …isolation is the indispensable component of human happiness.”

I love that.  Then there's this recollection of Leonard Bernstein's, as per Friedrich--

    Glenn Gould’s The Goldberg Variations had appeared when Bernstein's wife, Felicia, was pregnant with their first son. While she had to wait out the last month during a New York heat wave, that record became their “song.”
    Yet Bernstein's most vivid personal memory of the young Gould came slightly later, when they were preparing to record the Beethoven C minor Concerto, and Bernstein invited the pianist to dinner at his place in the Osborne apartment house, just across from Carnegie Hall.
    “He was all bundled up,” Bernstein recalled, sipping on his Scotch and soda and taking another cigarette from his silver cigarette box, “and he had an astrakhan hat over some other kind of cap, doubly hatted, doubly mittened, and endlessly muffled and muffiered. And Felicia said, ‘Aren’t you going to take your hat oft?’ He said, ‘No, no, that’s all right, I’ll keep it on.’
    “A few minutes later, she asked me, in an aside over drinks, whether this was a religious matter with him, and I said ‘As far as I know, it isn’t!’ So she brought it up again to him and said, ‘Really, I think you ought to take your hat off, if you don’t have any reason for having it on, because it’s very warm.’
    “And you know, he did. And when he had taken his hat off, Felicia said, ‘But this is impossible!’ I mean, he had--this was a mat of hair, soaking wet, and just unnourished, and no air. It was hair that hadn’t breathed in God knows how long. And while I was fixing drinks or something, she lured him into the bathroom, sat him down at a stool and cut his hair. And washed it, and combed it. And he came out looking like some kind of archangel, radiant, with this beautiful hair which one had never seen the color of, quite blond, and thinning, haloed-ish. It was really a very beautiful thing to see, what she did, his acceptance, equally beautiful, and the result, which was thrillingly beautiful.”

And then let me boast a quote or two from the Scottish novelist Muriel Spark (1918-2006)--

"…[it is] the moment of illumination which every artist experiences at one time, a kinship with that primitive order of religious revelation.  That is the paradox of inspiration--the incredible and the impossible are felt to be present and therefore (for what is more actual than what we feel?) are credible and possible.  If such an experience, a mystical revelation, is “unutterable,” if the inspiration itself cannot be conveyed, the work of art which is its flower will probably spring where the seed is sown.  The poem will have an organic connection with its physical origin, and the pattern of events and their movement at the visionary instant will be translated symbolically until in the end the work itself becomes the real thing and the events the symbols of it."

Well, that got me.  Then, from her biographer, Martin Stannard, this piece--

"...her poem “Chrysalis” describes how she and Derek Stanford had, one London winter, placed a chrysalis in a matchbox and “in cold spring” been at first puzzled to discover a butterfly in their room. The reader is invited to celebrate release, transformation. Muriel, or Muriel’s spirit, is figured as “the pretty creature” emerging from the hard “broken shell,” “whispering about the curtain,” and then out of the window, away from the “small violence.”

It's the "small violence" that really moved me.

                        

Bibliography:

Stannard, Martin. Muriel Spark: The Biography, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010.

Friedrich, Otto.  Glenn Gould: A Life and Variations, New York: Random House, 1989.

During a snowfall, looking out at my sister's backyard.

How I Spent My Winter Holiday With a Fractured Ankle and Broken Shin Bone

December 23, 2021. My sister Robyn and her son, Kenji, and myself.  A trip to the "Flatirons," part of Green Mountain, in the Colorado Front Range of the Rockies, above Boulder, Colo.* 

In the words of a very funny and annoying TV character, "On my behalf," I didn't know we were actually going hiking, and so just wore my sneakers.  At 3:00 pm, I texted Joe Savino my whereabouts, as we'd climbed to 7,000 feet.  I was exhausted needless to say.  "Take it easy," said Joe, "stop if you begin to lose your breath.  This is a 'no hero' holiday!" His words as true as they were I heeded, but...

By 3:46 pm we'd made it to the top of the Flatirons.  We rested, looked around at the gullies and preponderance of trees, Kenji explained why we can populate Mars within his lifetime.  I was skeptical.  Knowing how we've had trouble landing on Mars with robotic ships, sending humans into space for years with no technology to get them back is a huge problem.

Kenji explaining

At 4:37 pm, Robyn texted Joe that I had slipped and hurt my ankle.  "[The] Team is coming up, everything is okay."  Like what would that mean?  The Team?  It was the Rocky Mountain Rescue Group (RMRG), based in Boulder, Colo.  It was impossible for me to stand let alone walk down the mountain.

At left, a photo taken by Robyn just after she got me to sit up and away from the sliding dirt and stones and pine needles.  I'd already had two brushes with fainting, and I'm as pale as a ghost.  Pathetic man, waiting for the cavalry.

Just after sunset, the RMRG, numbering about 17 professionals (from ER doctors, fire fighters to EMS techs, nurses) showed up with a stretcher, blanket, inflatable caste, and ropes. 

They subsequently escorted Robyn and Kenji down the mountain ahead of me so as to enable them to utilize the trail as best as could be expected since it was dark.

I was strapped into the stretcher, helmet placed on my head, covered in an orange blanket with two mountaineers on either side of the stretcher, two in the front, and one in the back; supported by others "behind the scene" with rope tied around boulders and thick tree trunks; they lifted and began to transport me down between the first and second hammers of the Flatirons.  

It was phenomenal the way they managed, between slipping and losing traction among the bushes and huge rocks, but I was never dropped; at times I was suspended at a right angles, but never felt in danger of displacement.  My view was continuously the night sky and branches and twigs from trees we "flew" through. The downhill trip lasted about two hours; my rescuers Dan, Mike, Trixie, Ashley, Carissa, Josh, among others brought me safely to the ground.  They transposed the stretcher upon a one-wheel mechanism and rolled me along the mountain's bottom, packed dirt, and rock to the waiting ambulance and other emergency vehicles.  And of course Robyn and Kenji.

                                                                            Epilogue

Yeah, yeah, so it's just one more life-changing event: multiple fractures in the ankle, multiple breaks in the tibia or fibula, whatever the shin bone's called.  "You ain't goin' nowhere," said my foot to my already altitude-sick brain.  Crutches.  Nonambulatory.  No cooking and drinking heartily like I promised Robyn and her husband Shane.  No investigating the goods offered by the Great State of Colorado.  But my friends and family came to the rescue, you see.  Aside from keeping me safe and warm and well-fed in freezing Erie, Colorado, Robyn and Shane took great care of me.  No end of good, interesting conversations and catchings up on our segmented, geographically and age-distanced growing up; gaps were filled in; revelations were mystified and laughed about; I lost 37 games of backgammon to Robyn; and then a few visits from my nephews added to a memorable and loving winter holiday.

And I was regaled with boxes of cookies and crossword puzzles from Theresa's sister Linda in New Jersey; a cheese cake from Junior's in Brooklyn, N.Y., sent by the archangel Joseph Centrone; post-trauma cushions and handy medical pants and a warm comfy sweater from sweet Lisa Strong in Culver City; donuts and brownies were sent by my Santa Monica peeps (Theresa & Joe) from Delicious Orchards in New Jersey; and my semi-retired self received a lovely batch of goods from my semi-former workplace, Extraordinary Families.

As of this posting, I've had two surgeries, hopped all over my sister Robyn's house, at times butt-crawling down the stairs and along the shiny wooden floors (see! I'm not ashamed) and finally made it back to Santa Monica, Calif., on Feb. 7th, and "am awaiting sentencing" and x-rays by my local orthopedist, and the prelude to physical therapy.  I have a knee scooter and still need crutches to get around.  My exasperation is continually countered by Joe's quoting: "Some day this war's gonna end."**

From left: Kenji and Robyn; a view from outside Robyn's home; Robyn and me before
 the ascent up the Flatirons. 

(*) The Flatirons (a/k/a Chattauqua Slabs) consist of conglomeratic sandstone of the Fountain Formation. Geologists estimate the age of these rocks as 290 to 296 million years; they were lifted and tilted into their present orientation between 35 and 80 million years ago, during the Laramide Orogeny. The Flatirons were subsequently exposed by erosion. Other manifestations of the Fountain Formation can be found in many places along the Colorado Front Range.

(**) From Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now," spoken by the character Colonel Kilgore.