Is It Possible?

      Is it possible to have too many thoughts and ideas? I'm really starting to wonder. When Sandy first suggested I try blogging - well the first thought was really to wonder why I would do anything like that since it seemed that boring yet self impressed people wrote blogs that seemed like navel-contemplating drivel that nobody who wasn't as impressed with the blogger as the blogger was with her or himself could possibly be interested in. I have a feeling I just wrote a grammatical nightmare. I think I might be afraid to look. Anyway, back to the question at hand. It does have to do with when I started writing this. I thought it be about textile-related things, and I've hardly mentioned them. The whole idea of windings was that it made me think of yarn being spun. It makes me think of writing as well - how words and thoughts wind themselves around each other and turn into sentences (sometimes incredibly lovely ones) that tell stories - fiction or non-fiction ones. Gosh, that's a gorgeous image.

      Gees. This question is turning out to be a slippery thing. The reason I'm wondering about it is because I seem to have too many. They stop me from writing this. I don't think they'd stop me from writing a big project that required more discipline, but I dropped my serious project after my computer ate six to eight hours of research on a book I still hope to write. I haven't quite been able to make myself get back over to Western to start on that six or eight hours of research again. But, I have so many Ideas I'd like to explore, just for myself, through this medium. I even wrote some of them down, but I don't seem even to get back to them. I seem to become fascinated with a new idea to the point of near paralysis. Do I hear somebody suggesting that there's a diagnosis and a prescription that goes with that? Probably. I haven't even thought about how to write about the trip to California to help Angela with her dissertation. Actually, that's not true. I wrote some pages with a pen on paper, but I didn't even get a good part of it down that way.

      None of this is anywhere near any kind of big problem, but it seems to annoy me and keep me from getting much writing done.

More Poetry.

    Probably my favorite photo of my favorite city. One I wish I'd taken, but Dan Heller at http://www.danheller.com/quito-bw.html did. I still dream of scanning the hundreds I took while there.

     Some more poetry, this time some I wrote myself. My heart longs for Ecuador, Quito's high (according to Wikipedia, the central square is at 2,800 meters. Decidedly high enough to give me a case of altitude sickness after a trip to Otavalo where it's much lower.) I love the parts of South America I've seen. The huge, crumbling stones, the music, the geography, social and political systems, and history. I find it fascinating that liberation theology could come from Central and South America, almost as fascinating as that it could come from the Catholic Church since I think most people would likely not think of that as a source of liberation. 
      And I think so much about the music. That haunting odd sound seems to be wrapped around my soul. Surprising to me since I certainly wasn't raised to appreciate anything like that. Maybe it's just the opposite of the indigenous who were so taken with European music when the Spanish and Portuguese went in to found the missions and search for Eldorado (looks better to me as El dorado, but the computer prefers one word). There's a line in "The Mission" (gets my vote for one of the best movies ever; I highly recommend it.) That says (my paraphrase) that if the Jesuits had gone in with an orchestra, they could have conquered the whole continent. Another great line from that movie, "If might is right, then love has no place in the world." I'm only a bit influenced by the fact that the incomparable Jeremy Irons says it to the nearly as incomparable Robert DeNiro.

“If m

***********************************************************************************************

Quito in the Rain--A Love Song

Bawdy, ferocious, violent, obscene town of

riches, beggars, and thieves.

Come, rain, wash the

smell of machismo

urine into the filthy rivers;

run, try to purify, regenerate

those waters over rocks and

shreds of refuse.

Wet cobblestones glisten, old,

shine with mold from

rain, urine, and tears; watch

children play and work--sell

Quito’s wares--pure wools from

Otavalo and postcards of Galapagos tortoises.

Rain, drench those cobbles and

graffiti of political elections and corruptions.  Knives

flash, slashing into tourists’

hidden dollars and sucres, carried

to trade for Quito’s wealth.

Sun, set on the bustling streets full of vendors,

paupers, thieves, and child laborers.

Set on the violence, the horror, the pious churches

crying for liberation theology--on

            Quito.

 

Otavalo’s Market 26 February 1996

Babies and children suckle as

merchant mothers sell tapestries

woven in colors spewn and

dredged from Otavalo’s earth--

            purples, mauves, rusts,

            siennas, taupes, and grays

or woven bags bearing

birds and fish in screaming

            reds, yellows, and black.

Ten-year-old entrepreneurs

bargain, call me amiga want

me to buy blouses in Joseph’s

            many-colored stripes.

            sweaters knitted from

            pure wools of lamb and alpaca.

Three Indians in a pyramid--as

much a symbol of Ecuador’s

markets as any other flag

bring buyers, shoppers from

all over the world to Otavalo’s

market where a beggar woman, national

costume but with only one eye and

part of her nose, begs incoherently,

begs for sucres, food--from locals

or tourists, carries garbage in a

pail.  I blanch hoping it’s not her

lunch but only a comfortable

companion--something to soothe the

rejection from those who have so

much--even both eyes

and noses intact.

 

Mother Love

            “I have seen death without weeping

              the destiny of the Northeast is death

              Cattle they kill

              To the people they do something worse”

                                                -Anonymous Brazilian singer (1965)

Alto do Cruzeiro, shantytown, dry and hot

summer following Brazil’s military

coup—eery quiet settled over a market

town fractured by the ring of church

bells marking baby’s deaths.  Town of

mothers and daughters pregnant

in tandem, zone of neglect in

the shadow of economic miracle.

Tattered sugar-sacks replaced by store-

bought clothing—modern vestments to cover

tradition of feudalism, exploitation, dependence

on institutions failed.  Shantytown life—reasons

for death innumerable—death the expectation, life

in question, Mothers seem indifferent to

tiny, anticipated deaths—aversion

to life in babies better off dead.  Part of learning how

to mother becomes learning to let go of children who

want to die or who have no taste for life.  Mothers

need emotional detachment from all the

death in order to live—high fertility and high

mortality waltz in a grotesquery of a tail-spinning death

dance.  Babies divided into chronic cases, those

weak and passive, those deathly pale,

with no vital force, barely sucking or

crying.  Acute cases, left alone, die violently after

convulsions, head banging, foaming at the mouth,

stigmatized by relation to epilepsy, madness, and

rabies; tiny, wasted famine victims.  Catholic mothers

understand this as following God’s plan, and children

bury children on Alto de Cruzeiro as tiny processions carry

babies in cardboard coffins provided free to join multitude

others.  Fresh flowers may be scattered on the grave, but

no tears shed, no stone or wooden cross in memorial.

                                                                               Alto do Cruzeiro – Crucifix Hill

********************************************************************************************** 

      And I can't resist sharing some more Neruda:

 Canto XII from The Heights of Macchu Picchu

Arise to birth with me, my brother.
Give me your hand out of the depths
sown by your sorrows.
You will not return from these stone fastnesses.
You will not emerge from subterranean time.
Your rasping voice will not come back,
nor your pierced eyes rise from their sockets.

Look at me from the depths of the earth,
tiller of fields, weaver, reticent shepherd,
groom of totemic guanacos,
mason high on your treacherous scaffolding,
iceman of Andean tears,
jeweler with crushed fingers,
farmer anxious among his seedlings,
potter wasted among his clays--
bring to the cup of this new life
your ancient buried sorrows.
Show me your blood and your furrow;
say to me: here I was scourged
because a gem was dull or because the earth
failed to give up in time its tithe of corn or stone.
Point out to me the rock on which you stumbled,
the wood they used to crucify your body.
Strike the old flints
to kindle ancient lamps, light up the whips
glued to your wounds throughout the centuries
and light the axes gleaming with your blood.

I come to speak for your dead mouths.

Throughout the earth
let dead lips congregate,
out of the depths spin this long night to me
as if I rode at anchor here with you.

And tell me everything, tell chain by chain,
and link by link, and step by step;
sharpen the knives you kept hidden away,
thrust them into my breast, into my hands,
like a torrent of sunbursts,
an Amazon of buried jaguars,
and leave me cry: hours, days and years,
blind ages, stellar centuries.

And give me silence, give me water, hope.

Give me the struggle, the iron, the volcanoes.

Let bodies cling like magnets to my body.

Come quickly to my veins and to my mouth.

Speak through my speech, and through my blood  

maybe at least partly because I heard on the BBC today that the Chilean Communist Party has asked for exhumation of his body because his chauffeur said Neruda had been walking and talking normally on the day of his death then said he'd been given an injection that the chauffeur suspects was lethal. Interesting to me. 

      Guess I hadn't thought about this too much lately, but the Chilean coup seems like such a crucial thing for some reason is the only word that comes to mind. Maybe because I was in Sweden at the time, and that made everything so different and, therefore, so big seeming to me. It feels as if it's part of my history of that time as well. It isn't, maybe; I know that. I wrote a story that took place then and there, and Chileans asked me how much time I'd spent there. I have never been. I'm looking for some way to finish this, but all it does is make thoughts spin more in my head. Jason, for some reason you telling what lists do for you comes to mind, and I see myself making one. Then I wonder why (even this is all just imagistic) I'm using time that way - especially because lists have a different function for me. They become the focus, as if I can use them to keep me from what I really need just to do. 

      Okay. This is starting to feel too amorphous even for me, so I think I'll sign off with feel better quick, Sandy. Being on antibiotics that long would kill me. 

 

Poetry

      I love poetry, and this is my very favorite poem of all that I've ever read. My grandmother (who is totally responsible for my love of and obsession with words and by extension my awe of Pablo Neruda's writing, my desire to learn other languages . . .) gave me part of it that she cut out of a McCalls Magazine in 1973, and I've loved it ever since. I love the bit of humor that keeps it from being too maudlin (isn't that a wonderful word? I think so) or too angry.And just today Darling Mike pointed out how the foot was defeated. Never occurred to me after all the readings. 
      Anyway, I seem to become fonder and fonder of  poetry in general and Neruda's in particular as I get older.  I love the places - both internal and external - that poetry takes me, the way it creates a pace for itself, the way it can meander across a page and pull the reader in or can be stark against a page and demand attention. I'm not one to opt for fewer words when more is a choice, but there's something about thinking in poetry that makes me think differently.      


To the Foot From Its Child

by Pablo Neruda, translated by Jodey Bateman

A child's foot doesn't know it's a foot yet
And it wants to be a butterfly or an apple
But then the rocks and pieces of glass,
the streets, the stairways
and the roads of hard earth
keep teaching the foot that it can't fly,
that it can't be a round fruit on a branch.
Then the child's foot
was defeated, it fell
in battle,
it was a prisoner,
condemned to life in a shoe.

Little by little without light
it got acquainted with the world in its own way
without knowing the other imprisoned foot
exploring life like a blind man.

Those smooth toe nails
of quartz in a bunch,
got harder, they changed into
an opaque substance, into hard horn
and the child's little petals
were crushed, lost their balance,
took the form of a reptile without eyes,
with triangular heads like a worm's.
And they had callused over,
they were covered
with tiny lava fields of death,
a hardening unasked for.
But this blind thing kept going
without surrender, without stopping
hour after hour.
One foot after another,
now as a man,
or a woman,
above,
below,
through the fields, the mines,
the stores, the government bureaus,
backward,
outside, inside,
forward,
this foot worked with its shoes,
it hardly had time
to be naked in love or in sleep
one foot walked, both feet walked
until the whole man stopped.

And then it went down
into the earth and didn't know anything
because there everything was dark,
it didn't know it was no longer a foot
or if they buried it so it could fly
or so it could
be an apple.
     
       One of the coolest compliments I've ever gotten came from a friend who is a wonderful and wonderfully prolific poet who said I should write poetry because I write poetically. Here is what is probably my favorite of her poems:


The Blessing
By: Patricia Jabbeh Wesley
Let your days ahead be sprinkled with laughter and with laughter, peace.
May all you touch spring forth with freshness.
Find time to giggle and dance and jump, and watch the setting of the sun.
When you wake up, wonder out loud about the sun’s rays, about the darkening
of the morning, about the fog over the hills, about your babies down the hall,
about the neighbor and her dog. Wonder at the stars; wonder and wonder why
you are so blessed and why is it you are among those of the earth who have
more than their allotted air for breathing.
Wonder why the cat meows and why the dog wags its tail.
Wonder and wonder why dew falls at night and about the squirrel’s fleeting stare.
Make laughter come alive in your home.
And when you touch someone, let that touch be real, and I mean, real, my friend.
Walk gently on soft ground, and when you walk on a bare rock, step hard, this life is precious.
May your year follow only through a clear path, and please, when you walk, let it be with God, my love, let it be with God.

      And a new favorite. The person who I first heard read "Recuerdo" gave it a history that ties it so close to Kalamazoo that ties it to Kalamazoo, and that makes it even more precious to me. Recuerdo in Spanish is the first person of recordar, to remember. Tom, who I first heard read this, pointed out that recuerdo is also a noun. Then it's a remembrance. I'll have to find somebody to ask if it's the same as memoria or if there's a difference. I don't know why it makes me cry when I read it out loud; maybe only because I find it so beautiful and wonderful and wonder-filled.




 Edna St.Vincent Millay (1892-1951)

                              Recuerdo

    WE were very tired, we were very merry—
    We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
    It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable—
    But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,
    We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon;
    And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.

    We were very tired, we were very merry—
    We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;
    And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,
    From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;
    And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,
    And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.

    We were very tired, we were very merry,
    We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
    We hailed "Good morrow, mother!" to a shawl-covered head,
    And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;
    And she wept, "God bless you!" for the apples and pears,
    And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.

---

Millay was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923.

   The power of poetry astounds me. I'm totally there's no way I could have survived high school without Paul Simon's. It still fills and sustains me now. 

Mowing

Wow. It’s already been way past the amount of time I’d planned for there to be between posts. That seems to be pretty standard for me. Anything that isn’t an emergency will be handled according to my schedule. That seems to work fine as long as it isn’t a project I’m making that I manage to lose parts of while I’m trying to figure out the priorities of whatever I’m trying to schedule. There seems to be a direct tie-in to time and loss.I think it’s largely a matter of not getting the priorities right. And an enormous talent for losing things. This is one of the things I was thinking about this morning while I was mowing. Mowing is a wonderful job. I’m very unlikely to get fired is the first reason that comes to mind. Another is that it’s something I can see I’ve done. Most of what I do consists of what seems like 96 steps. Of these 96 steps, I’m usually lucky to get through the first six. Frustration mounts. Mowing is so different. I pull the cord and ignore the environmental havoc I’m creating. I like to let the grass get deeper than most people probably like it. It’s not laziness; it’s a desire to do something that’s obviously done for awhile without all the steps.

Best of all, mowing encourages thinking. It’s so freeing not to be able to hear a lot of the reality going on around me. That way it can’t get in the way of imagination. Here (in no particular order) is a list of some of the things that kept me mentally occupied while pushing a mower through deep, thick, wet grass yesterday morning. The plan as of now is to develop each of these ideas for further posts. We’ll see how that goes.

Dear friends and how blessed I am in that field

What seems like a major difference between love and like but probably isn’t the one most people think of

Snark snarking snarkiness

How I love it that Facebook gives me the opportunity that I speak fluent sarcasm

How rarely I get to use really good sarcasm

How incredibly beautiful this autumn is

The difference between “good people” and saints

Okay. Now it’s time for me to sleep on it.

       From Sandy, My friend:

 

Giveaway: Pay It Forward

Okay, here are the rules:

1. I  will make a little something for the first 3 people that comment on this post. It will be a surprise and you will not know when it will arrive.

2. I will have 365 days to get this surprise to you. The catch? To get a goodie from me you must play along too! Share the giving love on your blog by promising to send a handmade goody to the first three people comment on your blog post.

3. You must therefore have a blog!

4. After commenting on my post, you have to go post this on your blog.

    

   Come play with us.

Over a Year Ago

Ille Flotant - Bengt, I'm losing my French

Brasserie Ruhlmann

Breakfast Central

Magnolia Bakery

Bryant Park's Carousel

from the Empire State Building

                                                                                                                                   Bengt

 maybe my favorite of all photos

Bengt and Peter

in front of Elise's Plaza

f

from Roosevelt Island

from Roosevelt Island

fBengt's colleague's apartment

 

the poster Peter made for me

 Roosevelt Island 

      It hardly seems possible that it's been over a year since Bengt and Peter, my wonderful friends sent me a bus ticket so I could meet them while they were visiting New York City. I'm a big fan of what might seem like aimless wandering, so the idea of the long bus trip didn't bother me at all. In fact, it was a pleasant thought. I wouldn't have chosen to be in New York City on 11 September, and it worked out that it was a few days after that I got there and met my wonderful friends. I met Bengt in 1972 while he was an exchange student and I was preparing for a year abroad with the same program. We lost touch for way too long. Thanks to the wonders of Facebook (no matter how many silly things Mr. Zuckerberg and Co. do with it, I will be forever in their debt for all the connections and reconnections they've made possible), I was able to track Bengt down. This in itself inspired many happy tears, a pleasant change from the maudlin, missing, won't see him again  tears. I was so excited just by that I would see him again. And I would get to meet Peter who I had only seen briefly via Skype. And, oh gosh, I was going back to New York City for the first time since childhood. I LOVE New York. That Mike couldn't come along and our mobiles didn't seem to connect well were the only down sides.

       And I knew that I love photos, but I'm not at all sure that I knew how much. Don't think I've ever counted how many pictures I took, but I'm sure it's lots. The way there, Bengt and Peter, buildings, food, sidewalks, street signs, flags, Grand Central Station, Roosevelt Island . . . How did anybody survive pre-digital cameras? The idea of being without is almost as bad as the idea of trying to write on a typewriter again. Peter is an enormously talented photographer, and just watching and learning from him was cool. Thanks to him, I aspire to become a Mac cultist. The food was beyond belief. The salads we lingered over at Brasserie Ruhlmann, brunch at Pancake Central where Bengt told me he'd found heaven . . . 

      The weather was perfect. Warm but not at all hot and dry. Sunny. Perfect for pictures for three super tourists. We went as far up the Empire State Building as we could, and it was breathtaking. I guess, Jason, the word geek comes to mind here. I'm just geeky about different things than you are. I'm a city geek. I like subways and crowded streets. Walking through swirls of different languages and music amid masses of concrete and steel and street vendors is what do it best for me. And gosh, can there be anything geekier than being sad that the camera battery dies before you get a picture of the Bleecker Street signpost? Maybe actually hearing Paul and Artie  (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q98pbT-ok3s) singing it (well, since they weren't there, I guess the actually isn't accurate. That might have been memory and a slight case of sleep deprivation playing tricks. But it sure seemed as if I were hearing them) just upon sighting it. And I want to die and come back as somebody who will walk through Washington Square at graduation after wandering through the Tisches to get there.

      None of us could figure out why New Yorkers have the reputation of being cold and rude. The ones we came across were polite and nearly friendly. The taboo about looking people in the eye wasn't in play then, and people smiled a lot. I can see where it could be hard to get to know people anyway. Bengt said Americans are super friendly, and Europeans are snooty. I tend to think people are just people (an odd and very jumbled jumble) but he travels a lot more than I do. 

      Bengt, with the weather flipping from warm to cool to coldish almost minute by minute, the beautiful shawls you gave me are getting plenty of use. I wrap one around me and remember and miss you and Peter. Love you lots.

     

Introduction

With Morgen and Liana

with Brenda, mi querida hermanita

with Becky and Bob Edwards, one of my heroes

at Lake Michigan, one of my favorite places

Kalamazoo Central High School's 2011 graduation. I'm so proud of Brenda, Lupe, and Alejandra

with Mike, the love of my life

Hello,
      I'm Lee Ann, and after recommendation-prodding from some friends, I'm giving blogging a try. Until very recently, blogs irritated me. They seemed like self-indulgent attempts by uninteresting people to make themselves seem more interesting. That's an uncharacteristically unkind way for me to look at things. Besides that not being the way I normally think about things, I think I had just been reading the wrong blogs. Some are exactly what I thought, but I've also found wonderful ones that have expanded my way of looking at things.
        Windings seems like a particularly appropriate title for anything I'm writing now since that seems to be the way my thoughts are going. They want to circle around and loop back onto themselves. I like it for a thought pattern, but it can make it hard to get anything done. I don't get much done. One of the things that happens in regard to my writing is that I do so much internal revision, ie., censorship, that it's a miracle that anything ever gets from my brain through my fingertips, let alone onto paper. While this can be a real hindrance to the writing process, I'm still somewhat glad for the knowledge and love of words and grammar that's underneath it. I do love words and language and am particularly fascinated by translation and what it does to thinking. 
       I thought it was fiction I had the passion to write and have been surprised to find out recently that I LOVE writing non-fiction. Maybe I knew this before, but it didn't come so much to the surface so strongly until I wrote my MA thesis. I love the research process and am now working on putting together a much larger piece that will use a highly edited version of that thesis as a section.
     . I'm pretty political and have worked on several campaigns and participated in a few peace marches on Washington and New York City. I have not been arrested, but since I believe strongly in acting out of conscience, I kind of think I probably will be some day. Am strongly opposed to the death penalty and am mourning the murder of Troy Davis.
       I also knit, crochet, knit, and sew. I read a lot. Some of my favorite writers are Stuart Dybek, Pinckney Benedict, Nelson DeMille, Madeleine L'Engle, Isabel Allende, and Bonnie Jo Campbell. Bonnie doesn't write the kind of stories I'd normally read since I'm very oriented to the urban, but she just writes them so well. She's written sentences that made me cry. One of the things I like best in literature is a well-defined sense of place. I'm also very fond of poetry. Pablo Neruda is my absolute favorite, and I love Violeta Parra, Nicanor Parra, Walt Whitman, Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Stuart Dybek in no particular order. "To the Foot from its Child," though, is my favorite peom of all, and I've recently become incredibly fond of Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Recuerdo." You might notice a strong leaning to the eartthy, the political, the magical real, the urban, and the Latin American here.
      Guess that's it for now. Thanks anybody who stopped by to visit. I'd love to hear from you.