Like so many places, Washington D.C. is at its best in the rain. A cool, heavy smell of humidity pervades the whole city on a rainy day. I can almost taste the flavor of the wet pavement, the brick buildings and the damp trees. In the rain, I remember how much this city is one of gardens, each front step crowded by flowers hanging from thin stems and weighted by droplets. I'm sure not everyone would agree with my ideas on rain. But I like the way it staves off the thick heat. I like the way the young professionals crowd under the awning at the Trio Fox and Hound, drinking and talking, still dressed up from work.
Last night, I walked home in the faint drizzle and encountered a rat. He looked quite unconcerned, nosing about in someone's front garden in a particularly weedy patch behind a low cast-iron fence. When he noticed me looking, he quickened his pace just a bit, hurrying into a patch of shrubs, then tracking his way along a beaten path through the long grass that must have felt his exploring feet many times. His rear humped up behind him in typical rat fashion and his tail balanced him as he walked, a picture I've seen many times - my pet rat, Nutmeg, some years ago now, shared all the same mannerisms. I've never seen a city rat quite so close up before. Eventually he escaped my prying eyes and vanished into his narrow rat world.
And today, in the continuing damp, I sat with a coworker and two area science writers at the aforementioned Fox and Hound. A pleasant evening, all round. Our conversation revolved around science writing, as is natural, and politics, of course. We're in D.C., after all.
With all the politics surrounding me here in the consummately political capital of the U.S., I sometimes think about the personal nature of this blog and, in fact, most of my writing. Should I involve myself, more than I do in my day to day work, in the roiling political conversation that's ongoing on the streets, in the newspapers and, most of all, on the internet? In many ways I can't avoid it, nor would I want to.
But I rather liked what Tony Kushner wrote about Arthur Miller this month in The Nation: "He felt his successes and failures as a human being were consequential to something greater than himself, and so they were publicly examined and, in a sense, worth talking about. He wasn't certain that a single individual has relevance to our collective survival, but he saw no other question worth pursuing.
...Arthur focused his critical gaze... within the arena of an individual consciousness, in an important sense his own individual consciousness."
The rat in the rain. There's something admirable about its sense of self, that total independence of endeavor.
Saturday, June 04, 2005
Wednesday, April 06, 2005
Tribute
Someone I thought I'd meet someday.
Desmond Sheiham
Paul's best friend at Cambridge, of whom many stories were told with a smile over tea. Who had the guts to turn down a job at GCHQ, the British equivalent of the National Security Agency, for moral reasons. Who used to stay up to have a late-night snack and chat about math. Who convinced Paul it's useless to vote; who had a fine, thoughtful cynicism I'd have liked to argue with him about.
I'll miss you, Des, even though I never knew you.
Desmond Sheiham
Paul's best friend at Cambridge, of whom many stories were told with a smile over tea. Who had the guts to turn down a job at GCHQ, the British equivalent of the National Security Agency, for moral reasons. Who used to stay up to have a late-night snack and chat about math. Who convinced Paul it's useless to vote; who had a fine, thoughtful cynicism I'd have liked to argue with him about.
I'll miss you, Des, even though I never knew you.
Apartment in winter
from 1/21/05.
I walked down towards Kingsley Street tonight, in the downy, damp snow. Paul used to live there, in the apartment above the drive, overlooking the small back parking lot that stood above a steep, wooded slope. I used to walk down the drive, open the thin creaking metal screen door, and bound up the linoleum steps to the hall where Paul lived. His door stood on the second floor. I remember, once, we found a dead bird on the balcony, and I avoided it for some days, where it lay with its neck exposed and head thrown back; until at last, with a sense of the inevitable and a quiet pity, I picked it up with my hand gloved by a sandwich bag, and took it down to lay it on the soil beneath some thin trees. Its center had gone to dust underneath, a thin veneer of which still lay on the cement where the bird had fallen, and among which a few small, innocuous-looking beetles wandered, confused.
Inside Paul's apartment stood his usual austerity, not of character or habit but of a negligent detachment; Paul does not decorate. He kept it neat but questionably clean, and a thin grim developed along the edges of the kitchen floor, and along all cracks of the bathroom. The living room, though, was carpeted, and Paul kept it assiduously vaccuumed; a pink-and-white flowered couch that he acquired on the street stood stolidly against the wall; his piano faced the window; his "sideboard," as he named the desk and its associated shelves that flanked the door, was scattered with an assortment of small objects, coins, CDs, his stereo, and a small number of books. The big window overlooked a sunless view of the parking lot, but also, more romantically, the edges of town falling away beyond it, with the Broadway bridge and the thoughtfully changing traffic lights and the deep pine and oak woodlands. It had a wide flat stone shelf at its base, and could be shuttered by wide white blinds.
On the small table in the living room sat his small squat teapot, white with tiny blue flowers, that I bought him for Christmas one year. Beyond, in the kitchen, a rack of spoons adorned the counter by the microwave. A stained stove; a metal sink; a few pots, and a drying rack. His bedroom, adjoining, we spent little time in, and I remember it as a place of clothing piled on the backs of chairs, with a mirror in which I would sometimes tidy my hair, or admire my image when I'd wind up in some large shirt of Paul's.
I used to stand at the window, I remember, especially in the late evening when exhausted after work. I'd gaze out over the softly twinkling lights, drained, separate, and Paul would silently make dinner for us, not his usual role, but sometimes necessary in my lethargy. In the days, the cool grey light would sift in, and I'd touch my finger to the blinds, making them swing slightly. I used to sit on the couch and wait for him to change his clothes or put the laundry in or make the tea. Then we'd sit together.
If he'd gone to put the laundry in, I'd hear him banging up the other set of steps two at a time; I'd hear the screen door slap shut.
All this slipped into my mind as I walked past that plain, rectangular brick building, set a bit back from the road. The habit of the short journey, three blocks from my apartment to his, drummed its quiet rhythm back into my thought. I hadn't visited Kingsley Street since Paul moved away. All the images were fresh; the wet street glistening, flagstoned there where State Street begins its downward descent; the snow past which I've walked so many times; the crumbling concrete steps that encounter Kingsley at the corner. I was walking there to join a carpool to frisbee, as my ride lived just a bit further down the street. But for a moment, I felt I was visiting Paul again, and I felt the soft, empty sadness of nostalgia, that is so sweet and bitter.
Soon Ann Arbor will all be this way, a sweet, sad memory of calm and still and softness. For years ahead of me the images will startle up in me, brought by a song, a scent -- the scent of humidity or snow; by a church, a person, a late night. I'll walk its streets in the dream of the mind.
I think of Paul, his parents visiting him now, living his new life in the wood-floored apartment with its enormous windows on the hexagon-section walls. We placed his couch and his lamp and his piano neatly in their places before the fireplace; the little table found itself a comfortable spot in the kitchen. We tucked his bed against the wall, where at night the lights must dance, as he as yet has bought no curtains - his parents said they'd bring some. There's a reality to his life in that place for me, a clearness, a sharpness Ann Arbor never holds. The east coast is blunt, present. New Haven is unromantic and gray, its streets with their faintly dilapidated shops opening to the green square in front of city hall.
So different, that, from the tiny dim cell he lived in at IHouse, cluttered with his meager belongings and the substance of my suitcase. So different a place without, all hard light, cold and clear and damp with winter, unlike the diaphanous California coast, San Francisco rising all delicate and white, the great rocks by the sea holding their desolate beauty as the gulls winged tiny over the surf. No standing heads of pelicans, like a flock of outrageous, prehistoric bowling pins, await me in New Haven. Somehow my future on the east coast promises to be hard and cold. Yet I'm eager for it, for its blunt reality.
I walked down towards Kingsley Street tonight, in the downy, damp snow. Paul used to live there, in the apartment above the drive, overlooking the small back parking lot that stood above a steep, wooded slope. I used to walk down the drive, open the thin creaking metal screen door, and bound up the linoleum steps to the hall where Paul lived. His door stood on the second floor. I remember, once, we found a dead bird on the balcony, and I avoided it for some days, where it lay with its neck exposed and head thrown back; until at last, with a sense of the inevitable and a quiet pity, I picked it up with my hand gloved by a sandwich bag, and took it down to lay it on the soil beneath some thin trees. Its center had gone to dust underneath, a thin veneer of which still lay on the cement where the bird had fallen, and among which a few small, innocuous-looking beetles wandered, confused.
Inside Paul's apartment stood his usual austerity, not of character or habit but of a negligent detachment; Paul does not decorate. He kept it neat but questionably clean, and a thin grim developed along the edges of the kitchen floor, and along all cracks of the bathroom. The living room, though, was carpeted, and Paul kept it assiduously vaccuumed; a pink-and-white flowered couch that he acquired on the street stood stolidly against the wall; his piano faced the window; his "sideboard," as he named the desk and its associated shelves that flanked the door, was scattered with an assortment of small objects, coins, CDs, his stereo, and a small number of books. The big window overlooked a sunless view of the parking lot, but also, more romantically, the edges of town falling away beyond it, with the Broadway bridge and the thoughtfully changing traffic lights and the deep pine and oak woodlands. It had a wide flat stone shelf at its base, and could be shuttered by wide white blinds.
On the small table in the living room sat his small squat teapot, white with tiny blue flowers, that I bought him for Christmas one year. Beyond, in the kitchen, a rack of spoons adorned the counter by the microwave. A stained stove; a metal sink; a few pots, and a drying rack. His bedroom, adjoining, we spent little time in, and I remember it as a place of clothing piled on the backs of chairs, with a mirror in which I would sometimes tidy my hair, or admire my image when I'd wind up in some large shirt of Paul's.
I used to stand at the window, I remember, especially in the late evening when exhausted after work. I'd gaze out over the softly twinkling lights, drained, separate, and Paul would silently make dinner for us, not his usual role, but sometimes necessary in my lethargy. In the days, the cool grey light would sift in, and I'd touch my finger to the blinds, making them swing slightly. I used to sit on the couch and wait for him to change his clothes or put the laundry in or make the tea. Then we'd sit together.
If he'd gone to put the laundry in, I'd hear him banging up the other set of steps two at a time; I'd hear the screen door slap shut.
All this slipped into my mind as I walked past that plain, rectangular brick building, set a bit back from the road. The habit of the short journey, three blocks from my apartment to his, drummed its quiet rhythm back into my thought. I hadn't visited Kingsley Street since Paul moved away. All the images were fresh; the wet street glistening, flagstoned there where State Street begins its downward descent; the snow past which I've walked so many times; the crumbling concrete steps that encounter Kingsley at the corner. I was walking there to join a carpool to frisbee, as my ride lived just a bit further down the street. But for a moment, I felt I was visiting Paul again, and I felt the soft, empty sadness of nostalgia, that is so sweet and bitter.
Soon Ann Arbor will all be this way, a sweet, sad memory of calm and still and softness. For years ahead of me the images will startle up in me, brought by a song, a scent -- the scent of humidity or snow; by a church, a person, a late night. I'll walk its streets in the dream of the mind.
I think of Paul, his parents visiting him now, living his new life in the wood-floored apartment with its enormous windows on the hexagon-section walls. We placed his couch and his lamp and his piano neatly in their places before the fireplace; the little table found itself a comfortable spot in the kitchen. We tucked his bed against the wall, where at night the lights must dance, as he as yet has bought no curtains - his parents said they'd bring some. There's a reality to his life in that place for me, a clearness, a sharpness Ann Arbor never holds. The east coast is blunt, present. New Haven is unromantic and gray, its streets with their faintly dilapidated shops opening to the green square in front of city hall.
So different, that, from the tiny dim cell he lived in at IHouse, cluttered with his meager belongings and the substance of my suitcase. So different a place without, all hard light, cold and clear and damp with winter, unlike the diaphanous California coast, San Francisco rising all delicate and white, the great rocks by the sea holding their desolate beauty as the gulls winged tiny over the surf. No standing heads of pelicans, like a flock of outrageous, prehistoric bowling pins, await me in New Haven. Somehow my future on the east coast promises to be hard and cold. Yet I'm eager for it, for its blunt reality.
Saturday, February 19, 2005
Things shared
My good friend Hamlet wrote a piece about Don Quixote that I enjoyed enormously. I love his notion that the everyday populace finds echo in Don Quixote, in terms of systems of morality that no longer make sense in today's world. Perhaps people understand and empathize with Don Quixote's absurdity as the only rational approach in the face of the world's "practicality." Perhaps the book reminds them, with a dose of snide, satisfying amusement, that fundamentally it's society that's absurd, not Don Quixote -- or any of us.
My sister, meanwhile, shared a website of bird photography by a fellow birdwatcher in Massachusetts. My favorite photo is this one. Birds are so tiny and apparently fragile in the face of nature's enormousness and inhospitality -- just look at the rushing water, that pointed rock. In a moment, that teensy round splotch will plunge underwater and pop back out again, flicking the damp off his feathers, as undaunted as a bobbing cork. He's as gray as his surroundings, part of them, really, unified with all that rough cold. "Behold the birds of the air, they do not sow, neither do they reap..."
But then, of course, I remember chickadees, which manage somehow to survive the north's frigid winters. Miniscule knots of feathers, they sometimes freeze to death in their sleep when they can't find enough food to power them through the entire night. Morning comes, and, next to a treetrunk somewhere, a huddled bit of fluff simply doesn't budge again.
Victory comes late—
And is held low to freezing lips—
Too rapt with frost
To take it—
How sweet it would have tasted—
Just a Drop—
Was God so economical?
His Table's spread too high for Us—
Unless We dine on tiptoe—
Crumbs—fit such little mouths—
Cherries—suit Robins—
The Eagle's Golden Breakfast strangles—Them—
God keep His Oath to Sparrows—
Who of little Love—know how to starve—
-Emily Dickinson
Neither great comment from Dickinson or the Bible, though, anthropomorphized as they are, seems to suit the real lives of wild creatures. Birds simply live out there, tough as wire, built both for the violence and the sweetness.
As for me, I'm reading Tess of the D'Urberville's. It's rough going. I feel tragedy lurking ahead, though right now I'm all caught up in the beauty and fragility of Tess' world and her love for Angel Clare, despite the dark portents creeping around the edges of her dairymaid's life. After every page I set the book down, wailing in my head, "oh, nooo...", not wanting to go further, wanting to remain suspended, willing the book to turn out happily and knowing it won't. Why did Thomas Hardy, that brilliant novelist, have to write so many tragedies?
So I've been doing that, and trying to finish my thesis, of course. Tilting at windmills - to bring this entry full circle.
My sister, meanwhile, shared a website of bird photography by a fellow birdwatcher in Massachusetts. My favorite photo is this one. Birds are so tiny and apparently fragile in the face of nature's enormousness and inhospitality -- just look at the rushing water, that pointed rock. In a moment, that teensy round splotch will plunge underwater and pop back out again, flicking the damp off his feathers, as undaunted as a bobbing cork. He's as gray as his surroundings, part of them, really, unified with all that rough cold. "Behold the birds of the air, they do not sow, neither do they reap..."
But then, of course, I remember chickadees, which manage somehow to survive the north's frigid winters. Miniscule knots of feathers, they sometimes freeze to death in their sleep when they can't find enough food to power them through the entire night. Morning comes, and, next to a treetrunk somewhere, a huddled bit of fluff simply doesn't budge again.
Victory comes late—
And is held low to freezing lips—
Too rapt with frost
To take it—
How sweet it would have tasted—
Just a Drop—
Was God so economical?
His Table's spread too high for Us—
Unless We dine on tiptoe—
Crumbs—fit such little mouths—
Cherries—suit Robins—
The Eagle's Golden Breakfast strangles—Them—
God keep His Oath to Sparrows—
Who of little Love—know how to starve—
-Emily Dickinson
Neither great comment from Dickinson or the Bible, though, anthropomorphized as they are, seems to suit the real lives of wild creatures. Birds simply live out there, tough as wire, built both for the violence and the sweetness.
As for me, I'm reading Tess of the D'Urberville's. It's rough going. I feel tragedy lurking ahead, though right now I'm all caught up in the beauty and fragility of Tess' world and her love for Angel Clare, despite the dark portents creeping around the edges of her dairymaid's life. After every page I set the book down, wailing in my head, "oh, nooo...", not wanting to go further, wanting to remain suspended, willing the book to turn out happily and knowing it won't. Why did Thomas Hardy, that brilliant novelist, have to write so many tragedies?
So I've been doing that, and trying to finish my thesis, of course. Tilting at windmills - to bring this entry full circle.
Sunday, February 13, 2005
Color
I seem to manage one entry a month in here. So - February. What colors my life, these gray winter days?
Arthur Miller, University of Michigan alumnus and the acclaimed author of Death of a Salesman, died on Friday. The Daily put out a special edition on his life and career yesterday, beautiful with sepia photographs. Today, dropping by the library to find the International Directory of Little Magazines and Small Presses, I found a copy sitting on the table by the computer where I type now.
Miller, who wrote for the Daily, won a $250 dollar Hopwood award for a play while at Michigan, the Daily explains, and from then on he knew his profession was writing.
~
Paul visited this weekend, and the rolic and fun reminded me of the reasons I love our town. Friday, we both played in the indoor ultimate frisbee winter league. Now I have an enormous scrape on my hip, underlain by a bruise, from laying out for a disc. Sitting over breakfast this morning, Paul commented, "You've got a bruise on your arm." I tilted my arm up and looked at it: a small round purplish blot the size of a dime. "I guess I do," I replied, and grinned. One more glory stain.
Yesterday afternoon, in the cool, pale Michigan sunlight, I dragged Paul around campus for a "rock tour." Next Monday, I'll take my Introduction to Geology lab class on the same circuit, showing the students the limestones and serpentinites and sandstones and travertines and granite gneisses of which campus is built. Saturday, though, Paul had to hear it all, as I expounded on the origins of this boulder or that foundational brick. Through the five years of my research, I've at least learned a thing or two. Geology has such a special glamour, an immediacy and solidity, a tactile nearness.
Then the bar and the nightclub, reeling down the street with ten friends, squashing ourselves into the small roiling space deep in the basement of the club listening to one of the town's most popular cover bands. We danced; the sweat slid down our skin; we found a corner and hid from our friends for short, happy intervals.
We'd had a friend for dinner, too; Paul's compatriot in mathematics, now living in Australia, from where he hails. We sat in my tiny, warm kitchen, the smell of warming bread lifting from the oven, onions sizzling on the stove. I listened to them talk their incomprehensible heiroglyphics for awhile before interrupting to declare that now they had to speak some sense. After the meal, I left them to it, retreating to the comfortable space of my bedroom to change into my nightclub clothes. I zipped up my tall boots and rolled up my jeans and slid my sheer black shirt over my skin, then sat at my desk, half-listening to their talk heating the air, my nose in the Black Warrior Review, reading the poems there.
When my world complexifies, as it will and must, I'll remember these thoughtless evenings, when everything centers around the reach of my arm for a frisbee, or the surrounding whirl of my friends under the throb of the nightclub's speakers.
Arthur Miller, University of Michigan alumnus and the acclaimed author of Death of a Salesman, died on Friday. The Daily put out a special edition on his life and career yesterday, beautiful with sepia photographs. Today, dropping by the library to find the International Directory of Little Magazines and Small Presses, I found a copy sitting on the table by the computer where I type now.
Miller, who wrote for the Daily, won a $250 dollar Hopwood award for a play while at Michigan, the Daily explains, and from then on he knew his profession was writing.
Paul visited this weekend, and the rolic and fun reminded me of the reasons I love our town. Friday, we both played in the indoor ultimate frisbee winter league. Now I have an enormous scrape on my hip, underlain by a bruise, from laying out for a disc. Sitting over breakfast this morning, Paul commented, "You've got a bruise on your arm." I tilted my arm up and looked at it: a small round purplish blot the size of a dime. "I guess I do," I replied, and grinned. One more glory stain.
Yesterday afternoon, in the cool, pale Michigan sunlight, I dragged Paul around campus for a "rock tour." Next Monday, I'll take my Introduction to Geology lab class on the same circuit, showing the students the limestones and serpentinites and sandstones and travertines and granite gneisses of which campus is built. Saturday, though, Paul had to hear it all, as I expounded on the origins of this boulder or that foundational brick. Through the five years of my research, I've at least learned a thing or two. Geology has such a special glamour, an immediacy and solidity, a tactile nearness.
Then the bar and the nightclub, reeling down the street with ten friends, squashing ourselves into the small roiling space deep in the basement of the club listening to one of the town's most popular cover bands. We danced; the sweat slid down our skin; we found a corner and hid from our friends for short, happy intervals.
We'd had a friend for dinner, too; Paul's compatriot in mathematics, now living in Australia, from where he hails. We sat in my tiny, warm kitchen, the smell of warming bread lifting from the oven, onions sizzling on the stove. I listened to them talk their incomprehensible heiroglyphics for awhile before interrupting to declare that now they had to speak some sense. After the meal, I left them to it, retreating to the comfortable space of my bedroom to change into my nightclub clothes. I zipped up my tall boots and rolled up my jeans and slid my sheer black shirt over my skin, then sat at my desk, half-listening to their talk heating the air, my nose in the Black Warrior Review, reading the poems there.
When my world complexifies, as it will and must, I'll remember these thoughtless evenings, when everything centers around the reach of my arm for a frisbee, or the surrounding whirl of my friends under the throb of the nightclub's speakers.
Friday, January 07, 2005
Winter
The night cuts me, it is so cold and severe, and so beautiful. The red berries, glowing in studded scatter on the bare branches, pierce my heart.
Oh lovely night, shrouding itself in a veil of snow, that glitters and is not soft; I walk your stilled paths, and people pass me, by the library, on the square, hustling in their square wool coats. The snow drops like stars across their hunched shoulders. I revel in my solitude, my singleness among people. Inside myself I am a great vaulted space, vast and exalted, and I turn up my face; the passers-by notice my odd glow, and lift their eyes to stare at me.
This singleness, this great white night, this simplicity of solid brick with the lamps glowing soft and gold inside; the people walking and leaving their squashed prints, the square at once ordinary and otherworldly.
I beseech you - don't speak to me, for my soul is as still and solitary as a blackpoll in migration, tiny in falling arc over the globe's great sphere, in its inertia of motion.
How still the night is!
Oh lovely night, shrouding itself in a veil of snow, that glitters and is not soft; I walk your stilled paths, and people pass me, by the library, on the square, hustling in their square wool coats. The snow drops like stars across their hunched shoulders. I revel in my solitude, my singleness among people. Inside myself I am a great vaulted space, vast and exalted, and I turn up my face; the passers-by notice my odd glow, and lift their eyes to stare at me.
This singleness, this great white night, this simplicity of solid brick with the lamps glowing soft and gold inside; the people walking and leaving their squashed prints, the square at once ordinary and otherworldly.
I beseech you - don't speak to me, for my soul is as still and solitary as a blackpoll in migration, tiny in falling arc over the globe's great sphere, in its inertia of motion.
How still the night is!
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