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.

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.