As I hoisted myself out of bed this morning, I noticed I had fisted my hand for leverage. I looked down and saw my grandmother's hand at the end of my wrist. Thich Nhat Hanh says that we hold those who have died in our memories, in our bodies. One memory triggered another and I was back in that tiny cigar flavored apartment with my mother's entire extended family. The living room, normally spacious, now cluttered with the long, carefully set table, and resounding with the sound of laughing and yelling punctuated by brief interludes of noisy open mouthed chewing. My grandmother's mushroom barley soup- to die for.
I made my own yesterday in preparation for the holiday, and while it is never exactly like Grandma's (no beef) it is pretty damn good. Alex asked, last night at dinner at my sister's house, if I had just made it yesterday. He could tell it wasn't ripe yet. Tonight it will be superb. Our holiday meal was small-my brother in Africa, my mother off to Florida unexpectedly for a funeral-they are happening almost daily it seems-Cousins in California, and most everyone else, gone. But definitely not forgotten. Alex and five year old niece Rachael will remember their own Rosh HaShanah dinners, this one particularly poignant and sweet. Shanah Tova.
the amoxicillin isn't doing what it should, the dentist says, although we can't figure out why, so we are switching to Zithromax, which sounds more like a multiplex cinema than an antibiotic. my average, everyday sort of a dentistdoesn't do multi-root root canals so I am being referred to an endodontist. fyi, I didn't know what it was either until I looked it up. they specialize in root canals. their very helpful website identifies specific types of tooth pain. mine was described perfectly. "Constant and severe pain and pressure, swelling of gum, and sensitivity to touch. A tooth may have become abscessed, causing the surrounding bone to become infected." and the treatment is pain meds and make an appointment to see them. which I tried to do. talked to a machine.
however, my dentist says they don't like to do these procedures until the infection, if there is one, is cleared up. so I'm hunkering down in preparation for more days of ibuprofin sprinkled with codine and lots of yogurt to combat the antibiotics' effect. - holding out the promise of CTodd's offer of some Christina's ice cream when this is over. YUM! You wanna see the tooth????
the great relief and absence of pain can make you euphoric only when bracketed by the constant throbbing and ache of a vengeful tooth; so the days-and nights- have gone; pain, meds, temporary relief, return of pain. I tried, at first, like a good Buddhist, to use the experience, as practice. I entered the pain, tried to see the throb throb throbbing. the rhythmic pulsing, radiating first to the front of my mouth, then to my upper jaw. was it hot? did it have a color? I was a dismal failure. I wanted to dissipate it by experiencing it. Instead it soared and bulged and seemed to feed on the attention I was bringing to it. I only craved relief, not enlightenment. Motrin, Aleve, Tylenol, in succession, alternated, all brought short relief. The ibuprofin with codine made me mildly euphoric, but didn't do any better obliterating the pain and made it impossible to work. The horse sized amoxicillin the dentist prescribed didn't disappear the imagined infection either. I am off to the have the dentist take one more look at this mysterious enamel coated monster, who I somehow have mistreated or offended and who has sought his revenge. What festering absess is he cooking up in his den? Will we be able to unearth it and thwart his evil plan to ruin my Rosh Hashanah? Stay tuned.
Driving through the tail end of Isabel on Friday morning, I wasn't seeing much. The sun came out about Hartford and the rest of the ride was smooth. Anxiety crept up as I missed the major deegan and had to take the west side highway down and wend my way through the west village until I was gridlocked at canal and mercer, blocking traffic for miles, it seemed. by the time I turned onto lafayette where Alex's new dorm is I was fried. he came down to unload the car and to help me find an inexpensive lot ($40) in which to leave the car. then we walked- throngs of folks of all colors and sizes and shapes, in and out and around sidewalk artists and vendors, he to Tae Kwon Do practice and I, to surprise Eileen at her opening at 37th street. stopping at Shakespeare & Co to buy some books, and Starbucks for fortification, I arrived early at the opening, in time to touch base with Eileen, who I hadn't seen in several years, and whose work was lovely, graphite drawings on ceiling tiles reminiscent of chinese screen paintings...
later, Alex and I hobbled around Chinatown in search of a Japanese restaurant his friends had recommended, he with blisters from working out barefoot and my feet aching from my walk, only to find the restaurant was on Center, one block over from his dorm. Japanese food and "chinese" ice cream and we called it a night. I drove to Annie's in Park Slope, Annie who has been my friend since I was 10. We sat in the dark on her patio and talked for hours, slept and woke and talked somemore. Tea and scrambled eggs with taco chips and the sun and the butterfly bush. Annie showed me the web a spider had spun, spanning the width of her lush, brooklyn yard. And tomatoes and collards and eggplant growing too. But most amazing, was the hummingbird that dipped and hovered by the bright orange flowers. My first east coast hummingbird ever, in my entire life, right there in park slope.
Back to Manhattan to shop-ink cartridges, a wok and a plumber's wrench- and lunch with Alex. We talked about his "area of concentration," (what Gallatin, his program at nyu, has instead of majors) and found that between his proposed work and my proposed doctoral program were overlapped. Alex: something about the meditative qualities of music, caligraphy (he is studying Chinese) and internal martial arts, taoism. Me: the spiritual/meditative act of seeing. After lunch we went back to his dorm room to put that wrench to use. Alex had lost his tiger-eye stud down the bathroom drain. Calmly and methodically he took apart the drain pipe and retreived the earring. If his BA in meditative far eastern studies proves useless, he can always become a plumber! It was wonderful to see him, see his new digs, meet his roomie, and it was time to go.
winding my way back to the west side hwy, I was treated to a feast of sidewalk artists, music, rollerbladers and the sun setting over the palisades. nice weekend.
why am I not surprised? mercury remains retrograde and my carpenter cancelled. he had a carpentorial emergency? clearly, the wall-less-ness of my bathroom doesn't qualify as an emergency. he says he will come tomorrow, same time, same place...same glimmer of hope.
and while I am on the subject of bathrooms-I so wanted to be a profound insightful and pithy blogger, but soon this will become know as the bathroom blog-, thanks to all you enlightened and generous men who were willing-not that you had much of a choice-to share your one stall with the several thousand women who had to pee before settling in to hear the Dalai Lama last night at the Fleet Center. much obliged.
His Holiness was a sweet as ever, although tired from the strain on his brain after two full days of conversations with MIT neuroscientists. He was losing his English, but his translator was quite eloquent, and it was enough just to be in his present presence. such a sweet, sweet, man.
Lest my students think i am growing a fungus, let me reassure them and you that I am quite well. The greenish tinge around my nails is the thalo green stain, that anyone who has ever tackled a painting will tell you, just doesn't wash off.
I am painting again, after what seems like an eternal hiatus. Nothing monumental. Simple, small paintings based on some of my digital work, of echinachea flowers. In the midst of beginning my new class, Alex returning to NYU, the endless process of getting the lab working, and preparing my doctoral program design for presentation in November, I never expected to find the space to paint or draw, even a little. Feels like coming home.
phone rings. I give it a dirty look. I am on my couch, devoting myself to my evening vegetative state. I want to talk to no one. Let the machine get it, I think. Then I remember. My machine, pissed that I didn't call in to check it once the whole time I was at the cape, decided to go munchkin on me. The out going message is unintelligible, uttered at just under the speed of light. Alex and I tried to speak in slow motion to get it to be understandable, but when we tested it we found that the record function is also playing at SST speed. So rather that allow people to think they could actually leave me a message, I unplugged it and tossed it in the trash. Remembering this, I picked up the receiver. Hello? Hi, this is John, from Small Changes? I rack my brain, trying to remember what kind of a non-profit charity small changes is and how I can politely disengage without being terribly rude. In the pause, while I am trying to figure this out, the man continues. You remember, I came to look at your bathroom? Light dawns. THE CARPENTER! Yes, hard as it is to believe, even after I kvetched to my absentee landlord, risking eviction, there is still a gaping hole in my celing, wall and floor, allowing my downstairs neighbor to converse with my upstairs neighbor, without having to shout. John, the carpenter continues. Sorry, he says, things got so busy this summer. That's all right, I assure him, But are you really coming? will you really fix my wall? Monday morning. 7:30. It's a date. I'll need a key, he insists. You can have all the keys, all the food in my fridge, all the toilet paper in my cabinet. Whatever you want. Hallelujah.
So I'm trying to organize this doctoral program. I begin at Union in November and part of the process is actually designing a program. My program, is in Visual Culture Studies. It is helpful to look at existing programs for ideas, but there are only a handful in Visual Culture and while they have been helpful, I am pretty much on my own. The experience of doing the research to do the research has been a little like opening up a Matrushka doll. Eash time I investigate a new pathway, it takes me off in a new, totally unexpected direction. I seemed to be being pulled down this philosophy path, finding that in order to understand the Visual Culture theorists, I need to understand more basic philosophy and cultural theory. My good friend Mitchell, the philosopher, has been most helpful, in this regard. Before dinner and a movie with Mitchell and Ora, we talked Wittgenstein. I won't bore you now with the dreadful history I have had with reading any philosophy at all, more on that later, but it isn't a pretty picture. Mitchell says, read Philosophical Investigations. It is really wonderful. I am leery of course. His wonderful, has sometimes proven to be my nightmare, but I dutifully head off to the library at Simmons and pick up the book...
First of all, this edition is both in German and English. Like the prayerbooks at shul, (except German and not Hebrew), on the left is the German and on the right is the English translation. Even tho I know not a spec of German, (except whatever cross-over there is from Yiddish) I think this is way cool. I thumb to the short preface and begin to read. Ludwig says, "...thoughts should proceed from one subject to another in a natural order and without breaks. After several unsuccesful attempts to weld my results together into such a whole, I realized that I should never succeed. The best that I could write would never be more than philosophical remarks:.." So he's saying that if he tried to direct his thoughts one way or another so that they fit neatly together, they " would soon be crippled." So what does he do? He just leaves them. He BLOGS. Part 1 is 693 numbered blog entries and Part 2, fifteen short essays. I have read only the first entry, and won't get to really give the book my attention until after I finish desiging the whole program but I am tickled and exited and I think, ooh this is so cool, written in 1953, Wittgenstein invents the blog and I think all these bloggers out there will certainly want to know this and discuss this and so just for kicks I google " Wittgenstein" + "Blog" and I think I am so smart until the search engine returns 29, 000 some odd sites ranging from Philosophical Investigations a web site by Christopher Robinson & Joseph Duemer who read each numbered entry and comment on them to a blog called Wittgenstein in Italian, Il weblog di Wittgenstein.it é ospitato, where Luca Sofri assures us that this blog has nothing to do with Wittgenstein. The good news is there are loads of resourses, including this list of books by or about Wittgenstein, assembled by a young blogger. So while I am not the cutting edge blogger I had hoped to be, I am bolstered by the virtual company I may keep, and by the notion that some of our greates thinkers have random thoughts that just don't come together in a nice neat package.
not that I am complaining about being away....the time at the beach was magical~ soothing, nourishing, relaxing, calming...all that water and all that sky was just what I needed. No, it is the two weeks of utter non stop chaos that greeted me back at work. Getting the labs up and running, working on server accounts, dealing with Quark 6, the Digi 001, the OS X documentation and tutorials for the students so that they are not completely lost...no time to breathe, let alone blog. Tonight, however, I am choosing to chill- already spent several hours in the studio, working on a painting of the Truro Lighthouse I began almost a year ago and some drawings of echinacea-those awesome pink flowers...My fingernails are black with charcoal and I am as happy as a pig in shit....speaking of which, saw my first Pig Races at the Vermont state fair last weekend. I laughed so hard my cheeks ached. Potbellied pigs.
You gotta luv 'em.