It’s Furious Balancing

Today, Groundhog’s Day, is also the Feast of St. Brigid. I conveniently forgot this little factoid until I saw other bloggers posting about the Silent Poetry Reading that has taken place for the past three years. Even though the event has caught me by surprise — yet again — I’ll contribute a poem this time around.

It’s from a book a poetry given to me by one of my favorite college professors, Conrad Hilberry. I had Dr. Hilberry for classes in 17th century literature and creative writing – poetry (I was a teaching assistant for him in the same poetry class the following year). Con was a very gentle and kind professor; I remember that he wrote his comments on our papers in pencil since red ink looked too harsh. He gave me a fine appreciation for the written word (and John Milton, especially).

The book was Louise Gluck‘s The House on Marshland, and I’ve loved the following poem ever since Con gave me the slim volume back in 1985.

——————————————

Gretel in Darkness

This is the world we wanted.
All who would have seen us dead
are dead. I hear the witch’s cry
break in the moonlight through a sheet
of sugar: God rewards.
Her tongue shrivels into gas . . .

Now, far from women’s arms
and memory of women, in our father’s hut
we sleep, are never hungry.
Why do I not forget?
My father bars the door, bars harm
from this house, and it is years.

No one remembers. Even you, my brother,
summer afternoons you look at me as though
you meant to leave,
as though it never happened.
But I killed for you. I see armed firs,
the spires of that gleaming kiln–

Nights I turn to you to hold me
but you are not there.
Am I alone? Spies
hiss in the stillness, Hansel,
we are there still and it is real, real,
that black forest and the fire in earnest.

The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world. –Leonard Cohen

Last refuge? Not from where I’m sitting. I’d have to say that my overdeveloped sense of superiority to the sleeping world is the first place I head to on my Insomnia Nights. I like my late hours. I don’t like stumbling around the next day in a partial fog, but I do like my late hours. They’re extraordinarily peaceful. If I had my druthers, I would stay up until 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. every night and sleep until noon the next day.

There’s not a terrible lot I wish to write about; this is a rather empty blog post. I’m just throwing something out here on the Innernets to let people know that I’m Not Dead Yet, that my Day Job is stressing me to the point where I don’t want to spend too much time in front of my computer when I get home in the evening, and that I’m still working on 3 (or is it 4?) different knitting projects with nary a finished object in sight.

I suppose I’m in some sort of Holding Pattern. Further Bulletins As Events Warrant, cats and kittens.

Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak whispers the o’er-fraught heart, and bids it break. — Shakespeare, Macbeth

I’ve been sitting at the keyboard for a while, debating with myself whether or not I should attempt a blog post about grief. Even though I tell myself that I write blog posts for myself alone, I know there are Readers Out There who come here to be entertained or to check out the knitting or to look at LOLCats and really don’t care to hear about the sad, icky emotional stuff.

Well, today’s post isn’t for them. I suggest to those of you who don’t want to wade through this to just go to the link in first footnote and watch the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppets do Macbeth. I need to go watch those sock puppets again myself, to be honest. I could use a laugh.

There is no logic in my grieving for Gregor. There is no doubt in my mind that it was his time to go. He wasn’t eating. He wasn’t drinking hardly any water. He was getting to be a little bag of bones; he was too weak to leap on counters. There wasn’t any “cure” for him. I could have said yes to 20+ weeks of chemotherapy to buy 6 to 9 more months with him (maybe), but that wasn’t the right answer. I know that. The logical and best thing to do was to let him go.  It was definitely his time.

It hurts like hell.

Gregor was my Special One. Out of my three cats, he was the one who followed me around constantly, the one who had to sit on my lap while I was on the computer. The one who came into the bathroom with me every morning when I was getting ready for work. The one who had to come curl up next to me when I was knitting on the couch or reading in bed before I would go to sleep. At night, I would lie on my side and he would settle in next to me, filling up the hollow space under my chin, letting me hold him like a teddy bear as I fell asleep. He was Mama’s Boy, my Good Big Cat, Mr. Squeakypants, Mister G.

I miss him. I just miss him, and there’s this irrational part inside of me screaming GIVE ME BACK MY CAT to the universe even though I know that there isn’t any giving back involved in any of this.

I know time will help with the sorrow. I know I did the right thing.

I just want my cat back.

I’m going to stop here and go watch those Sock Puppets, I think. I’m not at the point where I can articulate grief, merely let it roll through me.

I came home from work at lunchtime on Friday to spend the rest of the afternoon with Gregor. We sat on the sofa, him sleeping and me knitting and watching The Two Towers and The Return of the King. When I’m depressed, sick, or out of sorts, I put The Lord of the Rings movies in the DVD player. I hadn’t really planned on watching both films all the way through, but there was a scene between Gandalf and Pippin in The Return of the King that I had to watch yesterday.

During the battle of Minas Tirith as the trolls and orcs are trying to break down the door to the second level of the city, Gandalf and Pippin have a discussion about death and dying:

Pippin: I didn’t think it would end this way.

Gandalf: End? No, the journey doesn’t end here. Death is just another path — one we all must take. The gray rain curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass. And then you see it.

Pippin: What, Gandalf? See what?

Gandalf: White shores, and beyond. A far green country under a swift sunrise.

Pippin: Well, that isn’t so bad.

Gandalf: No. No it isn’t.

I wanted to have this in mind when we took Gregor to the Ann Arbor Cat Clinic this morning. It would be a comforting thought to hold onto when I said goodbye.

A sunny, cold morning. I didn’t put him in his cat carrier until we were at the clinic; that would have been too traumatic for the poor boy. I held him in my lap with his purple polar fleece blanket to keep him cozy. He had been so weak and tired the past few days, so he sat still. No, not quietly, but still. Even his meowing was weak and tired.

At some point on the way to the clinic, The Husband mentioned that he had Me and My Shadow from Time Bandits playing in his head. So, of course, I had to sing it to Gregor.





This is how I want to remember Gregor’s last day. Sitting in the sunny spot on my lap, wrapped up in his “binky” with his Mama singing to him.

My and my shadow, strolling down the avenue (avenue, avenue, avenue)

Yes, the movie imagery from this is much different from Gandalf’s “far green country” speech, but I think it’s more fitting for Gregor and me. He always was my little shadow.

When it’s twelve o’clock we climb the stairs

We never knock ’cause nobody’s there…

A sweater affords the scientific-minded a chance to experience the phenomenon of the Knitting Black Hole. At some point in your work (although you have definitely knit 34 rows since you first noticed), you stop making progress. You knit and knit but the sweater doesn’t get bigger. Then, mysteriously, you are released and discover that, even though you’ve been obsessively measuring every two rows, it’s suddenly five inches too long. — Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, Knitting Rules!

That’s about how it feels at the moment. I tried on Tempting last night, and decided there was an inch left to go. I’ve been knitting for an hour and a half (through 3 VHS episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus), and I still have an inch left to go.

I am going to finish this sweater in my lifetime.

I hope.

And Now For Something Completely Different (in my best John Cleese voice).

This photograph is in honor of my friend Tarre, whose comment that she is working on an amigurumi Cthulhu has made my day.

My Fellow Knitting Conspirator found this design on cafepress a few months back. Of course I had to have it on a t-shirt. I have absolutely no idea how it came about, but I like to think there’s a Providence Stitch-n-Bitch that meets every Thursday night to swill absinthe and knit miles of i-cord.

Or something like that.

I like to think that I have wide-ranging, eclectic tastes — computer gaming, knitting, an appreciation of Twinkies and aerosol cheese (not concomitantly), and least not of all, good books. Yet, I find it disconcerting when I go to a gaming blog to find an article about the works of Jane Austen.

The original article appears here and the gist of it is that a writer in England took some chapters from a few of Austen’s books, changed the names, and submitted them to 18 different literary agents and publishing houses. Not only were the chapters rejected – if he got a response at all – only one of the responders was able to identify the work as Austen’s.

Now, I realize that not everyone has read Pride and Prejudice, but we’re talking about BOOK PEOPLE in ENGLAND for God’s sake, not stereotypical male gamers who are quick to label any book and/or movie as “boring” if it doesn’t contain car chases, tits, explosions, lasers, computer-generated special effects, tits, aliens, mutant vampires, tits, Klingons, psychotic Vietnam vets toting flamethrowers, tits, or Jean-Claude Van Damme. The director who makes a movie with mutant Klingon vampires carrying flamethrowers who may or may not be the PTSD-induced hallucinations of Jean-Claude Van Damme can nail this demographic and laugh his or her butt off all the way to the bank, but only if there are plenty of boudacious ta-tas involved.

But I digress.

This isn’t the first time I’ve had my old fart response of “What is the world coming to?” Far from it. But how often does one have the opportunity to mention Jane Austen, tits, and Klingons together in the same blog post?

One of my most enjoyable habits is to get up (relatively) early on a weekend, make a pot of coffee, and surf the Innernets for weirdness.

There is a lot of weirdness on the Innernets, and half the time I don’t even remember how I found a particular pool of weirdness. I follow links. I have the attention span of a dog. I use Firefox and have a minimum of three tabs open at once.

It may be the caffeine, but I found two little lovely bits to share. The first, a web comic I stumbled upon. This one, I do believe, is worth the time to read the archives — and add to the sidebar. I spent half a cup of coffee hitting the “random” button; for some reason, I find this entry hysterical:

Perhaps it’s because I used to be an eBay addict. I’ve since moved on to Etsy, which was most aptly described as “being a lot like eBay, but you don’t feel dirty afterwards.” I wish I could remember which knitting blogger said that so I can give her credit. See note above about “attention span of a dog.”

Second, a perfect verbal pearl from Franklin over at The Panopticon, about his relationship with color: “[M]y idea of Mardi Gras is three shades of gray in one sock.”

A yep, that about sums it up for me. Despite all these photos of hot pink sweaters and scarves, the vast majority of my wardrobe is black, gray, and white. There’s a smattering of red, forest green, teal, and blue in there — well, lots of blue since it brings out the color of my eyes — but the foundation of my so-called style is black, gray, and white, especially my work wardrobe. I own four pairs of the same style of Old Navy pants — in black — which I cycle through with great regularity.

This is one of these spots where I need to be able to footnote my footnotes. I need to work something in about how when I find pants that fit, I buy them in multiples. Since I am more bootylicious… er, amply callipygian than most, and right on the border between what is considered a “petite” and what is not, finding pants that fit is a rarity.

The Old Navy dress pants fit. Thank God. I know I am well outside their average demographic, if not 3 times as old as their average demographic. I am thinking that I could send some 14-year-old into hysterics with this information: “Eeeeeeewwww, I fit into the same pants as a 42-year-old! EEEEEeeeewwwww!!”

I would consider it a good day if I could do that.

Anyhow, I’m off to knit a felted cephalopod and (maybe) go shopping at Joann’s with He Who Has L33t Sewing Skillz.

I can definitely detect an upswing in my post-equinox mood. Things are, indeed, looking up.

You should be familiar, by now, with my opinion of the months of June, July, and August. Michigan summers are ghastly. Day after day of feeling like a wet, wrung-out gym towel, all the days melting into a shapeless, undifferentiated mass of heat and humidity.

For all of you (misguided) people mourning the passing of summer – bite me. I am moving into a Michigan Autumn. Days of Crisp Purpose and Contrast. Brisk has always been one of my favorite adjectives to describe this time of year. Bracing, blessedly cool days when my brain switches to the “on” position and I finally feel like Doing Things.

Time for visual aids. To me, summer looks like this:

Autumn, on the other hand, looks like this:

I strongly encourage you go go and look at this photographer’s web site. He has some phenomenal photographs of Ann Arbor autumn color. Right now, the leaves are just on the verge of turning. In two or three more weeks, it will be stinkin’ gorgeous around here.

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird, I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns. — George Eliot

[Gentle Reader -- I have the looming and ominous sensation that this is going to be a long, discursive blog post. It will be "under construction" for a while. When this notice no longer appears here, that's when I have deemed it "finished."]

I tend to filter reality with a bit more negativity than others. I hear news stories or learn about events, and my first, immediate reactions often have black borders to them. Case in point: I read on yahoo! about the mother of a missing girl formally being named as a suspect in the high-profile case in Portugal; the little girl has been missing for four months.

The press are calling it a “shocking twist.”

The first thing that went through my mind was “Well…. Duh!“

That’s the essence of it anyway. I know you’ve come to expect such erudite verbiage from me.

When I hear about crimes against children, my first thought is to look to the parents — Is there some sort of weird Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy (“MSbP”) Thing going on? Not the by-the-book, standard definition of MSbP (i.e., induced illness in the victim), but the vague sensation that the mother /parent has done something to the child in order to have the focus put on themselves, however indirectly. That was my opinion in the Jon Benet-Ramsey case as well, and that had all that Overlaid Weirdness with the child beauty pageants, u.s.w. I certainly can’t claim that the mother in this case is guilty or innocent. I haven’t been following it closely enough to form an opinion. I’m just a tad stunned that what I consider obvious (i.e., look to the parents) is regarded as a “shocking twist.”

Anyway, the purpose of this preamble is to show that I look at things with a darker view than others. My other illustrative example was my reaction to the rookie pitcher who threw a no-hitter in his second major league appearance. I heard that on the morning news and my first thought was “Dude, you do know it’s all downhill from now on, don’t you?”

These thoughts somehow lead to Roddy McDowall prancing around in my head singing “The Seven Deadly Virtues.”

Now, that’s not as much a reach as it sounds. If you go and look at the lyrics, you’ll see that it offers the Cynic’s View of Human Nature. Courage, Purity, Humility, Honesty, Diligence, Charity and Fidelity all get skewered.

Those lyrics lead to me waxing philosophic on the concept of Courage.

I am proud to be a cynic, and I heartedly disagree with that misquoted Oscar Wilde definition of a cynic as “a person who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” Au contraire. A cynic does now the value of many things, and the amazing lack of those things in Real Life is perhaps what makes her cynical.

[NOTE - More to follow. I need to take a break from the machine. Stay tuned for an updated post.]

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library. — Jose Luis Borges

Well, in my Paradise, it wouldn’t exactly be a library because I would want to eat gooey caramel-filled chocolates and take bubble baths while I read. Real libraries frown on that sort of reckless behavior.

“Libraries” make you keep their books at arm’s length, and I’ve always been of the opinion that you should love your books hard. Live with them. Write in them. Get chocolate on them when you lose yourself in the words and have a Reeses Peanut Butter Cup melt in your page-turning hand. I’ve dropped a few of my books in the bathtub, and a great deal have some humidity damage. People with pristine books make me suspicious: Have you actually read your books? How can one tell?

I am careful with books I borrow from other people, certainly, but those times are few and far between. I confess to having no self control in book stores and, frankly, I don’t want to.

I recall reading in one of those “declutter your house” books an author theorized that books represent knowledge and people are reluctant to part with them because owning books means you own the knowledge in the book. He also says, and I quote, “If they don’t fit on your shelves, they shouldn’t be in your home.”

Well, I don’t believe small children should be in a home until they’re toilet trained and can dress themselves, so I’ll let him slide by with that specious comment.

I am one of the few people who will not spend today ensorceled by the latest installment in the Life of the Boy Wonder Wizard. I haven’t read a single word of any of the Harry Potter books and there is no doubt in my mind that I will go to my grave a fulfilled and well-read woman nonetheless.

It is a closely-held belief of mine that any work — literary, cinematic or otherwise — that can so dominate popular culture for so long must, inherently, be low brow and aiming for the lowest common denominator. However, since I haven’t read any of these books, I am in no position to say whether this holds true (or not) for Rowlings, Potter, et al.

I didn’t say I was right; I’m just saying it’s one of my beliefs. I realize I may be putting to fine a point on this distinction and am uncertain if any of the Pott-heads would be able to discern it, but I digress.

If this series can withstand the test of time (i.e., it is still in print in 25, 30, or 40 years) I may pick it up and peruse it. I still reserve the right to throw it across the room.

To my recollection, I’ve only thrown one book, the Norton Critical Edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance. This was during sophomore year’s American Lit class and, if memory serves me, I picked it up and repeatedly slammed it against a wall in our dorm to the point pages fluttered from its limp carcass. I still can’t remember what set me off.

I know I mentioned before in this blog that I have nothing against red roses. Red roses are fine. Red roses are okay. Red roses are boring as all-get-out and take no imagination and no effort to procure. If a hapless swain were to present me with red roses, I would accept them graciously, like the first runner-up in the Miss America Pageant.

I found these beauties at the Busch’s in Dexter, Michigan. Since I’m in the middle of a thumping sinus headache as yet untouched by caffeine and extra-strength Vicodin, this is about all I can manage for a blog post today.

Well, that, and a quote from the book by which I’m currently ensorceled, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessl. Some of the reviews I saw on amazon.com were not kind. There was one customer review entitled “Lots of Words” which concluded that the reviewer would recover by reading Hemingway. I have little, if anything, kind to say about Hemingway. Ah, well. To each his – or her – own.

Since I love lolling about in words and language like some people enjoy lolling about in silk sheets, I’m enjoying this book tremendously. Allusions and obscure references abound. My favorite!

In any event, the first quotable bit I found was some advice from the professorial father to his daughter on organizing (documenting) one’s life:

Always have everything you say exquisitely annotated, and, where possible, provide staggering Visual Aids, because, trust me, there will always be some clown sitting in the back — somewhere by the radiator — who will raise his fat, flipperlike hand and complain, “No, no, you’ve got it all wrong.”

I found that apropos, but perhaps every blogger would find it apropos.

In any event, my headache has receded to a dull roar behind my right eye (frontal sinus), so I will present you with another Visual Aid and then run off to the world of Telon to work on my diplomacy and tradeskill levels. Game on.

Nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it. – Vladimir Nabokov

It started with a post today on Feministe — a blog I read fairly frequently (if not everyday). It was Mikey’s post on madeleines. Starbucks’ madeleines in cello-wrap, or shrink-wrap, or whatever one calls it, complete with pictures and a link to a very interesting Slate article on Proust’s Belle Epoque madeleines and one man’s attempt to reverse-engineer the recipe based upon hints in the famous madeleine-tea-Aunt Leonie’s lime blossom tisane-Combray passage in the first volume of In Search of Lost Time.

This lead to some comments about the awfulness of Starbucks’ pastries, and the awfulness of their coffee, and their mega-chain evilness (but still how it was oddly comforting to find this mega-chain when out of one’s element). Even though I could have put in some digs about how I believe Starbucks is the Wal-Mart of coffee houses, my first thought was that I should go home and bake some madeleines. My second thought was I should then blog about it. One of the commentors mentioned that she had seen the madeleine-tea-memory reference many, many times, but only knew of one instance where madeleine was a recurring blog tag to mean “memories.”

I strongly feel that madeleines require greater blog presence — of any sort.

I actually own a madeleine pan. I bought it for myself after I first began reading Proust. I’ve made them only once before, but tonight I’ll give it another go.

I’ll take pictures, don’t fret.

I hate flowers. I paint them because they’re cheaper than models, and they don’t move.
– Georgia O’Keefe