Phantom Animals

Page from my field journal, 21 September 2009, and excerpt from a letter written 9 September 2008.

D restored the windows in the dining room - they're tall and narrow (8 feet), and the upper sashes have stained glass surrounds - little panes of different colored & textured glass. The windows are beautiful now [and] turned out so well, that yesterday D... cleaned up a similar surround on the door...that leads to the Juliet balcony. Now there's a work of art in the room. At least one thing is restored as the ice swan of history keeps melting away.

D and I used to periodically journey across the river for fresh chickens and other provisions at a [farm] outside the hamlet of Preston Hollow in the foothills of Schoharie County. In the hamlet, we would drive past a cluster of houses, including a shed on the door of which was painted the ghostly, graceful image of a white horse, leaping. It took my breath away the first time I saw it, it was so beautiful and unexpected. Anytime we drove past I would ask D to stop for a moment so that I could gaze at this masterly image, a simple, vernacular gesture beautifully rendered, like a Lascaux cave painting, on a simple shed door. I think it must have been there for many years, this extraordinary piece of public art, right there in the elements (hence, perhaps, its faded ghostly quality) for the enjoyment of common passersby. I wish I had taken a picture, but I am rarely organized with a camera.

One day when we drove past, the image was gone. The dismantling of beauty - an indifferent plywood door took its place. I hope yahoos didn't destroy it (yahoos destroyed virtually every bit of original woodwork in our house, except for the stained glass windows). I hope the image isn't in someone's private art collection. If the image of the horse is no longer out there in the elements in Preston Hollow where the artist intended it (and created it with such obvious love and exuberance) then I hope at least that it finds its way to a place such as the American Folk Art Museum in Manhattan, to be preserved for posterity and displayed for many to enjoy.

***

Second thoughts on my conclusion today. Someone's private art collection would be okay for a time. But maybe eventually it should go to a museum.

Mulligitawny

Message from B., with whom I've been in touch since 1982, when she hired clueless me as a legal assistant at a San Francisco firm. Eventually I mashed her with my brother thinking they'd hit it off since they both liked Dr. Demento. I was right. Mission accomplished I moved to NY, in 1984. I missed Grand Central Station.

B: Every year at Thanksgiving I think about your Mulligatawny soup recipe. I haven’t made it in a while, but this year found a recipe for a spicy Indian turkey soup....

Me: I have lost that Mulligitawny recipe unfortunately. Not that the recipe was so great (I was always kicking it up) but the tattered scrap from the now defunct Gourmet had taken on a talismanic quality. I am sorry to lose that.

***
This post seems so downbeat. It shouldn't be, because things are wondrous. The way things are going that scrap just might turn up.

***
And there is only blue sky. A beautiful thought of wow, for each grey cloud, and cumulus you!-bebop-o

***
Dream last night. I'm walking on a country road. Woman stops car on side of the road, gets out, leaves motor running & radio on. Is she going to leave her car like that? I'm a little annoyed (disturbing the peace) & also curious. I've seen her before (dreamt about her before). She's alright (don't be annoyed). She's come to check in on the cat - Penelope. The woman says, she was my favorite. I say, I wonder what her story was - I think she was dumped. No, she's from here - the woman gestures at the wild overgrown acres - there are holes everywhere. Me: But she was spayed. The woman is suprised. Yes - I took her to the vet & it turns out she was spayed. (Which I think supports my dumped theory.)

***
Someone who very much reminded me of bebop-o was at the conservation area early this morning, an elderly gentleman who struck up a conversation with me as soon as I got out of the car.

I was just feeding the animals, he said.

What animals? (More cats?)

He gestures at the overgrowth. Oh, possums, raccoons... I asked my wife, what are you going to do with those turkey bones - make stock again? So I took the bones. Give them to the animals.

So now the animals will have a taste and dream of turkey forevermore.

Exactly!

***

Living Room

Excerpt from a letter I wrote on 7 July 2008.

I used to leave comments on Glenn Greenwald's blog at Salon(dot com). It occurred to me yesterday that I might want to archive them for myself, as a small record of what I had been thinking about at a specific time period, at least with reference to GG's posts, or comments others had made. So yesterday I started the project of copying & pasting them onto a Word document that I can save for myself. It must be a number of things prompting this effort - including reading your Philosophy of Mind chapter. All these external thoughts that I kept sending out there - they're worth preserving.

Anyway, I thought you might be interested to see the sorts of things I was thinking about, a year ago anyway. Not so different today, only I quit leaving comments there, it was too exhausting, and too much din on that busy board. I've moved on to the 12534.

City Islands

Journal notes from 8 Sept. 2009
amazing cobwebs in the morning
whole constellations
and galaxies of them
a harbor of miniature
ghostly clipper ships
and suspension bridges
afloat in the woods
cobweb sheeting draped over (milkweed?) scaffolds


Lynn Barber, An Education (memoir)
her rebellious nature is what saved her
from being sucked into his thrall
her ability to think for herself

Rabbit Songs

Going through a small box that contains a jumble of scraps from my past. In it, folded in four, is an abstract for a presentation my brother was to give at a neuroscience conference. The copy is signed and inscribed to me. I read the abstract. I don't understand it, yet it resonates. In his doctoral work my brother studied the "olfactory bulb" of rabbits. These same rabbits are classically conditioned to give a discriminative response to a CS+ odor. Okay, you lost me at the "CS+" part but - how Proustian! The reaction time to an olfactory cue for rabbits is near one respiratory cycle. It is hypothesized that the critical information for discrimination lies in the "decisive" burst recorded just after odor response...."

She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called 'petites madeleines,' which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim's shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory--this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Whence did it come? What did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it?

My brother's abstract concludes, In short a powerful new classification technique confirms that spacial patterns of burst amplitude are stable and unique to each animal, but cannot characterize the information content of a decisive burst.

You can say that again!

(Alright then, say a rabbit joke, says the vying suitor, an attorney, the object of their desire - my supervisor at the time, with whom I'm in friendly contact to this day - poised between them in a San Francisco cafe. What, you think I can just pull one out of a hat? Game over. My brother got the girl.)

Morning Cantata for Hudson

Thinking about advent calendars. I love the idea of them. So many windows open.








How can we keep this ping pong volley going forever?

One

I had a thought but I’ve forgotten it.
But I wrote down some things earlier today.
It could be that the friend of my first lover, the one
whose name I see on movie credits,
is already composing the score.
The one who came up from the deep lagoon,
or in his case what’s left of the North Pole,
came to probe me.
Now that everything we ever do online is recorded and observed
he may be getting a commission for all I know,
from the weirdly vibrant crystalline ones who have turned the world
inside out and upside down
(a song from radio way back when)
You turn me on.
There were other friends of his too,
they were all alums of a place called the King School.
Which I now realize whose sole purpose,
à la Poe’s purloined letter hidden in plain sight,
was to create kings. Kings.
Young kings, in crisp oxford shirts, with mesmerizing intellects, dazzling test scores,
They imbibed parents’ intoxicating libations from crystal decanters,
and found intelligent young female goblins as myself
irresistible and for the archives of all time.

In my dream, he sent me a message today: “1” was in the title line.


2 September 2008