This Blog Still Exists

In a 1984 Paris Review interview with the writer James Baldwin, he was asked whether he found it easier or more difficult to write out of anguish, specifically his utter despair after the death of Martin Luther King Jr.  Baldwin replied, "No one works better out of anguish at all; that's an incredible literary conceit. I didn't think I could write at all. I didn't see any point to it. I was hurt...I can't even talk about it. I didn't know how to continue, didn't see my way clear." When I heard that this morning as I listened to the Paris Review podcast of the interview, it shot right through me, a kind of bolt of recognition and affirmation. When Sophie was diagnosed with infantile spasms nearly twenty-three years ago, she was not even three months old and I not quite thirty-two years, and it would be more than ten years before I'd write a single word about the experience despite the nearly twenty-seven years that I'd been writing almost daily. I've never been able to figure out why, nor to explain it -- in fact, when I did start writing again, nothing irritated me more than the comment I received over and over that you must find such comfort in writing, that it must be so therapeutic.

Perspective. 

I thought about it today as I brushed my teeth, the whir of the brush in my brain a kind of provocation for thought, willy-nilly. My parents left yesterday after spending a few days here with us for Thanksgiving. It was a lovely time -- we seem to have figured out how to love one another despite our differences and perhaps because of them. My mother insisted a few times over the days she was here about a persimmon-colored blouse she wanted to buy me, something we'd both admired in a catalog, and I kept saying, no, I really don't need that or want it, and she kept saying, yes, I want you to have it, it's good to have nice things, but aside from letting her buy it for me because she wanted to and could, it occurred to me in my head, willy nilly, as I brushed my teeth this morning, after they'd left, that my perspective is profoundly different, that it's not just that nothing material really matters having gone through such anguish over so many years, but that having gone through such anguish over so many years, everything else matters. Do you get that?

Last week, the In Home Supportive Services worker came to our home to do the annual check-up. She was Armenian (the largest population of people of Armenian descent live in Los Angeles), and at some point during the mind-numbing process of signing papers and answering inane questions about Sophie's inabilities (I'm not saying disabilities because the questions are posed negatively), she looked into my eyes and said, Where are you from? and I told her that I had a Syrian grandfather, a Scotch English grandmother and two Italian grandparents. She nodded her head, said she saw it in my eyes and mentioned that Putin and Assad were together that day. I made a face. She asked, You don't like Putin and Assad? I said, Ummm. No. She asked, Why? I said, Because they're hideous people who have caused the deaths of millions of people. She said, Ah you would know, and I let it go, her perspective, as it was, focused on my very diluted ethnicity. I'm only telling you this, Reader, because that little exchange led to her telling me about her Christianity, about her worries as a mother to two grown sons, about her asking me whether I was happy and me replying that I was and her answering that I wasn't because I had Sophie and no one could be happy with a child like that. 

Pause.

Some of you out there will think that I should report her, that she was out of line, in the wrong line of work with such a perspective, but I only felt tired. 

It'll make a good story, is what I thought, even as I calmly gave her mine.

Here it is. I wrote it down.

The Bluest of Blues

Planetarium, Griffith Observatory
Los Angeles

This has been a difficult week, so after an unbloggable morning meeting and in lieu of weeping while driving around the shitty, I drove up to Griffith Park Observatory and bought two $7.00 tickets to two planetarium shows. 

I lay back in my chair and listened to the program about water and the planets and the stars. We began at the bottom of the ocean, and when a blue whale's shadow swam over me, the tears leaked out of my eyes and then the stars came out, the constellations, the moon waxing and waning, the world spinning even as my body lay, stardust still --

During the second, Ptolemy's crystal sphere shattered into a bigger universe, 

more stars 

the galaxy, 

something beyond.

Despair After Sadness

Despair is still servant
to the violet and wild ongoings
of bone. You, remember, are 
that which must be made 
servant only to salt, only 
to the watery acre that is the body
of the beloved, only to the child
leaning forward into 
the exhibit of birches 
the forest has made of bronze light
and snow. Even as the day kneels 
forward, the oceans and strung garnets, too,
kneel, they are all kneeling, 
the city, the goat, the lime tree
and mother, the fearful doctor,
kneeling. Don’t say it’s the beautiful 
I praise. I praise the human, 
gutted and rising.

Katie Ford

Swimming to Shore

I lay on my bed for many hours yesterday. Flat on my back, staring at the ceiling when I wasn't playing Solitaire on my phone or carrying on on Facebook. I felt beyond drained. Spent. All used up. I felt filled with sorrow and sadness and loss and loneliness later that night. I thought about my friends who spend days and weeks and months in hospitals with their children. I remembered the many days I spent in hospitals during the early years of Sophie's life and don't remember how I did it. My body bears the memory in muscle and sinew, brain synapse. I think of Sophie's brain and kindling, the cascade of spark. I think of doctors in earnest boxes and those that believe so earnestly in them. Again, sorrow and sadness and loss and loneliness. I don't believe in the divine but am grateful for the divine comedy. Every thought spins another and the other is a gentle admonition that it's not that bad. There's perspective. There's Aleppo. There's my cousin in Mississippi who lost her beloved teenaged stepdaughter in a car accident on Tuesday morning. There's the very fact that I can lie on a bed for five hours staring at the ceiling, let sorrow and sadness and loss and loneliness wash over me, the bed a boat bobbing.











Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature this morning, and I am glad. I'm glad because his poetry and song has shaped my adult life. Even as my mind doesn't understand, my body -- muscle and sinew, bone, mouth, tongue -- does, and I am alive. I got up and out of the boat and swam to shore.



Though you might hear laughing, spinning, swinging madly through the sun
It's not aimed at anyone
It's just escaping on the run
And but for the sky there are no fences facing
And if you hear vague traces of skipping reels of rhyme
To your tambourine in time
It's just a ragged clown behind
I wouldn't pay it any mind
It's just a shadow you're seeing that he's chasing


Then take me disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tomorrow

And Peace*

First of all, as I fried an egg and toasted some bread this morning I wondered just how I do it. That's all. It wasn't self-congratulatory. I was just observing in a sort of mindful way how I absorb, think about, deflect and let fly the various emotions that accompany my daily life with Sophie. It's been a difficult morning. Yesterday, I took her to the beloved osteopath who worked on her for nearly an hour. Sophie was quite calm and even fell asleep for most of the visit, but as we walked down the hallway to go back to our car, she gazed off to the right and then collapsed into my arms in a seizure. I lowered her to the floor and knelt beside her as she jerked, cradling her head in my lap. When it was over, I sat down on my butt and just gazed back down the hallway, looking right out of the window at the far end. It was a long, light gaze. In the foreground were the tops of Sophie's pink high-tops, pointing upward, then a line of  pale carpeting and closed doors, symmetry, four-paned window, light, clouds.

We're working on adjusting the dosage of Sophie's cannabis and trying to tinker enough to get some better seizure control. I am actually pretty confident that we'll be able to do it, so when I say that I don't know how I do it, I mean balancing, the tightrope walk, the delicate stepping despite my bulk. Literal and figurative. Clumsy on the ground, the narrowing perspective, exploding out to light.

















*For those of you reading War and Peace with me, a chapter a day, please see my friend Criticlasm's fine blog about his own experience doing so (he inspired me to take it on). He wrote a blog years ago about his experience that serves as an excellent compendium. He's also a playwrite and wonderful critic of all things cultural, and you can find a lot of good writing at his other blog. Thank you, B!

Break It

Does it matter that I now know the difference between a real problem and a simple annoyance? Does it matter that I have been stripped of every pretense, self-indulgent thought, and vanity that ever existed inside me? Does it matter that I see the shallowness, greed, entitlement and selfishness of our society while at the same time have infinite compassion and patience with it’s denizens?

The above words are those of one of my favorite bloggers who always cuts straight through to the most powerful and essential. As the mother of a child with severe disabilities, she knows like the rest of us about living questions and holding paradox. She writes gloriously, angrily, with love and compassion. Read the rest here. And read the comments.

Smashed Windows

The Husband walked back into the house this morning and told me that the passenger window of my car had been smashed to bits. I said Really? in just that tone that the word suggests and then I walked outside and down the steps to the driveway where I stood at the car and peeled off a few bluish shivers of glass and let them crumble to the ground. It doesn't look like they stole anything, The Husband added, and I agreed. The boys circled the car, amazed and titillated at random crime, I went back into the house to deal with Sophie and The Husband left with Oliver to take him to school. He came back to pick her up and take her to school despite having a late morning event he needed to cater. I found a place to fix the window, lay a towel over the pile of glass in the front seat and drove west on Pico Blvd then south on La Cienega. I travel this way at least four times a week, but I had never noticed the auto place or the coffee shop that the man recommended I go to while I wait despite the fact that both had been there for nearly fifty years. I sat at the counter and ordered blueberry pancakes and crispy bacon with a cup of coffee and read a tiny version of The Family Fang on my phone.  The blueberry pancakes were excellent, and I had whole milk in my coffee. Two hours later, the car was fixed and I paid the owner $237.00. The Husband said his luncheon went well.  Neither he nor I had lost our marbles that morning but had, apparently, resigned ourselves to smashed windows.

Baking as Metaphor

It's not what you think. There are warm smells of yeast rising, the edges of bread baking or cookies crisping. The steady hand can mold and shape marzipan and fondant into tiny facsimiles of the real thing, but it's not the real thing. I read the directions for the white icing recipe that I've read hundreds of times: Add shortening and butter and beat on medium-high until it triples in volume, ten to twenty minutes. The days go by, even the years, and despite the adding, the layering, volume only triples. The rest is air. The steady chipping away comes up from within. The whirring and whiz of the mixer drowns it out, but it's still there. I read Heather's post about perspective, about the struggle for empathy, of other people's problems, problems that we bakers we molders of the impossible see as tripled in volume but made of air. I don't want to talk about schools, one says, it's too stressful. My father is coming for Thanksgiving, another admits. He'll drive me insane. The handyman is late; he's always late and it's giving me stress. You know who you are. The public schools here are dangerous, terrible, another confides, forgetful of the person to whom she is speaking. You're so changed -- both for the worse and for the better. The pastry chef's fingers are deft, and her sense of timing exquisite, but her fingers flail, grow arthritic with the struggle to think all is relative. All is relative. All is relative. A refrain that makes her weary in effort. She just can't lose the thread. Plop. Plop. Plop. The icing falls from the bag in an even swirl that belies effort. The boy lies in the bed, his head wrapped, the cancer cells growing, volume tripling, even as the burst in his brain tries to settle. All is relative, all is relative, all is relative, she thinks, struggling with volume when there's only air. Perspective is a thick band that grows thinner and ends in a point, a pastry bag with a tip, the swirl of frosting from the outside, round and round to the center.


You know who you are. And it's not what you think.


** This post is dedicated to Heather and Klein