My mental circus, inside and out.

blogging

Max, the baby, is sleeping beside me in his blue flannel footie. The house is full of sprawled twenty-somethings.  And there's snow on the branches of the tiny woods.  After everything, my world feels astonishingly peaceful.  The Buddhists have a loving-kindness meditation that extends  good will to all sentient beings, including oneself.    It's easy to feel that way today in this quiet Northern town. 

I am not sure any of this makes for good blogging.  I should be shaking my fist against abusive power, avoiding the solipsism of the overfed, commenting on the great events of the day, etc.  I read somewhere that when a traveler visited Buddhist monasteries in China, many decades after the revolution, none of the monks were aware that any political change had occurred.

Posted by: EmmaPele at November 26, 2005 21:02 | link | comments (1)

Maud Gone

Maud is gone.  For the past few weeks she had fallen ever deeper into sleep.  We will never know what she dreamed, for even when she could speak,  she was ever the cypher.  But I believe that once she was blind, she felt no reason to go on living. My son and I made the trip down over icy roads, listening to a radio interview with Ray Kurzweil who expounded on the tragedy of disease and death, the promise of immortality, and the need to take 200 supplements a day.  His are the days of miracles and wonders and the Great Singularity.  "If we just make it fifteen more years in relatively good shape," he said, " we'll be able to reverse aging."  At the Big House, as we have always called it,  everyone was arriving.  My father had come to say goodbye and left quickly.  Dave's partner, Roy, thanked Maud for her son, now also gone.  He left quickly  too. And then we just waited, the five remaining children, a scattering of inlaws and grandchildren and health aides, sitting around the hospital bed, measuring a different kind of progress, the number of breaths per minute Maud was taking.  The last grandson she would ever know took toddling steps around the bed, waved to his grandmother and smiled.  30-50 shallow breaths, then, after several hours, 10-12 breaths, then, very quickly, a strange breathing with swollen tongue, slower, slower, the court house clock across the street banged 6:00pm and Maud drew a last, soft breath. 

Posted by: EmmaPele at November 24, 2005 21:23 | link | comments (1)

shifts

 People are lost, they disappear, they die, and then the world has to be reconfigured without them.   Emma suspects a freedom in this.   Her father long ago told her that  Maud, because of her extreme love and protectiveness, had prevented him from getting near his own children.   Those were the times out in Midwestern suburbia where "the problem that had no name" was festering.  ("It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States."--Betty Friedan)  It wasn't really Maud's fault, but the expected family structure, and it was Emma's father who felt it most acutely, the stirring, the dissatisfaction, the longing for intimacy.  Now that Maud is nearly gone, he has suddenly discovered himself as the emotional center of the family.   This sustains him through his own grief, that his children now come to him for his solace and advice.   Though for years he did not call Emma, suddenly he calls. Suddenly he is present.  

Posted by: EmmaPele at November 22, 2005 06:20 | link | comments

Capote

Capote was harrowing.   Any writer who has ever questioned her relationship to her characters, true or otherwise,  has to feel disconcerted by Capote's disintegration into egomania and alcoholism because of his use (and maybe abuse) of the killer Perry Smith.   Whose cold blood?  It's a complex film in which no relationship is simple, though Harper Lee remains undeveloped, serving as the moral voice of the film.   Since I write about historical figures, I have avoided taking a living person and shaping him/her to fit my will, my own ego as a writer, though I have been sorely tempted by revenge.  I have observed other writers do this without a sense of the ethical complexities involved.  No real person can pass through the factory of a writer's mind without emerging molded, buffed and polished.  But what was interesting about the Perry Smith case is that he really was possessed of a ruthless, unapologetic violence that would test the compassion of a Buddhist,  a mirror to Capote's ruthless, unapologetic egotism.   Fascinating film.

Posted by: EmmaPele at November 21, 2005 00:14 | link | comments

Wharton Always Had It Right

"Early in his career Thursdale had made the mistake, at the outset of his acquaintance with a lady, of telling her that he loved her and exacting the same avowal in return. The latter part of that episode had been like the long walk back from a picnic, when one has to carry all the crockery one has finished using: it was the last time Thursdale ever allowed himself to be encumbered with the debris of a feast. He thus incidentally learned that the privilege of loving her is one of the least favors that a charming woman can accord; and in seeking to avoid the pitfalls of sentiment he had developed a science of evasion in which the woman of the moment became a mere implement of the game. He owed a great deal of delicate enjoyment to the cultivation of this art. "--Edith Wharton, "The Dilettante"

Posted by: EmmaPele at November 19, 2005 21:59 | link | comments