Searchblog

“Me, te, se, nous, vous
devant le, la, les
devant lui, leur
devant y
devant en
devant le verb”

…I’ve had the same haircut since 1989, when it was first created by my temperamental Italian barber. People don’t believe me when I tell them I go to a barbershop and pay a mere $16.00 for a trim, but it’s true. Fie on all chicy-chic salons – I discovered hair Nirvana long ago.

My haircut has mostly been described as a “Louise Brooks” bob, but people with a knowledge of fashion history will look at me and gasp “Peggy Moffitt!” which is accurate too. Until last autumn, it was black, glossy, and perfectly sculpted, drawing comments even from jaded Goths I passed on the street. The Goth girls always commented on my color (vivid aubergine highlights, visible in direct sunlight), and I always loved to tell them that the color was one I acquired in Poland – a supermarket brand, no less, costing a mere $3.00.

My favorite hair encounter occurred with the actress Marcia Gay Harden on an LA-NY flight in March 2003. I settled in next to her, trying hard to master the I’m-so-cool-I-won’t-bother-you pose, but after several minutes of studiously ignoring one another, she turned to me and said ‘I love your haircut – it’s just like the one I wore in Pollock.’ Indeed it was, and since I’d seen and liked the film, I was able to compliment her in return. Of course I told my barber about Marcia and he’s not yet stopped repeating the story.

Another favorite hair moment: I concluded an important presentation at a major academic conference in California and asked the audience for follow-up questions. I was apprehensive, hoping I’d be able to answer what I anticipated would be a fairly intense grilling. Immediately, a hand shot up in the rear. ‘There’s something I really need to know,’ said the questioner. I waited tensely. ‘Where do you get your hair done?’

Me (doing my best Travis Bickle impersonation): “Are you talking to me, by any chance?”

Gay Voice: “OH MY GOD! CAN I TOUCH IT?”

Me (to myself, hearing my mother’s voice in my head): “Who knows where those hands have been?”

Me (aloud): “I don’t let people touch my head, thanks. But I appreciate your enthusiasm.”

GV: “I’m a hairdresser and my salon is further down the street. Look at the back of your head. That cut is fantastic. No one knows how to do a disconnected bob any more.”

Me (wiggling my eyebrows): “And you should see my barber – he’s a really cute Italian.”

GV: “OH MY GOD! I CAN’T TAKE ANY MORE!”

Saleswoman (shrieking): “Your hair! It’s so beautiful! Where do you get it colored?”

Me (cautiously): “I buy it in the supermarket in Warsaw. It’s very inexpensive.”

SW: “Warsaw? Where’s that?”

Finger Woman: “You’re the one … you’re that woman who … oh, you know. The one with the hair.”

Me (evilly): “Which one is that, ma’am?”

FW (staring): “You’re the one with the hair. Don’t mess with me. You’re that one.”

Me: “Yes, I am”

FW: “I knew it!”

“… a type of Polish lard created from rendered pork fat. Homemade smalec is typically imbued with pork cracklings, chopped and fried onion, marjoram, salt, pepper, and other seasonings. It is a classic peasant dish typically used as a substitute for the ‘rich man’s butter’ and is spread on bread. Approximately equal to one month’s supply of cholesterol on a single slice of bread.”

“No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shiver ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of like had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory… I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal."

“Like much of his life, the narrator’s childhood has grown rather vague in his mind since then, and what he does remember of it holds no particular charm or interest … and it is this failure that the madeleine now addresses. By a quirk of physiology, a cake that has not crossed his lips since childhood … has the ability to … introduc[e] him to a stream of rich and intimate memories. He recalls with newfound wonder the old gray house in which Aunt Léonie used to live, the streets along which he used to run errands, the parish church, the country roads, the flowers in Léonie’s garden, and the water lilies floating on the Vivonne River. And in so doing, he recognizes the worth of those memories…”

“Thus I turned, once again, to The Unconsoled, which has always been one of my favorite – albeit complex and difficult – novels to revisit. The hallmark of Ishiguro’s writing, for me, is his use of a narrator who is not as he or she appears to be. An unreliable narrator, as it were, who controls a steady drip-drip-drip of emotional seepage that eventually craves release. Most often, Ishiguro’s narrators tell a story that they appear to control, but which they in fact do not. Thus it is with me. I, too, am an unreliable narrator.”

“Rashômon has entered the common parlance of everyday culture to symbolize general notions about the relativity of truth and the unreliability, the inevitable subjectivity, of memory. In the legal realm, for example, lawyers and judges commonly speak of 'the Rashômon effect' when first-hand witnesses of crime confront them with contradictory testimony.”

You – just to look at you makes me feel better. You’re so incredibly alive. And me – that’s why I’m envious. Before I die I want to live one day just like you do. I won't be able to die unless I can do that. I want to do something. Only you can show me. I don't know what to do. I don't know how. Maybe you don't know either, but please – if you can – tell me how to be like you.

But all I do is work and eat. That’s all. I mean it. All I do is make these little things. But even making these things is so much fun because I feel like I’m playing with every baby in Japan.

As the wind intensified, rustling the curtains overhead, my thoughts turned to my blind friend and interpreter Jacek, from Poland. What would he make of this, I wondered? Could this artistic experience affect him in some way, even though he couldn’t see it? I recalled that he and I had enacted a photographic experiment several years ago – an Eastern European version of the film Proof, in which a blind man photographs his surroundings as “proof” that the world really is as others describe it to him. Jacek and I wandered through his hometown until he'd approach a spot that evoked a particular sensation within him. “Stop!” he’d say. “Give me the camera. I want to take this photo.” “But there’s nothing there,” I’d reply. “But there is something there that speaks to me,” he’d respond, clicking the shutter with abandon. Passers-by gave us strange looks, and who could blame them? A blind man with a long white cane, taking photos? But Jacek had discerned something worth capturing, beyond the mere visual.

“… Reading things like this is so valuable to me, because while I’m struggling to fight off the bad thinking and bad self-opinions, I’m also scared stiff at the idea of taking pills. Omega oil supplements is the closest I can come, I just can’t do St. Johns Wort etc - too much of an admission that there might be a problem. There was a wonderful blog on a woman academic who was fighting depression drug-free called Searchblog that seems to still be up, though posting has been slow since she achieved much recovery and had not yet decided what to do with the blog. Great stuff there on the struggle and the enlightenment of what is making it worse or how to make it much better.”

Friend: I was so upset and I know I acted out. I was crying and I hated myself for it. Then, when I was driving home, I could feel my panic and anger rising. I knew I was on the verge of road rage.

Me: So what did you do?

Friend: I called my psychiatrist right away and asked him to look into changing my medication. It obviously wasn’t right.

Me: And did he?

Friend: He asked me to come in and we’re experimenting with my dosage.

Me: You know I never give advice, but there’s something I want to say because I care about you. It seems counterintuitive, but hear me out, please?

Friend (looking apprehensive): OK.

Me: When something like that happens to me, and it still does from time to time, instead of trying to minimize or anesthetize those emotions, I now understand that emotional turmoil has tremendous therapeutic value. When I feel burning waves of self-hatred begin to engulf me, I know that I have to allow those emotions to pierce the core of my being in order to analyze, understand, and eventually extinguish them. That process – and only that process – is what has helped me. Grim, I know, but there you have it.

Friend: But I’m too afraid to feel my emotions that intensely. What will happen?

Me (smiling): You’ll probably start to get better. “Feeling better” and “getting better” are not synonymous, as I know you know. What I hear you saying is that you desperately want to get better. Medication, on its own, won’t help you do that.

Friend: But I’m so afraid to let those emotions out. When I try, I feel like my entire body is shutting down in protest.

Me: I know how hard it is to change lifetime patterns of thinking – and you’ll always be my friend, no matter what. Just … think about it, OK?

Friend (running her hands through her hair): OK.

“What is a life? And when it’s over, what remains? And of that remainder, what do we keep – and what do we discard?”

I don't always understand why these things happen to we humans, but I know how tremendously restorative it is to finally emerge from the other side of whatever darkness we find ourselves grappling with. I know you’ll emerge too.

For what it’s worth, I would much rather have cancer than depression. There is nothing worse than depression …

You Are a Yellow Crayon

You have a thoughtful and wise way about you. Some people might even consider you a genius. Charming and eloquent, you are able to get people to do things your way. While you seem spontaneous and free-wheeling, you are calculating to the extreme. Your color wheel opposite is purple. You both are charismatic leaders, but purple people act as if you have no depth.

I don’t need to write memos and letters every morning.
Others will take over, always with the same hope,
The one we know is senseless and devote our lives to…

So the Earth endures, in every petty matter
And in the lives of men, irreversible.
And it seems a relief. To win? To lose?
What for, if the world will forget us anyway.

~ Czeslaw Milosz
From Return to Krakow in 1880

“The road back is not always so straight, and sometimes the ordinary stresses of life can trigger extraordinary responses. But I think you know you're getting better when the ‘off the wagon’ moments right themselves, when they no longer portend a backward spiraling.”

There is an affecting recording of the elderly Copland rehearsing “Appalachian Spring” with the Columbia Chamber Ensemble. When he reaches the ending, an evocation of the American frontier in ageless majesty, his reedy, confident, Brooklyn voice turns sweet and sentimental: “Softer, sul tasto, misterioso, great mood here…. That’s my favorite place in the whole piece…. Organlike. It should have a very special quality, as if you weren’t moving your bows…. That sounds too timid…. It should sound rounder and more satisfying. Not distant. Quietly present. No diminuendos, like an organ sound. Take it freshly again, like an Amen.”
~ Alex Ross
Appalachian Autumn: Aaron Copland confronts the politics of the Cold War
The New Yorker, August 27, 2007

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.

~~~~~

Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

~ William Wordsworth
From 536. Ode. Intimations of Immortality

"Yesterday I was at the cmentarz (cemetery) to commemorate the 1 August Uprising. I try to visit every year and place flowers on the graves of those who fought for freedom. How do you like this photo I took for you? Nice shot, tak?"

He: But this is very expensive.

Me: I know. But I want to pay.

He: But I am a male chauvinist pig. This makes me uncomfortable.

Me (laughing): I know. But I like to see you squirm. It makes me feel powerful.

He: Very well. But I wonder about this villa. Can it really be pre-war?

Some of the sharpest pains we feel come from the silence imposed on the deepest inward mining that we do. The most unlikely-looking people may be the most deep miners. I’ve often thought, ‘He, or she, is intensely at work, digging in a different gallery, but the galleries are far apart, in parallels which never meet, and the diggers are deaf to one another’s work. It must be one of the wickedest forms of human suffering. And it could explain the horrible shapes often taken by what we call ‘originality.’

A friend
Is one to whom one may pour
Out all the contents of one’s heart,
Chaff and grain together,
Knowing that the gentlest of hands will take and sift it,
Keep what is worth keeping,
And with a breath of kindness
Blow the rest away.

Me: Well, you already know about the scathing reprimand and equally scathing conference call I initiated with several colleagues last week. I kept asking myself, "Who is this woman (meaning me), anyway?"

Good Doctor: And what happened?

Me: I managed to astonish myself. I remember you saying last week that I didn’t have to be completely correct about something before taking action; I only had to be 51% right. And I was dead certain about that 51%.

GD: How did you feel?

Me: At first, I was fearful that my scathing, but appropriate and deserved, criticism of my colleagues would engender a reciprocal criticism of me – and of my work. Truth be told, I was terrified. But – and here’s the interesting part – I didn’t let it stop me. I was the 51% Superwoman, so to speak.

GD: And?

Me: I’m sure it won’t surprise you, but … I’ve now taken complete control of the situation and am getting exactly the level of quality I expect from my colleagues. And, most significantly, I don’t care what they think about me. I repeat: "Who is this woman, anyway?"

(Insert wide-eyed, penetrating stare here.)

Me: It’s true. I have no interest in reading such books, even those well-written and thoughtful examples of the genre.

GD (looking interested): Go on …

Me: When I read about another person’s psychic pain, it can lull me into believing that I’m addressing my own problems, but I'm not, of course; each person's depression is his or her own highly specific construct. For me, therapy involves my willingness to change – and the excruciatingly difficult work of change is an active process. Change requires that I uncover my deepest fears and go precisely to the place that begs to be left alone, undisturbed, forever dormant; I dig, dig, dig, deeper and deeper, well past the point that I’m certain will finally break me. Does that make sense?

GD: Yes. I understand what you’re saying.

Me: It upset me terribly to disagree with my friend, and it upset him, too … but so it is.

At the heart of the space-glove conundrum, Homer [said], is a gnarly clash of basic physics. The pressurized lining of a space glove … strains to push out. ‘Have you ever seen a doctor take a surgical glove and blow it up like a balloon with five ears?’ Homer said, explaining how [it] works.

‘The [lining] wants to take the shape of a sphere,’ Homer went on, ‘and that’s exactly what this glove wants to do when you pressurize it.’ So an outer layer of the glove must be fashioned that confines the [lining] without doing the same to the hand.

Hence, the conflict. ‘How do you restrain something but keep it flexible at the same time?’ Homer asked.

Fellow travelers: Why did you turn off the highway just then? Do you have any idea where we are? Who speaks Czech? Anyone?

Me: Calm down. I’ll just find an exit and turn back.

FTs: This road is shit. We are going to kill you.

Me: Look! Is turnoff! (Already spoken like a true Pole. Who needs those pesky articles, anyway?)

Me: This is crazy. We have to ask for directions. We can ask in Polish, English, or Czech, so we should be OK.

Me (yelling out the window at a disheveled looking pedestrian): Proszę! Can you help us with directions, please?

Disheveled looking pedestrian: Yes, I speak English.

Me: We’re trying to get to the Austrian border.

DLP (leaning his upper body into the driver’s side window): Hey – You look like Flipper.

Me (thinking): Hmm … I know I’ve been in this car for a very long time and my feet are grotesquely swollen, but – Flipper?

Me (to fellow travelers): What is he talking about?

DLP (gesturing toward my head): You know – like Flipper. Fleeper.

FTs: Ahhh! He means flapper – like your hair of the flapper.

Me (sighing): My barber will love this story, but not now, please.

She sang a verse from Seems Like Old Times the way she did in Annie Hall, trembled audibly, then quoted a character in her underrated second feature, Unstrung Heroes, who said, “Documentation is key.”

“Looking at us then and looking at us now,” Ms. Keaton said, “is all the documentation I needed to recognize that these