Jays

The other day on our usual evening TV date, we watched an episode of The Big Bang Theory that featured a bird—a "blue jay," as Sheldon called it. But that warn't no blue jay. 

That got me wondering—of course—how many "jays" exist in the world. Turns out, a lot.

The one in the BBT episode is a Mexican black-throated magpie-jay (Calocitta colliei). There's a white-throated one too. They and the other jays are all corvids (in the crow family).

There are, apparently, 46 species of jays, according to the above image (though Encyclopedia Britannica says 35–40, so who really knows). Ten species, for sure, are found in the US: blue, green, gray, pinyon, Canada, Mexican, and Steller's, plus three scrub jays, California, Florida, and island. Where I live, we have California scrub jays and Steller's jays, and I have communed on the Channel Islands in southern California with island scrub jays:

But look at this one, the green jay (Cyanocorax yncas), which is found on the coasts of Mexico and down into western South America:

Beautiful!

Then there's the Lidth's jay, endemic to the islands of southern Japan:

Also beautiful!

Or just look at the Mongolian ground-jay:

Okay. I'll end this little jaystravaganza with the actual blue jay, Cyanocitta cristata:

I have grown so used to our two local and very raucous species, it never occurred to me that these birds could have insinuated themselves globally. Or that they could take on so many lovely guises. Or that they all like to look off to the right. The island scrub jay being the lone, stalwart exception. 

Book Report: Hamnet

10. Maggie O'Farrell, Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague (2020) (4/13/23)

It was pure chance that the last book I read, The Great Believers, also opened with a person suddenly finding himself in a house mysteriously absent of people, or that it was organized in alternating chapters going backwards and forwards in time, or that it concerned a plague. Eerie mirrorings. But with those coincidences, the similarities more or less ended—unless you count luscious writing.

This book begins in 1596, in Stratford-on-Avon. The fact that a supporting character is never named makes no difference: his identity as the greatest English poet and playwright is always there, tickling your mind. But the book is only glancingly about him, at least until the very end; it is much more about his wife, Agnes (pronounced something like Ahniss), and always, too, about their son, Hamnet, who succumbed to bubonic plague at age eleven. 

The alternating chapters tell about the "now" of Hamnet, and his last few days caring for his twin sister, Judith, who has taken sick, and then falling sick himself; and the backstory of his parents meeting, falling in love, setting up a household adjacent to the man's father's glovery, raising a family. Agnes is touched with a gift, to be able to sense people's fates. Her husband, meanwhile, is trying to get out from under the cruel shadow of his father. Until eventually Agnes sends him off to London to represent the family business. Only, of course, he finds a different line of work, and a life of his own.

And then Hamnet dies. And we arrive at part II, which is about mourning his loss, about continuing on living, somehow. Which involves, on Agnes's part, and ever so slowly, finding her way back into life, into her medicinal plants and curative powers, and on her husband's, writing a play about their dead son—who in the play is not yet dead, but is haunted by death. 

Oh, but wait, there's another eerie mirroring: in my report on The Great Believers, didn't I end with a character talking about Hamlet, and Horatio's "burden of memory"?

I didn't flag any passages as standing out, though the book is beautifully written. It just flows. If I page through tomorrow and find something that is worth sharing, I will do so. But for now: that's my report.

Book Report: The Great Believers

9. Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers (2018) (4/6/23)

I started following Rebecca Makkai's newsletter Submakk recently, though I'd never read any of her work—so I figured I should change that. As luck would have it, I owned this novel from 2018, a finalist for both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award. So I dove in.

And yes, was immediately hooked. Set alternately in the early 1980s in Chicago at the beginning of the AIDS crisis, and in 2015 in Paris, it tells, mainly, the stories of two characters, Yale Tishman, a young gay man who works as development director at the Northwestern University art gallery, and, in the later story, Fiona Marcus, a friend of Yale's and the sister of another young man, Nico, who has just died as the story opens. Fiona is in Paris trying to find and reconcile with her estranged daughter, Claire.

I found the characters utterly believable in their confused, vulnerable, often contradictory ways of approaching the world, living outside conventional society to a degree but with all the dreams and hopes of any human being. It is a very honest book, authentic to a time and an experience we don't hear much about. It's also an emotional book, in a good way: fully felt.

There are those readers on Goodreads who complain about the two-story-line structure, but I felt it added an important dimension to the book, which is to a great degree about loss and grief and memory—and how we who survive carry the lives of the disappeared with us as we go forward. I also enjoyed the theme of art, which is used to good ends, especially at the finish, where we attend a photographic and video exhibition by Richard Campo, who spans both time frames, and see the earlier world in retrospect. It also plays into a subplot involving bohemian artists from the WWI era—another time of senseless death.

Makkai is a wonderful writer: I thoroughly enjoyed sinking into her beautiful prose. Here are a couple bits I flagged:

Here, Yale is speaking with the very old woman, Fiona's great-aunt Nora, who wishes to donate some old drawings to his gallery—Modigliani, Soutine, Foujita, and one unknown artist, whom Nora was in love with. As soon as she met him, she said, 

"I wanted to paint him, that was my first thought, but the next instant I was smitten. I'd never understood it before, how artists fall for their muses. I thought it was just a bunch of men who couldn't keep it in their pants. But there was something about the need to paint him and the need to possess him—they were the same impulse. I don't know if that makes sense, but there it was."
     Yale tried to say something, but didn't know how to begin. It had to do with a walk he once took with Nico and Richard around the Lincoln Park Lagoon, the two of them sharing Richard's Leica. It struck Yale that day how they both had a way of interacting with the world that was simultaneously selfish and generous–grabbing at beauty and reflecting beauty back. The benches and fire hydrants and manhole covers Nico and Richard stopped to photograph were made more beautiful by their noticing. They were left more beautiful, once they walked away. By the end of the day, Yale found himself seeing things in frames, saw the way the light hit fence posts, wanted to lap up the ripples of sun on a record store window.

And here is Fiona in 2015 at Richard's opening, looking at an array of b&w contact sheets titled "1983" with a survivor of that time, Julian. "Look," he said, pointing to a frame.

There she was herself, an arm around Terrence. In a restaurant, it looked like, She never remembered being that pretty, that happy. Claire was just an egg in an ovary, one more thing Fiona hadn't ruined yet. At the left of the shot was Yale, mouth open, talking to someone out of frame. A mirror behind them all, in which you could see a room of tables, diners, and Richard himself, camera flash for a head.
     She wanted to climb into the photo, to say, "Stop where you are."
     What that what the camera had done, at least? It had frozen them forever.
     Stay there, she thought. Stay there.
     Julian gave her a minute and then he said, "I was thinking about Hamlet. You know I was in it three different times, and I never got to be Hamlet? Actually it's Horatio I was thinking about. I never got to be him either."
     Fiona was filled with ridiculous, irrational love for Julian just then, for whatever he was about to say, because she could feel Nico beside her, and Yale and Terrence and all of them, rolling their eyes at Julian's making this about himself, about his acting, which was such a Julian thing to do, and they all loved him anyway, and she still did too.
     He said, "The whole play is about Hamlet trying to avenge his father's death, trying to tell the truth, right? And then when he dies, he hands it all to Horatio. In this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, to tell my story. See, I'd have made a great Hamlet! But what a burden. To be Horatio. To be the one with the memory. And what's Horatio supposed to do with it? What the hell does Horatio do in act six?"
     Fiona leaned her forehead against Julian's. They stood like that for a moment, head to head, nose to nose. The warmth of his skin soaked into her body, all the way down to her feet.
     She still had the magnifying glass in her hand, clenched tight. She wanted to call Claire over, show her these photos, tell her what Julian had just said, try to explain, or to try to start to explain, what her life had been. How this show might begin to convey it all, the palimpsest that was her heart, the way things could be written over but never erased. She was simply never going to be a blank slate. 

I will definitely be reading more of Rebecca Makkai. She created a world, harsh and beautiful, that I feel improved me for having glimpsed it.

 

Book Report: Four Thousand Weeks

8. Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (2021) (3/29/23)

Like most of us, I suppose, I often feel like I'm not doing "enough" with my life, and fall into the trap of thinking I should do more, be more. This book is the perfect antidote to that sort of self-defeatism. As Burkeman points out (via Heidegger), we don't really have time to use up; we are time—and a very limited amount, at that. 

Before I can ask a single question about what I should do with my time, I find myself already thrown into time, into this particular moment, with my particular life story, which has made me who I am and which I can never get out from under. Looking ahead to the future, I find myself equally constrained by my finitude: I'm being borne forward on the river of time, with no possibility of stepping out of the flow, onward toward my inevitable death—which, to make matters more ticklish, could arrive at any moment.
     In this situation, any decision I make, to do anything at all with my time, is already radically limited . . . in a retrospective sense, because I'm already who I am and where I am, which determines what possibilities are open to me . . . [and] in a forward-looking sense, too, not least because a decision to do any given thing will automatically mean sacrificing an infinite number of potential alternative paths. . . . Any finite life—even the best one you could possibly imagine—is therefore a matter of ceaselessly waving goodbye to possibility.
     The only real question about all this finitude is whether we're willing to confront it or not.

But let me back up: the 4,000 weeks of the title refers to the amount of time the average human has on the planet, some more, some much less. That underscores the finitude. And then there's our capitalistic mania for productivity, goal-setting, success, career—often to the exclusion of plain old living. Which is really all we get to do in the first place: just live. And yet it's so easy to get drawn into an abstract spiral of expectations, based on delusion and the ridiculous idea that we have all the time in the world to "figure it out and get it right."

This book combats that. It's listed under self-help, but also under philosophy, and it does have much practical advice—like having two to-do lists, one existential, the other practical; like putting your phone on gray-scale mode so it's less alluring (I'm giving that a try). But what I enjoyed most was being immersed in the beautiful open-endedness and uncontrollability of time. Yes, we can make plans, we can create our to-do lists, but if we forget to stop, right here, right now, and simply be, we're cheating ourselves of the amazing gift that is life, that is our life. 

In a chapter on impatience, Burkeman describes an exercise of going to an art museum and sitting in front of a painting not for fifteen minutes, or even an hour, but for three hours. 

You spend the first forty minutes wondering what on earth you'd been thinking. You remember—how could you ever have forgotten?—that you've always hated art galleries. . . . You contemplate switching paintings. . . . But then you're forced to admit to yourself that making a fresh start, by picking a new painting, would be to succumb to the very impatience you're here to learn to resist. . . . And so you wait. Grumpiness gives way to fatigue, then restless irritation. Time slows and sags. You wonder if an hour has passed, but when you check your watch, you find it's been seventeen minutes.
     And then, around the eighty-minute mark, . . . there's a shift. You finally give up attempting to escape the discomfort of time passing so slowly, and the discomfort abates. And the Degas [Cotton Merchants in New Orleans] begins to reveal its secret details. . . . Before long, you're experiencing the scene in all its sensory fullness: the humidity and claustrophobia of that room in New Orleans, the creak of the floorboards, the taste of dust in the air.
     The second-order change has occurred: now that you've abandoned your futile efforts to dictate the speed at which the experience moves, the real experience can begin.

My favorite chapter, called "Rediscovering Rest," extols the simple activity of going for a hike, or of cultivating a hobby—purely because it gives pleasure. I can get into that! It reminded me of geocaching, which surely has no practical purpose, but it gets me out into the world, looking around, enjoying the moment—all the better if I'm with a good friend or two. 

There's much more food for thought in this book, but I'll end with five questions that Burkeman poses to grapple with the deluded notion that life is provisional, "as if the point of your having been born still lies in the future." 

1. Where in your life or work are you currently pursuing comfort, when what's called for is a little discomfort? (Alternatively, one can ask, Does a particular choice diminish me, or enlarge me?)
2. Are you holding yourself to, and judging yourself by, standards of productivity or performance that are impossible to meet?
3. In what ways have you yet to accept the fact that you are who you are, not the person you think you ought to be? (A corollary question: How do you enjoy spending your time?)
4. In which areas of life are you still holding back until you feel like you know what you're doing? (Consider the possibility that that will never happen. Then just start doing.)
5. How would you spend your days differently if you didn't care so much about seeing your actions reach fruition? 

Dennis Wojtkiewicz, artist

Scrolling through FB, I spotted a gorgeous photo reminiscent of a stained glass window. 

The search to identify the photographer revealed that this wasn't actually a photo, but an oil painting! Until recently the artist, Dennis Wojtkiewicz, was a professor at Bowling Green State University, where he taught painting and drawing since 1988. He retired last fall, in part to spend more time with his own art.

He says of his hyper-realistic approach: "This idea that you can be surprised, that you never figure it out and that there’s always something new ahead. Even if I’m working with the same subject matter, there’s a way to see it anew, a way to see the same thing but it’s different. With being engaged on a steadier basis that’s what I’m looking for, to see what happens." I appreciate this healthy attitude of curiosity, which could be applied to any creative endeavor, or to life generally.

Here are some more of his pieces, many of citrus, but he explores various kinds of fruit, as well as flowers, mostly in oils but also in pastels. He seems to approach his subject matter in series: citrus, watermelon, onion, etc.; also in shapes, such as rosettes. His ability to depict light is extraordinary. Just wow! (Click to view larger on black.)

Here are a couple of pastel flowers:

Milo

Our dog, Milo, a 52-pound goldendoodle, is starting to falter. He is 13½. It’s his legs that are going, not his happy attitude, not his appetite or his heart. Whenever he slips on the hardwood floor and falls down, or doesn’t quite make the jump onto the couch or into the car, he looks at us with a puzzled expression, like he doesn’t understand what’s happening. We don’t really either. He trots along on his daily walk as usual—though there’s that dragging front left foot, which the other day started bleeding as the asphalt ground away at his nail, right down to the quick. On Sunday, on a longer hike, he started stumbling on the downhills; we finally leashed him, lest he lose his footing entirely and tumble down the steep hillside. He’s sleeping more, and has taken to occupying the folded fleece blanket at the bottom of the stairs leading to my little office-loft. He very rarely comes up the stairs anymore, but he lifts his head whenever I come down, inviting a neck scritch. I know he will die. It breaks my heart. And so I’m trying to use this end time to feel all the love and sweet pleasure—his, mine, bundled together. As Ted Kooser describes in his poem “Death of a Dog,” I fully expect our house to come unmoored and float away when Milo is no longer here to hold it down. But for now—and, I hope, quite a while longer—he continues to provide crucial ballast: love, connection, trust, joy in living. 

Here is my first post about him, from seven years ago, complete with baby photos.

Postscript 3/24: We took Milo to the vet today, and she prescribed some pain meds, thinking it might just be pain from arthritis that's bothering him. So we'll try that and see if he responds. Here's hoping.

Postscript 4/25: Turns out, I was wrong about him being 13½: he's only 12½. He will be 13 this year. Which, maybe, means he'll live an extra year? One can hope... Or at least, I can. And do. As for the pain meds, they didn't seem to have much effect, except in the gastro-intestinal category, negatively. So we went for the vet's second recommendation: CBD. And it's working a charm! Milo seems peppier, more his normal self. It could simply be that he's learning to tolerate his changed condition—the new normal. But no: he seems much more like his old self—with the exception of the dragging foot, which we stick in a booty now when we go for our walks. He doesn't seem to mind. Yay for CBD!

Anne Carson, poet

Pretty much every day, three friends—me, Kim on Kauai, and Sherilyn in either Santa Clara, where she is a caregiver for her father who suffered a serious stroke several years ago, or Burbank, where she is, briefly every week, home with her husband—meet virtually to write, at 7:30 Hawaii time, 9:30 or 10:30 here in California, depending on Standard or Daylight. We meet via WhatsApp, where we call ourselves "Let's Howl!" (the image here is our WhatsApp icon: a photo of Decomposition notebooks). Usually, we greet each other with an emoji of the local weather: a cloud or a sunshine icon, say. We may engage in a bit of conversation. The other morning, Kim greeted us with a  poem. And I thought I'd share it on. It's by Anne Sexton.

The Poet of Ignorance

Perhaps the earth is floating,
I do not know.
Perhaps the stars are little paper cutups
made by some giant scissors,
I do not know.
Perhaps the moon is a frozen tear,
I do not know.
Perhaps God is only a deep voice,
heard by the deaf,
I do not know.

Perhaps I am no one.
True, I have a body
and I cannot escape from it.
I would like to fly out of my head,
but that is out of the question.
It is written on the tablet of destiny
that I am stuck here in this human form.
That being the case
I would like to call attention to my problem.

There is an animal inside me,
clutching fast to my heart,
a huge crab.
The doctors of Boston
have thrown up their hands.
They have tried scalpels,
needles, poison gasses and the like.
The crab remains.
It is a great weight.
I try to forget it, go about my business,
cook the broccoli, open and shut books,
brush my teeth and tie my shoes.
I have tried prayer
but as I pray the crab grips harder
and the pain enlarges.

I had a dream once,
perhaps it was a dream,
that the crab was my ignorance of God.
But who am I to believe in dreams?