Rocks and Narwhals

I was looking at that last post and thinking about how I try to control stuff around me.  For example—my garden.  The blackberries never stop encroaching on my yard.  The Madronas shed their barks in long strips on my grass.  Weeds pop up everywhere with no regard for my perfect placement.  Don’t get me started on trees.  Everything sheds—cones and needles and leaves and ergh.  That’s right—ERGH.

Could things just look tidy?  Some days when I am awfully tired, I long for cement and small pots.  I long for gardeners and those blowing machines that blow everything into your neighbor’s yard.

Could all living things just stay put (where I put them), and not try to muscle out other things?  Squirrels getting ready for winter are now throwing  pine cones.  They land on my car, in my grass and in my pots.  The birds that I feed so religiously, that I call out to in the morning, shit on my chairs and tables.  Good God.  Is there no surcease?

I guess I could be a corpse whale just lolling at the surface ignoring it all.  Damn it though.  I notice the mess and am compelled to clean it up.

Everything is in flux.  Just when I finish one job here comes another.  Could the world just stop and wait for me to catch up?

So I guess I can understand that woman who wanted a non-needy dog.

Need (n.)
Old English nied (West Saxon), ned (Mercian) “necessity, compulsion, duty; hardship, distress; errand, business,” originally “violence, force,” from Proto-Germanic *nauthiz/*naudiz (source also of Old Saxon nod, Old Norse nauðr, Old Frisian ned, Middle Dutch, Dutch nood, Old High German not, German Not, Gothic nauþs “need”), probably cognate with Old Prussian nautin “need,” and perhaps with Old Church Slavonic nazda, Russian nuzda, Polish nędza “misery, distress,” from PIE *nau- (1) “death, to be exhausted” (see narwhal).

Look at the origins of the word need.  Misery, distress and “see narwhal.”  What the hell. How is need connected to narwhal?

I’m going to tell you.  Narwhal comes from Nar meaning corpse because the narwhal is mottled white and grey and looks like a drowned sailor when it lays close to the surface of the water in resting mode (called logging).  Hence, the corpse whale.

That’s how I got from neediness to narwhal?

Do you notice that the etymology of the word need is essentially Germanic.  Compulsion, duty and hardship.  As my beloved husband points out, I am a half German.  I do not believe this is his favorite half.  I am compelled to battle chaos.  Nature is by it’s very nature (ahem) chaotic.  Living breathing things are chaotic.  Only with constant attention do we have a hope of corralling this life force.

Back to my garden and growing things and taking care of husbands.  Living things “need”.  Maybe that’s why I collect rocks.  They just lay there where you put them.  They just are.  They don’t need to be trimmed or cooked for or entertained.  They just are.  Lets hear it for the rocks.

 

Happenstance

The needy dog:

I am at the Farmer’s Market on a beautiful summer’s day.  My dog was interested in another dog who looked very like him except a different coloring.  As we dog owners do, we exchanged particulars about our dogs:

“Is your dog a Havanese?”

“My dog is part Havanese, part brain dead mutant.  The neediness has been bred out of him.”

Possible responses:

“WTF”

“Why didn’t you just get a stuffed animal?”

“Shame you can’t do that to your children.”

“Not yet anyway.”

Do you think someday we’ll be able to breed dogs to such particular specifications?

I know we can do size, shape, coat type, etc, but do we really need to breed for not neediness.  There are retrievers and herders and diggers.  Each of these have particular  traits which make them more or less adept at their tasks.  But really– will ring the doctor if you fall down and can’t get up, opens own tins of dog food, bathes himself, takes his leash in mouth and goes for a walk, oh, and did I mention–not needy.  God forbid he’s needy.

My experience with these types of things (that is, messing around with living things to attain a certain outcome), is that something can go terrible wrong.  As in, well he’s not needy but he wees the bed, or, he’s a great retriever but he has OCD, or whatever.

Made me wonder about her husband.  Tall, handsome, handy, few words, great in bed, stands in corner when not needed.  Not needy.  Wees the bed.  Actually that sounds pretty good except the wee part.

Why does this bug me so much?  I guess because it is our attempt to control everything in our environment.  But then, there’s no surprise, there’s no adjustment, there’s no flexibility.  We don’t have to accommodate anyone or anything.  It’s the world according to my desires.

Solipsism.  The world revolves around me.

I’m afraid that it’s this kind of thinking that has created the world as we find it today–off balance and out of sorts.

Chaos and chance means you’re a living breathing human being in a world of living breathing beings other than ourselves.  Accommodate, bend, wrap your arms around happenstance.

That’s a great name for a dog.

 

 

 

 

 

Name that tune

Change your tune

“…singing the world into existence.”                    Salopek

Picture this:  a human, not quite fully modern man, but close enough, wandering away from his African origins headed toward Saudi Arabia, singing as he goes.  The first of his kind to leave his birthing grounds and wander away to find new lands, new stories, new songs;  a man, a woman, their family searching and singing a new world into existence.

I sing when I go for a walk but it is usually to my dog.  I acknowledge signposts along the way—hello elbow tree, how you doing Mr. Stump, hey, nurse tree, nice of you to foster new growth.  I say hello to trees I encounter but I rarely put these words into song.  Perhaps I’ll start.

Imagine a whole wide world, a vast emptiness and just you and your family.  Singing fills the void.  Singing brings the immeasurable down to, if not bite size, than human size.

Singing and epic poems describe the world as it is.  We mostly sing songs now about love—will you love me, why did you quit loving me, you love me, I don’t love you, love hurts, love heals, God loves you, and on and on into an imagined love universe—it’s the Planet Earth as Loveboat.

The songs of the ancients are different.  These songs describe the earth as it is.

What would I sing about?  Today I would sing about a thick brown pall that hangs over my house and the air quality advisory that states that our air is very unhealthy.  I don’t think the music would be light and chirpy.  I think it might involve dead birds falling out of the trees, an unearthly silence and a rising red sun.

We must change our tune.  We must.  We are poisoning all living things.  Our greed is cataclysmic.  The song I would sing would be a dirge.

The.nationalgeographic.org/projects/out-of-eden-walk offers the sounds and sights of ancient pathways, a glimpse into the world our ancestors walked.

We don’t live in our ancestor’s world anymore.

 

Imperfection

Kintsugi–the art of precious scars.  This bowl looks like it’s been struck by lightning, doesn’t it?

Simon Winchester has written a new book on perfection and precision and the importance of balancing those impulses with the importance of imprecision and the imperfect;  a teeter totter between machine made and handmade.  I love the subjects he picks to write about.  This particular subject reminded me of a bowl I have.

It is a Chinese bowl, I think, that was among my mother’s stuff.  So many of her things were poorly and imperfectly mended.  In fact, I think the very idea that something needs to be mended means it is imperfect.  Whatever.

My mother loved this bowl and I do too.  It is mended with a grey bead of adhesive which you can follow along the rim.

I could go out and buy a new Chinese bowl which would look very similar.  It would be machine made and painted and look remarkably like my original.

But it does not have the mark of hands, loving hands that repaired it.  Like all handmade things, it is not precise.  Like all handmade objects, it is somehow idiosyncratic.

Winchester talks about the development of a perfectly wrought cylinder which allowed the development of steam engines which led to the industrial revolution in May of 1776.  This was the first machine made part leading to thousands and millions of big and little machine made parts that make our modern world possible.

He does not eschew these advances, but he reminds us that perfection and precision, although valuable, are not always to be preferred.

As I wrote this last sentence, I thought about these perfect faces in our magazines, the face lifts, the tucks and sucks and other rigmarole that women  and men go through to become more perfect.  We have turned our desire for perfection on ourselves.

The imperfect, the homely, the slightly off-kilter are essential to being human.   Can we just leave it that?

Rock it

As I wrote in my last post, I have been cleaning house.  All the nonessentials are gone.  All of my mother’s rickety rackety furniture and geegaws have been moved to a different plane.  May they inhabit other lives joyfully.

There is one item that I cannot seem to let go of.  It is a darling rocking chair, cunningly wrought, simple and true.  And, it’s not rickety.  It’s small and low to the ground (like my Mom) and is referred to in the literature (you know the literature) as a sewing or nursing rocker.  I love it and I have no room for it.

If it looked like this:

I could see why no one wanted it. (although it would fit perfectly into a goth girl’s bedroom.)

But my little rocker doesn’t.  It’s charming.

No one wants rockers anymore.  Is that possible?  Are rockers no longer de rigeur.  Are we only glider people now?  Do we only like ergonomically modern furniture?  Can people not tolerate rocking and relaxing?  How can rockers be out of date?

You know what I say to this, oh best beloveds,

I’m going to keep it until the world turns, and rockers rock it again.

 

Memento Mori

I have been in cleaning out, downsizing, junking mode for about a month now.  The last remnants are in my driveway now under a canopy waiting for a final accounting.

Amazing what we keep.  Inside a beaded evening bag, in the attached coin purse, I found a lock of hair.  Who’s was it and who put it in that coin purse?  Was it my mother who saved a bit of baby hair?  Did Mom cut off a bit of Betsy’s hair before we buried her?

I have read about women in Victorian times making bracelets or brooches to save their babies’ hair, or other loved one’s hair, as if one can salvage a bit of that baby or loved one to put your hands on.  I think of those women, women in high lace collars and whalebone corset, braiding bits of hair to pin to their bodices in a brave attempt to cope with their loss.

How can we not at least attempt to capture time?  How can we bury  whole parts of our life—linens, furniture, books, people we’ve loved, mementos of places we’ve seen, people we’ve known, photos, scraps of fabric that once made up a dress, a wool plaid cape my mother made me, broken toys, smudged dolls and threadbare bears.

We might be buried by our memories.

Do other animals remember their pasts? I know they go to the same streams to spawn and birds return to their mating grounds.  Elephants and bison and whales and wildebeests—do they remember their mothers and fathers and infants they have lost?  Oh, it is a doleful thought.

We must exercise some discretion or we will become hoarders and perpetual mourners for things lost;  grabbing and holding everything and everyone we’ve ever known.  I understand the drive to hold on, but we must fight it.  Things are things are things.  Elephants probably don’t hold on to the turban of the guy who once rode him, fish spawn, they don’t mourn, birds follow an inborn GPS to take them home.  Birds probably don’t (I could be wrong) say things like “remember that great old chest of drawers we had in 2008?”

Our pasts are in our heads.  As long as I keep my head, I can go back and sift though time’s detritus. .

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Happiness

 

Rob is doing the crossword.  I am sitting next to him, sipping tea.  He often asks me for help with a clue and I help him if I can.  Sometimes this drives me nuts. The word happiness popped into my mind—and the idea that happiness is a moment.  Happiness is not a constant state.

So how about that “pursuit of happiness?”  If happiness is a moment, and we run after it pursuing it madly, doesn’t it burst like a bubble?  Happiness, it seems to me, is not state but a gift, a confluence of air and light and self that suddenly, without planning, or warning, or pursuit, just is.

I am happy this morning looking over at my husband of forty years, happy.   A gift I was neither expecting or pursuing.   It just is.

T.P. Science

Laying in bed last night and I kept having to get up to go to the bathroom.  It is so annoying not to be able to last through the night.  It is very dark and I am scrabbling around the toilet roll trying to find where it starts so I can pull off a few sheets.  My father contended that one should only need five sheets to do your business.  He was an accountant and therefore wrapped a little tight.

Anyway, scrabble, scrabble, scrabble and then a thought.

Perhaps Robin put the roll on upside down.  My sister Jane has thought though every daily action that we do.  One of her insights concerned the proper placing of the toilet roll.  The proper placement is with the first tissue on top rolling over toward you.  It should never be placed so it comes out underneath.

You probably think this is stupid but toilet etiquette or lack thereof has ruined many a marriage.

I decided in the wee hours (no pun intended), to begin an experiment.  I worked out the whole protocol in my head.  I will start noting who changes the rolls (another bugbear) and how the rolls are replaced.  I will enlist friends and family members to do the same in their houses.  Over time we may notice a pattern.  Is this a sex-linked characteristic?  Are men under rollers and women over rollers ?

When I explain this to Rob I can guarantee that he will say “Who gives a shit.”  It would be interesting to compare and contrast reactions to this information, but that, perhaps, is for another day.

 

 

Talking to Dogs

“Woof.”  says Rob, “”Woof

I said “Did you say woof?”

“I did” says Rob.  “This is how we talk to dogs.”