Please Marry Me

"Please marry me. Your mother likes me."
-Line spoken by an unknown woman, in a dream


We are stretched out on a dingy sofa, and I think
I must be barefoot because a woman whom no one knows
Is massaging the ankle of one leg of mine and the instep
Of the other, all this toward morning, and I have that
Occasional epiphany one has while still asleep
That I am floating down a river
Because I am so happy and all the dismal issues
Have been made tractable at last, and so I say to her
That the late symphonies of Gustav Mahler
Are more lucid if you're sitting close to, and above,
The orchestra, so that you can see the contrapuntal
Lines moving from strings to woodwinds
And then back again, whereupon this woman,
Sitting (I now realize) at my feet, says, in the full
Heat of our dream life, and in that happiness,
"Please marry me. Your mother likes me,"
And so I wake, not laughing, although my mother

Has been dead for over thirty years, but in wonderment
Over what quality this dream-woman must have owned
To have pleased my mother so that she,
My late mother, would have said, despite her ban
On ordinary pleasantries, that she had liked someone,
Anyone, who might have cared for me, and as I lie
In bed I think of the last movement of Mahler's Ninth
When the melodic lines go quiet for minute after minute
In a prolonged farewell to music and to life,
Which my mother would attend to in her bathrobe
Late at night, the stereo turned up, blended whiskey
In her highball glass mixed with milk as a disguise,
Leaning back, hand over eyes, silent-movie style
Like Norma Desmond listening as Von Stroheim plays
The organ wearing his white gloves. No, it wasn't
Mahler, it was Schoenberg, Verklarte Nacht,
Moon-drunk music, mad and inconsolable.


-Charles Baxter


**this poem was made even better when i looked up who Norma Desmond and Von Stroheim mean in this context. as, i'm sure, knowing mahler or schoenburg would turn up my appreciation even more**

What the Living Do

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It's winter again: the sky's a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat's on too high in here and I can't turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss--we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:
I am living. I remember you.

-Marie Howe

The Loneliest Job in the World

As soon as you begin to ask the question, Who loves me?,
you are completely screwed, because
the next question is How Much?,

and then it is hundreds of hours later,
and you are still hunched over
your flowcharts and abacus,

trying to decide if you have gotten enough.
This is the loneliest job in the world:
to be an accountant of the heart.

It is late at night. You are by yourself,
and all around you, you can hear
the sounds of people moving

in and out of love,
pushing the turnstiles, putting
their coins in the slots,

paying the price which is asked,
which constantly changes.
No one knows why.

-Tony Hoagland
from Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty

A Book of Music

Coming at an end, the lovers
Are exhausted like two swimmers. Where
Did it end? There is no telling. No love is
Like an ocean with the dizzy procession of the waves’ boundaries
From which two can emerge exhausted, nor long goodbye
Like death.
Coming at an end. Rather, I would say, like a length
Of coiled rope
Which does not disguise in the final twists of its lengths
Its endings.
But, you will say, we loved
And some parts of us loved
And the rest of us will remain
Two persons. Yes,
Poetry ends like a rope.

-Jack Spicer

*oh, this poem for so many reasons today. not least of which is the way it chimes with a discussion from yesterday's linguistics class about present progressive in english (bear with me here): how never before mcdonalds could an english speaker say 'i am loving', as love in english is a perfect verb - you either do or you don't love, but you're never in the process of loving. and how big macs changed all of that. and how, yes, the rest of us will remain/two persons. yes*

Love Poem With Toast

Some of what we do, we do
to make things happen,
the alarm to wake us up, the coffee to perc,
the car to start.

The rest of what we do, we do
trying to keep something from doing something,
the skin from aging, the hoe from rusting,
the truth from getting out.

With yes and no like the poles of a battery
powering our passage through the days,
we move, as we call it, forward,
wanting to be wanted,
wanting not to lose the rain forest,
wanting the water to boil,
wanting not to have cancer,
wanting to be home by dark,
wanting not to run out of gas,

as each of us wants the other
watching at the end,
as both want not to leave the other alone,
as wanting to love beyond this meat and bone,
we gaze across breakfast and pretend.

-Miller Williams

Nights

There’s nothing that I really want:
The stars tonight are rich and cold
Above my house that vaguely broods
Upon a path soon lost in dark.

My dinner plate is chipped all round
(It tells me that I’ve changed a lot);
My glass is cracked all down one side
(It shows there is a path for me).

My hands—I rest my head on them.
My eyes—I rest my mind on them.
There’s nothing that I really need
Before I set out on that path.

-Kevin Hart

Hafiz

Even after all this time
The sun never says to the earth,
"You owe me."

Look what happens with a love like that -
it lights the whole world.

In Praise of Coldness

by Jane Hirshfield

"If you wish to move your reader,"
Chekhov wrote, "you must write more coldly."

Herakleitos recommended, "A dry soul is best."

And so at the center of many great works
is found a preserving dispassion,
like the vanishing point of quattrocento perspective,
or the tiny packets of desiccant enclosed
in a box of new shoes or seeds.

But still the vanishing point
is not the painting,
the silica is not the blossoming plant.

Chekhov, dying, read the timetables of trains.
To what more earthly thing could he have been faithful?-
Scent of rocking distances,
smoke of blue trees out the window,
hampers of bread, pickled cabbage, boiled meat.

Scent of the knowable journey.

Neither a person entirely broken
nor one entirely whole can speak.

In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.

Passover

"I still believe, as many of us do, what the Exodus first taught:

-- first, that wherever you live, it is probably Egypt;

-- second, that we can make a better place, a world more attractive, a promised land;

-- and third, that the way to the land is through the wilderness.

There is no way to get from here to there, except by joining together and marching."

When the Time Comes for Singing

The water flings itself down insistently,
laughing,
a thousand shifting mouths
gulping at the ground.
"You are like me," it says,
"hurtling from moment to moment,
atoms dancing and clinging,
full of vibration and crashing silence."
Do not be afraid, my darling!
Water falls,
and your body's samba dances itself.
Silence snags and catches in your throat,
but your heart still sings the song it knows.
When the time comes for breaking open,
you will break open.
When the time comes for singing,
you will fill your lungs and fling yourself,
laughing,
in the only direction there is.

The Precipice

I stand, within four shivering walls
and their wood plank door,
on top of a mountain,
trembling with fear and promise
at the roar of gushing wind
wrapping its arms around my sticks and plaster, screaming,
demanding everything.
The door rattles its latch, and each thunderclap cracks closer,
coming to claw at walls and proud defenses.
The storm rages nearer, and I stand alone, on top of a mountain,
trembling with fear and promise
under the cold fire of invisible stars.

Tonight, again, the world demands this of me:
that I stand with my whole self bare at the center of the storm
and feel it through to my bones-
that I surrender again and again
and even here, even on the mountaintop,
trembling before the precipice,
be willing to tumble end over end into this life.

Chiesi agli Dei

Several years ago, I began to learn an art song by Vincenzo Bellini called "Malinconia, ninfa gentile", which translates to "Melancholy, gentle nymph". The first verse (the text of which is by the Italian poet Ippolito Pindemonte) is as follows:

Malinconia, ninfa gentile,
la vita mia consacro a te;
i tuoi piaceri chi tiene a vile,
ai piacer veri nato non è.

This translates, quite clearly, to roughly:

Melancholy, gentle nymph,
I dedicate my life to you;
Whoever is afraid of your pleasures
is not born to true pleasures.

It seems to be simply an early emo song. "Life is so painful! I'll embrace pain! Look how dark I am!" And it is, obviously, all sung in a minor key. Whenever I have sung this song, that is the only attitude I have brought to it - Italian hyperbole of suffering. Yet treating the second verse this way has always been a bit of a cop-out. Because the embarrassing truth is that I never really translated the second verse. I had a vague sense of what all the words meant, and I had read others' translations of it, but I had certainly not internalized its meaning. Eighteenth century poetic Italian is not always easy to translate for a non-native speaker like myself, and while reading the translations of others is helpful, I believe that to truly make a song your own, you must bridge the space between the poetic Italian and poetic English yourself.

And the thing that kept bothering me was that, in the middle of the second verse, the key changes to major. "Why does it change?", my voice teacher kept asking me. "You have to decide why if you want to sing this song." But the text just didn't make sense, so I continued to gloss it over, singing notes and words rather than a song.

Here is the text of the second verse:

Fonti e colline chiesi agli Dei;
m'udiro alfine, pago io vivrò,
né mai quel fonte co' desir miei,
né mai quel monte trapasserò.
(Trapasserò, né mai, né mai, co' desir miei,
trapasserò, né mai, né mai, trapasserò,
né mai, né mai, trapasserò.
No, no, mai.)

And here is the sense of the words, with no (or at most vague) meaning, that I had:

Fountains and hills, churchs to the Gods;
I will hear myself at last, I pay I will live,
never that fountain with my desires,
never that mountain I will pass.
(I will pass never, never, with my desires,
I will pass never, never, I will go beyond,
never, never I will pass.
No, no, never.)

Clearly there is some meaning in there, and clearly these words do not capture it. It turns out, of course, that I had made four crucial errors, and with them resolved, it turns out this song is not emo and angsty, but rather Buddhist and paradoxically joyful! (Which I am a big fan of.)

**The following is a detailed, perhaps tedious explanation of what these mistakes were, and how I fixed them. If you aren't interested in languages and translation, feel free to skip the next four paragraphs.**

The first mistake was "chiesi agli Dei". I initially translated it as "churches to the Gods", thinking "chiesi" was the plural of "chiesa", which does mean church. Of course, the plural of "chiesa", a feminine noun, is actually "chiese", and the 'i' at the end in fact turns the word into the first person past tense of "chiedere", which means "to ask". "Agli" is a compound of "a" and "gli", and Italian being a romance language, "a" can actually mean "to", "of", "at", or "in", to name a few. So "chiesi agli Dei" actually means not "churches to the Gods", but "I asked of the Gods".

My second mistake was "m'udiro", a compound of "mi" and "udiro". I did correctly identify "udiro" as a conjugation of "udire", which means "to hear", but thought that it was either the first person present (which is in fact "odo") or the first person future (in fact "udirò"), with the required accent probably accidentally omitted. But with further investigation, I discovered that "udiro" is actually a shortened version of "udirono": the poetic texts of arias and art songs often drop syllables at the beginnings or ends of words to keep a better rhythm. "Udirono" is the third person plural past tense of "udire", and so the phrase is not "I will hear myself", but "they heard me".

The next error was "pago", which I translated as the first person present of "pagare", which it certainly could be. Of course, that makes little sense here, and I luckily discovered that "pago" can also mean "satisfied".

My final mistake was ignoring the "né" of "né mai". "Mai" on its own means "never", and the "né" is indeed important. It means "neither", and is always paired as "né...né...", meaning "neither...nor...". With these tiny words added in, it is possible to parse the second two lines into four phrases rather than two: "'neither never that fountain' 'with my desires' 'nor never that mountain' 'I will go beyond'" - and it is possible to see that the first and third are connected, and the meaning closer to "Neither that fountain nor that mountain I will never go beyond with my desires." And the repeated phrases at the end are more accurately "I will pass neither never nor never, no never."

**Translatophobes start reading again!**

With these flaws fixed, the second verse is now:

Fountains and hills I asked of the Gods;
They heard me at last, I will live satisfied.
My desires will never go beyond that fountain
nor that mountain.

With this translation, I now find incredible depth in the song. In these words I now hear, "I will accept suffering. Those who do not accept suffering cannot experience joy. The beauty of the earth, of the present moment that is a gift from God, is enough. I will not desire more." And in this spirit, the key change finally makes sense.

The change to major happens at the first "né mai", which is certainly strange if the line is interpreted as giving up: "I will never go beyond" as "it will never get better". But with the joy of acceptance, it perfectly supports the deeper meaning of the song: "I will never go beyond" as "this is enough", worthy of a major key, indeed.


One of the things I love about classical music is the incredibly richness of it that can be discovered with persistence and meditation. With some pieces, it only takes minutes to get inside them and get them inside me. With others, it takes years of patience, of coming back again and again to what seems random and unimportant before I can make them my own. But I am learning to trust that every piece of music will give to me what I give to it, and hopefully I in turn will be able to give something of it to others.

Things to Think

by Robert Bly

Think in ways you've never thought before.
If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message
Larger than anything you've ever heard,
Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.

Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,
Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose
Has risen out of the lake, and he's carrying on his antlers
A child of your own whom you've never seen.

When someone knocks on the door,
Think that he's about
To give you something large: tell you you're forgiven,
Or that it's not necessary to work all the time,
Or that it's been decided that if you lie down no one will die.

Tell No One/Ne le dis a' personne

This past summer, after reading many enthusiastic reviews of the French movie 'Ne le dis a' personne', and being the kind of person who can’t resist a critic-pleasing foreign/independent movie, I went to see it. I was thoroughly happy with my decision, as I found the movie to be engaging and moving. The twists and turns of a well-wrought mystery told a stunning tale of a man’s deep grief and loss, and awesomely redeeming hope.

So when I discovered this weekend (I know, shame on me for not doing my research earlier) that the movie was in fact based on the American novel ‘Tell No One’ by Harlan Coben, and being a fan of mystery novels, I thought I would try giving it a read. I opened it Sunday late in the morning, and read the final sentence on page 370 that night around 9pm. I guess I must have liked it, or at least enjoyed reading it. For the most part the plot was exactly the same as that in the movie – in fact the movie kept a surprisingly high percentage of the original plot’s complexities. Yet the book told a very different story, and I don't mean the slightly different ending.

The book was about secrets and lies, and self-sacrifice, and the consequences of seemingly simple actions as they layer into increasing levels of complexity. The movie, while certainly portraying some of this, was a tale of what it means for hope to return when it has been long abandoned – the terrified melting of a heart that had long ago given up. And in my opinion, it was much more powerful.

While I did prefer (shockingly!) the movie to the book, that in itself is not what I find most striking. What is most fascinating to me is the use of (almost) the exact same plot to tell two very different stories. To me, it speaks to what it means to be an artist. My analogies, of course come mostly from music, and here I think of the plot as being the song, and the story is the artist’s rendering. A song can sound completely different – and have a completely different impact – depending on who is performing it, and how. I think of Jeff Buckley singing Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. Cohen’s original is certainly one that I love, but more as a compelling “plot” than a complete piece of art. Buckley’s cover is powerful and moving in a way that pushes the song into a different league. I feel the same way listening to Billie Holiday sing “The End of a Love Affair.” And hopefully what I will take forward from this is the lesson that art is what we put into it, and just as choosing beautiful songs to sing can’t make up for a lackluster performance, a passionate and honest one can always overcome the most humble of sources. (Wish me luck with conservatory auditions!)

The Omnivore's Dilemma

Ah, the treacherous work of blog maintenance - always seems like a good idea to start, but then to *keep* writing? But I've been very engaged in the book I've been reading lately, so here are some thoughts:

The most shocking thing about reading Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma is realizing how very little we actually think about what we eat. Even I, a vegetarian who spends a relatively large amount of time reflecting on what I eat and why, had never even scratched the surface of the thoughtful investigation and reflection imparted by this book. Pollan emphasizes the fact that we are, quite literally, what we eat, and in an attempt to further discern what that really is, traces foods back through several chains of production to the ground that it comes from. Corn will never be the same after the first section on industrial agriculture. And, quite surprisingly for me, his chapter on "The Ethics of Eating Animals" made me rethink my reasons for my continued vegetarian diet. Not, of course, that I plan to start eating meat, but rather that my strongest reasons are tied more to the production of meat in America than to the actual act of eating an animal.
But the most delightful parts of this book for me were the descriptions of the divine working of farms - not big industrial ones, of course, but the actual incredible mechanisms interacting with each other in the best places, like Joel Salatin's Polyface Farm, that allow each entity to thoroughly embody their deepest desires in a way that helps each other entity to more fully express theirs.
Oh how I'll mourn the closing of the farmer's markets this winter...

Happy Earth Day

From Blossoms
Li-Young Lee

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

Poem Holding Its Heart In One Fist

by Jane Hirschfield

Each pebble in this world keeps
its own counsel.

Certain words--these, for instance--
may be keeping a pronoun hidden.
Perhaps the lover's you
or the solipsist's I.
Perhaps the philosopher's willowy it.

The concealment plainly delights.

Even a desk will gather
its clutch of secret, half-crumpled papers,
eased slowly, over years,
behind the backs of drawers.

Olives adrift in the altering brine-bath
etch onto their innermost pits
a few furrowed salts that will never be found by the tongue.

Yet even with so much withheld,
so much unspoken,
potatoes are cooked with butter and parsley,
and buttons affixed to their sweater.
Invited guests arrive, then dutifully leave.

And this poem, afterward, washes its breasts
with soap and trembling hands, disguising nothing.

Panic! and G-d

I want to preface this post with the assurance that I am not, in general, a fan of emo/punk. Like any genre, it has its moments, but for me they tend to be few and far between. As a singer, I tend to judge many bands by the quality of their vocals, which I’m sure is part of my general dislike of the genre. So many of these singers have whiney, annoying voices, so tight that I would weep for their vocal chords if they weren’t so, well, annoying, and that being the case, a part of me feels that the damage they’re doing to themselves is sort of what they deserve.

But that said, I can also forgive many other musical shortcomings of a group fronted by a really talented singer. And I believe that this is what keeps drawing me back to the convolutedly-named Panic! at the Disco. So upon the release of their new album – on which the frustratingly self-involved song titles of the first (e.g. “There’s a Good Reason These Tables are Numbered Honey, You Just Haven’t Thought of It Yet” and “The Only Difference Between Martyrdom and Suicide is Press Coverage”) have been replaced with simpler, though admittedly duller, titles like “Behind the Sea” – I’ve been revisiting that earlier album “A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out”, and finding much to both enjoy and criticize. (Whoa, talk about a run-on sentence.)

The lead singer’s arrogance, with lyrics like “I’ve got more wit, a better kiss, a hotter touch, a better fuck, than any boy you’ll ever meet”, remains surprisingly attractive (though a few years later, the then 18-year-old’s claims seem perhaps a bit premature). On the same track, “Lying is the Most Fun a Girl Can Have Without Taking Her Clothes Off”, the passion with which he sings, in the chorus, “Let’s get these teen hearts beating faster, faster”, really does quicken the pulse. Listening to the album as a whole, I’m also still struck by the confident transitions between different meters and tempos within many of the songs that provide a relatively unique pop music experience, one that is continually engaging and entertaining.

What I’m most interested in at the moment, however, has little to do, I assume, with the band members themselves. The hit single from “A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out” was “I Write Sins Not Tragedies,” which received a good deal of radio play when the album was first released in 200*. The chorus of the song, which tells the odd story of an ill-fated wedding ceremony, is:
“I chime in with a ‘Haven’t you people ever heard of closing the God damn door?' No, it’s much better to face these kinds of things with a sense of poise and rationality.”
What’s interesting about these lyrics, and this song, is not the song itself, which is a pretty good song for a hit single, but rather what happened to it on the radio.

By now, we’re used to “radio edits” of our favorite songs, in which certain words deemed inappropriate are blanked out, or replaced with less offensive versions. In earlier days, the changes would be straightforward – in middle school, I knew that Alanis Morisette sang, “I’m brave but I’m chickensh.” I was somewhat surprised, listening to the actual album, to discover that what she was, was in fact “chickenshit”. But the bleep was straightforward. "Shit" is not appropriate, so it's edited out. When we get into the realm today of what is "offensive", however, things get more complicated, and we end up with the radio edit of, for example, the Black-Eyed Peas "Let's Get Retarded" being a rather different song: "Let's Get It Started". Who is it that judges "retarded" to be inappropriate?

This is the same issue that arises in "I Write Sins Not Tragedies", where in the above lyric the word that is censored is not the "swear" damn, but rather the word "God". We hear, "Haven't you people ever heard of closing the *** damn door?" What a bizarre decision.

That was my initial reaction. But the more I let it sink in, the more I feel the respect in this shift. What offense is there in the word damn? Yes, it's in the category "swear", but there is nothing in the word that offends any value of mine. The word "God", however, is fraught with tension. Even in my decision typing to continue to capitalize it, I acknowledge the weight of it. And in many religions and cultures, to say "God" is an affront to a sense of divine power. Though I may not agree with that kind of reverence, I am, for now, happy to live in a culture learning to censor words that are actually sensitive, where the potential implications of "retarded" are more important than the arbitrary badness of "chickenshit".

-avocado

Some Lines Against the Light

My turn to post an amazing poem.


Some Lines Against the Light
by Yehuda Amichai
translated from the Hebrew by Leon Wieseltier

How awful the light is for the eyes.
How awful it is to be flooded with light,
how unpleasant to be David's Citadel or the Wailing Wall
or an actor
or something like that.
How awful is the light left on in the henhouse
by wily farmers
so that the hens will lay and lay
thinking it is forever day.
How awful of the light in this way to sow feelings,
to be leaping, always to begin loving anew,
to spew love.
Sometimes I stumble into history
the way a small animal, a rabbit or a fox,
stumbles into a passing car's beam of light.
Sometimes I am the driver.