As I approached the Amtrak ticket window at Newark Penn Station this morning I smiled at a woman already in the queue. She carried a handbag and rested her other hand on a neat black leather backpack atop her suitcase. She returned my smile. In some strange recognition between strangers, we acknowledged each other as equals, “Hello” answering “Hello.” “In a pinch, you can turn to me.”
The exact same encounter happened to me at the Amtrak counter in Boston's Back Bay station four days ago. Women recognize their peers in age, class, and circumstances almost instantly. It's part of a survival instinct when traveling alone. Just like instinctively noticing where the exits and restrooms are, women will identify the peer who will be a potential ally if danger approaches. Later that same day, as the train approached my station, a woman entered the train and seemed quite anxious. She asked if the seat next to me was free and we chatted until I got off ten minutes later. She was apprehensive about this train ride, her very first. “People in Texas don’t have this opportunity,” she said. I reassured her and she seemed relieved as much by my presence as by my words.
On both ticket-purchasing experiences in recent days, I observed a woman in difficulty at the counter. For the ticket agents, these may have been just samples of many long narratives that unfold during the day. In Boston, the protagonist was an international woman with minimal English trying to buy a complex ticket that might have been impossible. She was short, dark-skinned, and elderly—three strikes against her in addition to the language barrier and limited resources. She was holding a zippered coin purse at the counter and I wondered if she would pay for her ticket with small bills or possibly even with coins. The agent must have expressed doubt about the feasibility of her desired route, because the customer responded in broken English, “I go this way many time.” The agent tried again and then wrote a number on a slip of paper, handed it to the woman, and asked her to wait while she sold tickets to the few of us with immanent departures. I saw the price of $148.20 on the piece of paper and then my narrative boarded a train and diverged from hers.
At Newark Penn Station this morning, the woman facing her trial at the ticket window was young, white, and blonde. She had five or six bags at her feet. Not suitcases, but canvas and plastic bags with their handles tied together. She was in an extended conversation with the agent. She told him she had just been released from rehab in a mental hospital and she needed to get home today. Her voice was urgent and highly distressed, almost panicked. She rested her cheek against the palm of her hand and pleaded with him. He asked for her name and typed it into the computer. Perhaps she had a reservation but no identification? He couldn't give her the ticket without ID. When he asked for a phone number, she quickly gave him a number and told him that her ex-husband was at that number and he could give any information needed. The agent ultimately directed her to the police, “Go around the corner and turn left.” She hooked all the bag handles with her fingers and walked off. When I left the ticket counter, I was relieved to see her in conversation with a policeman. I felt some tug to get involved, but I didn't.
Meanwhile, off to my left was a row of men who may or may not have had tickets, but who were sitting along the outside wall of the waiting room on a bench marked (as they all are) “Seating for ticketed passengers.” They were watching, too. They were not watching the big board for their track number to appear. They were not watching the lines at the ticket windows to pick the fastest one. They were watching out for one another as they stepped outside and then returned to the warm station and the benches. They were also watching the passengers sitting on the other benches. I wondered if they were watching to see if someone dropped something that they could pick up and use or sell, but when a package of cigarettes fell out of the pocket of a passenger opposite me, one of the watchers got up and gestured to the man until he saw his cigarettes and retrieved them.
Another of the watchers called out, “Blossom! Blossom!” and I looked to see who might respond. I was not quick enough to catch sight of Blossom passing by.
Leaning against the information booth in the center of the waiting area and looking out over all the benches and all the people was a uniformed policeman. He scanned the room attentively. What would happen if he were not watching? And the three young soldiers in buff camouflage uniforms that I saw as I came down the escalator at the Port Authority bus station on Tuesday morning? In the universe of humans watching other humans, we may have turned the page from watching to surveillance.
Monday, July 15, 2013
Thursday, June 27, 2013
Sounds of Place: Budapest Keleti Station (2007)
The Budapest train station called Keleti is gigantic and beautiful. Inside Keleti Station today it is confusing, hot, and crowded, and we are waiting for an overnight train to Krakow. I have loved train stations for a long time because of the vibrant aura of travelers setting off on a journey or arriving at a destination. Grand Central Station in New York City is a very special train station for me. It represents my claim on my own life, starting a new existence right there at the center of the universe!
Centered in this station in Budapest, between tracks and ticket booths, there are two old-fashioned “big boards” with metal cards clicking over to display the times of arrival or departure of the trains along with the origin or destination, notes we can’t understand, any delays and how long, and finally, the datum that completes each line, the track number.
Every couple of minutes, the board begins to transform itself. One by one, beginning at the top, each element of the line of information will begin rotating to repeat, momentarily, the line below it. For just a blink of an eye, the two lines are identical, and then the elements of the second line begin to flip to bring up the train just below it. This movement is nearly constant as track numbers and other information is updated. At any moment, some element is flipping through all of the small metal cards with all of its potential readings to stop at the exact right one.
The “big board” entertains us in anticipation of the track posting which will catapult us into action towards the arriving train. The sound of all that clicking mesmerizes us, rivets our attention. This sound is like rosary beads clicking, like many fast, small marbles snapping against one another, like thick, flexible plastic cards shuffling, like heavy dry leaves rustling in the wind in October. It is similar and yet unlike any of these. If the mechanical big board holds still and silent, for even a moment, everyone watching it is still, we all stop breathing for an instant, for a heartbeat, until the rapid flipping begins again.
I tried to figure out who or what is behind this hypnotic system, but can’t quite imagine! This system predates computers, but is it computerized now? Of course, the next iteration of big boards will be digital displays, practical, but not as dynamic or interesting to watch.
In addition to this repetitive, resonant sound locking on a brain frequency that immobilizes us, we are also enchanted with the names of destinations that flip through our sights each time a line moves up the board. Potential destinations from this spot in Budapest flip over each other, revealing and concealing jewels and tapestries, markets and minarets, rich aromas and strange twisting cries. Today we are NOT going to Nagykáta, Zűrich, Sopron, Hatva, Moszkva, Szolnok, Sűlysáp, Koŝice, Pëcs, Graz, Berlin, Zagreb, Hamburg, Belgrade, Thessalonika, Dormond, or Bratislava, or any of the places with names so complex I couldn’t capture them from the short glimpse on the big board.
Our train finally appears at the bottom of the big board as the departure time of 18:30 takes the bottom line below 18:25. Before we are assigned a track number and achieve the top line, I am already nostalgic for the sound of the big board at Keleti Station in Budapest.
Centered in this station in Budapest, between tracks and ticket booths, there are two old-fashioned “big boards” with metal cards clicking over to display the times of arrival or departure of the trains along with the origin or destination, notes we can’t understand, any delays and how long, and finally, the datum that completes each line, the track number.
Every couple of minutes, the board begins to transform itself. One by one, beginning at the top, each element of the line of information will begin rotating to repeat, momentarily, the line below it. For just a blink of an eye, the two lines are identical, and then the elements of the second line begin to flip to bring up the train just below it. This movement is nearly constant as track numbers and other information is updated. At any moment, some element is flipping through all of the small metal cards with all of its potential readings to stop at the exact right one.
The “big board” entertains us in anticipation of the track posting which will catapult us into action towards the arriving train. The sound of all that clicking mesmerizes us, rivets our attention. This sound is like rosary beads clicking, like many fast, small marbles snapping against one another, like thick, flexible plastic cards shuffling, like heavy dry leaves rustling in the wind in October. It is similar and yet unlike any of these. If the mechanical big board holds still and silent, for even a moment, everyone watching it is still, we all stop breathing for an instant, for a heartbeat, until the rapid flipping begins again.
I tried to figure out who or what is behind this hypnotic system, but can’t quite imagine! This system predates computers, but is it computerized now? Of course, the next iteration of big boards will be digital displays, practical, but not as dynamic or interesting to watch.
In addition to this repetitive, resonant sound locking on a brain frequency that immobilizes us, we are also enchanted with the names of destinations that flip through our sights each time a line moves up the board. Potential destinations from this spot in Budapest flip over each other, revealing and concealing jewels and tapestries, markets and minarets, rich aromas and strange twisting cries. Today we are NOT going to Nagykáta, Zűrich, Sopron, Hatva, Moszkva, Szolnok, Sűlysáp, Koŝice, Pëcs, Graz, Berlin, Zagreb, Hamburg, Belgrade, Thessalonika, Dormond, or Bratislava, or any of the places with names so complex I couldn’t capture them from the short glimpse on the big board.
Our train finally appears at the bottom of the big board as the departure time of 18:30 takes the bottom line below 18:25. Before we are assigned a track number and achieve the top line, I am already nostalgic for the sound of the big board at Keleti Station in Budapest.
Tuesday, June 4, 2013
Ring the Bell
At Jinming Temple on Saturday I held three smoldering incense sticks in the sticky humid air and bowed in four directions to the Buddha, beginning with the East. I inhaled the smoke and then opened my hands and heart for a blessing.
A few hours later, I paid two renminbi to sound the massive bell in an inner courtyard of the Confucius Temple. A small log was wrapped in red cloth and suspended by two ropes. I pulled it back, posed for a photo, and released the log toward the bell and the boom reverberating through flesh and bone and air. I paid another five renminbi to hold mallets and play three rows of graduated bronze bells, a very big drum, and a Chinese zither. My five minutes on that stage were not enough to perfect my style, but to confirm a vision that this might have been my role in a past life at this temple.
On Monday, I climbed every available stair in the weaving workshop garden; the geometric and smooth ones as well as the water-shaped, rough and uneven ones, filling all my frames with texture. I looked and longed toward the roof garden that was inaccessible to my ascending desire.
I confess that I am the one who touches sculptures despite signs that say “Do not touch,” and on Tuesday, I touched the lucky turtle, and the elephant, and the camel, and the lions. They were stone both before and after, but I was not.
At the gate of Linggu Temple on Purple Mountain, I ate slippery cold noodles of bean paste with shredded carrots and cucumber, sauced with sweet, pungent, and spicy. Though I held my sticks upside down, no one noticed my splashy style.
Today, I plan to touch silk and jade, perhaps to great excess. When the antiphospholipid antibody syndrome rings the final bell in my head or heart, I will be ready.
A few hours later, I paid two renminbi to sound the massive bell in an inner courtyard of the Confucius Temple. A small log was wrapped in red cloth and suspended by two ropes. I pulled it back, posed for a photo, and released the log toward the bell and the boom reverberating through flesh and bone and air. I paid another five renminbi to hold mallets and play three rows of graduated bronze bells, a very big drum, and a Chinese zither. My five minutes on that stage were not enough to perfect my style, but to confirm a vision that this might have been my role in a past life at this temple.
On Monday, I climbed every available stair in the weaving workshop garden; the geometric and smooth ones as well as the water-shaped, rough and uneven ones, filling all my frames with texture. I looked and longed toward the roof garden that was inaccessible to my ascending desire.
I confess that I am the one who touches sculptures despite signs that say “Do not touch,” and on Tuesday, I touched the lucky turtle, and the elephant, and the camel, and the lions. They were stone both before and after, but I was not.
At the gate of Linggu Temple on Purple Mountain, I ate slippery cold noodles of bean paste with shredded carrots and cucumber, sauced with sweet, pungent, and spicy. Though I held my sticks upside down, no one noticed my splashy style.
Today, I plan to touch silk and jade, perhaps to great excess. When the antiphospholipid antibody syndrome rings the final bell in my head or heart, I will be ready.
Monday, June 3, 2013
Sitting Still (Auracular Spaces #2)
“Matter, it was discovered, can be used to tell time.
‘A rock,’ said physicist Holger Müller, ‘is a clock.’”
Harper’s Magazine, “Findings” March 2013
I am sitting still in a small park on a compact university campus in downtown Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, China. The temperature is in the 90’s and I am inclined to remain motionless while humid currents circulate around me.
A dark haired woman picks up a long bamboo pole and begins to swat at the plum-sized yellow fruit suspended in bunches above her head in the branches of a tree. Her companion picks up the fallen fruit and rubs it with water from a jar. She then places it on the seat of a wheelchair already occupied by a slight immobile man in white pajamas. He may not be aware that he has become a basket for the ripe fruit.
The two women are slightly heavier and quite a bit darker in flesh than many of the other women in this city; they may be ethnic minority Chinese employed as home health aides for this elderly and seemingly incapacitated man. Three animated elderly people sit on a bench nearby eating the same fruit. The two trios are linked by the sweet ripe fruit, but nothing else.
Two school girls pass by arm in arm. Workers traverse the path just beyond the low railings with small wheelbarrows, tools, and pallets of water behind bicycles.
The clicking sound of high heels draws my attention to a slender woman in a long-sleeved black dress with a spine overtly zippered from neck to hem.
I hear a flute somewhere behind me in the middle air.
Another wheelchair approaches the bench to my left. A young adult male pushes an older man. After transferring the older man to the bench, the younger one sits beside him and turns his full attention to his cellphone. The older man enters the park’s ambiance in the role of witness.
The wooden benches are built to seat two comfortably, but they are occupied one by one by one.
This park strays toward the wild side with soft low grasses that are not trimmed between the paths. The shrubs and trees are carefully randomized to present every shape, texture, and size with limbs growing horizontally, vertically, diagonally, and fractally. Greens go forth as leaves, fronds, tufts, fingertips, feathers, sprays, needles, fans, ferns, shoots, and every other possible projection and extension to form a thick and light-entrapping tent. Fallen and falling leaves become part of the appealing pattern.
Pensive notes from several flutes at a distance play hide and seek among the leaves.
This garden has many more paths of patterned tiles than necessary to pass through it in any direction. The trails criss-cross and converge at a five-pointed, off-kilter star deliberately far from the notion of center. The tiles inscribe skewed triangles and irregular four or five-sided geometric shapes. This park makes a deliberate statement about beauty and order, reminding me of the Wallace Stevens line, “The Imperfect is our Paradise.” Inside is a pause outside the ordinary. Though all sides have low boundaries, no glance in any direction gives up the secret of its size and shape. Peripheral vision is quiet on the subject, making no guesses.
A woman with silver hair and red shoes scribbles in a notebook. Three brightly dressed girls take photos of a baby sitting on a bench. A pregnant woman listens to music through headphones.
An organic breathing space offering the privacy of intimate public rooms, this botanical sanctuary presents two objects for visual convergence. One is a bronze head on a large, slightly irregular stone block. The other is a water-pocked stone in the shape and size of two horses kneeling nose to nose. Formed of elements and momentum, the stones beckon like evidence.
I am still . . . sitting . . . and then . . . the flutes draw my themes onward.
The park takes another breath and recomposes space and time around the flight of a single white butterfly.
‘A rock,’ said physicist Holger Müller, ‘is a clock.’”
Harper’s Magazine, “Findings” March 2013
I am sitting still in a small park on a compact university campus in downtown Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, China. The temperature is in the 90’s and I am inclined to remain motionless while humid currents circulate around me.
A dark haired woman picks up a long bamboo pole and begins to swat at the plum-sized yellow fruit suspended in bunches above her head in the branches of a tree. Her companion picks up the fallen fruit and rubs it with water from a jar. She then places it on the seat of a wheelchair already occupied by a slight immobile man in white pajamas. He may not be aware that he has become a basket for the ripe fruit.
The two women are slightly heavier and quite a bit darker in flesh than many of the other women in this city; they may be ethnic minority Chinese employed as home health aides for this elderly and seemingly incapacitated man. Three animated elderly people sit on a bench nearby eating the same fruit. The two trios are linked by the sweet ripe fruit, but nothing else.
Two school girls pass by arm in arm. Workers traverse the path just beyond the low railings with small wheelbarrows, tools, and pallets of water behind bicycles.
The clicking sound of high heels draws my attention to a slender woman in a long-sleeved black dress with a spine overtly zippered from neck to hem.
I hear a flute somewhere behind me in the middle air.
Another wheelchair approaches the bench to my left. A young adult male pushes an older man. After transferring the older man to the bench, the younger one sits beside him and turns his full attention to his cellphone. The older man enters the park’s ambiance in the role of witness.
The wooden benches are built to seat two comfortably, but they are occupied one by one by one.
This park strays toward the wild side with soft low grasses that are not trimmed between the paths. The shrubs and trees are carefully randomized to present every shape, texture, and size with limbs growing horizontally, vertically, diagonally, and fractally. Greens go forth as leaves, fronds, tufts, fingertips, feathers, sprays, needles, fans, ferns, shoots, and every other possible projection and extension to form a thick and light-entrapping tent. Fallen and falling leaves become part of the appealing pattern.
Pensive notes from several flutes at a distance play hide and seek among the leaves.
This garden has many more paths of patterned tiles than necessary to pass through it in any direction. The trails criss-cross and converge at a five-pointed, off-kilter star deliberately far from the notion of center. The tiles inscribe skewed triangles and irregular four or five-sided geometric shapes. This park makes a deliberate statement about beauty and order, reminding me of the Wallace Stevens line, “The Imperfect is our Paradise.” Inside is a pause outside the ordinary. Though all sides have low boundaries, no glance in any direction gives up the secret of its size and shape. Peripheral vision is quiet on the subject, making no guesses.
A woman with silver hair and red shoes scribbles in a notebook. Three brightly dressed girls take photos of a baby sitting on a bench. A pregnant woman listens to music through headphones.
An organic breathing space offering the privacy of intimate public rooms, this botanical sanctuary presents two objects for visual convergence. One is a bronze head on a large, slightly irregular stone block. The other is a water-pocked stone in the shape and size of two horses kneeling nose to nose. Formed of elements and momentum, the stones beckon like evidence.
I am still . . . sitting . . . and then . . . the flutes draw my themes onward.
The park takes another breath and recomposes space and time around the flight of a single white butterfly.
Thursday, May 16, 2013
Travel Anxiety #1: Zip it Up!
Travel anxiety takes many forms. We are packing for a two-week trip to China and three months at our cottage in Rhode Island. I am very familiar with the many forms of travel anxiety this week! One form is a manic energy for doing laundry, for packing pretzels and nuts into ziplock bags, and for watching whole seasons of Scandal on demand. The mirror image of this is a deep lethargy brought on by the long list of phone calls to make, including stopping two newspaper deliveries and checking in with our credit card security department so they won’t cancel the card upon seeing charges in two or three countries while we are in transit. The confusion of packing for Nanjing—sometimes referred to as one of the “little ovens” of China—along with cool nights in Rhode Island, and a wedding in New York has my head spinning. I’m packing tee shirts made in China to bring for our Chinese host’s new baby. I’m trying to guess what sandals I’ll want to wear on an evening a month from now.
My husband and I are book people. Before we both had Kindles and iPads, we packed three or four heavy paperback books to read and exchange. Now we shop the online store and load up the e-readers with books recommended by our friends and hope that we’ll always find an outlet (and our cords and adapters) when we need a charge to keep us supplied with our psycho-literary fix. The thought of being delayed somewhere without a book . . . that's anxiety!
I have a new four-wheeler suitcase. My old, bright red two-wheeler has been roughed around for six or seven years. I’ve been envying the four-wheelers for some time. These pieces of luggage seem to float along beside the travelers allowing a side approach for narrow passages (into bathroom stalls, for example) and easily gliding to a front-on stance facing the counter of the newsstand when purchasing Reese’s Pieces or The Atlantic Monthly before a flight. An ache in my shoulder and back from pulling my two-wheeler with an accessory backpack through airports hastened this upgrade.
My new suitcase has three shallow zippered compartments on its topside, a zippered main compartment, and one of those expansion zippers that increase the depth of the bag by another two inches. My back pack has three zippered compartments and a small front mesh pouch, also with a zipper. I’m not even counting the zippers on the insides of both bags, or the zippers in my wallet and cosmetics case, or the quart-size ziplock bag with my travel liquids. Let’s say, I have about a dozen or more zipped areas available for expressing my travel anxiety. And that’s not even counting my Eddie Bauer “SPORT” slacks with 4 zippered pockets. Travel anxiety? When asked, I will deny it. When observed, I will fake it. I love to travel, so why am I creating so much activity around the contents of all the little segmented compartments of my baggage?
My checking and rechecking of the stuff in all of these sections and partitions approaches an OCD symphony. Dollar bills for the water machine? Bandaids and tea bags? Slippers, pajamas, pens, pencils, paper? Phone charger, camera charger, extra batteries? Even at the airport, finally relaxing with a cup of hot tea, I’m unzipping, zipping, and checking little side pockets and pouches to find my travel notebook, Dramamine just in case, and the tiny card that has the codes for remote accessing my home phone voice mail. And this is all before entering the security line! After going through the strip search of airport security, there is no turning back and my anxiety muscles begin to flex for the new challenges ahead!
My husband and I are book people. Before we both had Kindles and iPads, we packed three or four heavy paperback books to read and exchange. Now we shop the online store and load up the e-readers with books recommended by our friends and hope that we’ll always find an outlet (and our cords and adapters) when we need a charge to keep us supplied with our psycho-literary fix. The thought of being delayed somewhere without a book . . . that's anxiety!
I have a new four-wheeler suitcase. My old, bright red two-wheeler has been roughed around for six or seven years. I’ve been envying the four-wheelers for some time. These pieces of luggage seem to float along beside the travelers allowing a side approach for narrow passages (into bathroom stalls, for example) and easily gliding to a front-on stance facing the counter of the newsstand when purchasing Reese’s Pieces or The Atlantic Monthly before a flight. An ache in my shoulder and back from pulling my two-wheeler with an accessory backpack through airports hastened this upgrade.
My new suitcase has three shallow zippered compartments on its topside, a zippered main compartment, and one of those expansion zippers that increase the depth of the bag by another two inches. My back pack has three zippered compartments and a small front mesh pouch, also with a zipper. I’m not even counting the zippers on the insides of both bags, or the zippers in my wallet and cosmetics case, or the quart-size ziplock bag with my travel liquids. Let’s say, I have about a dozen or more zipped areas available for expressing my travel anxiety. And that’s not even counting my Eddie Bauer “SPORT” slacks with 4 zippered pockets. Travel anxiety? When asked, I will deny it. When observed, I will fake it. I love to travel, so why am I creating so much activity around the contents of all the little segmented compartments of my baggage?
My checking and rechecking of the stuff in all of these sections and partitions approaches an OCD symphony. Dollar bills for the water machine? Bandaids and tea bags? Slippers, pajamas, pens, pencils, paper? Phone charger, camera charger, extra batteries? Even at the airport, finally relaxing with a cup of hot tea, I’m unzipping, zipping, and checking little side pockets and pouches to find my travel notebook, Dramamine just in case, and the tiny card that has the codes for remote accessing my home phone voice mail. And this is all before entering the security line! After going through the strip search of airport security, there is no turning back and my anxiety muscles begin to flex for the new challenges ahead!
Saturday, May 11, 2013
Auracular Spaces #1: London and Libraries
I remember the first time I realized that there is an invisible mist or essence around me and other people, an aura of sorts. It looks like empty space, but it is inhabited with sensory receptors and meanings.
I was sitting in one of six chairs at a heavy oak table. My work was spread out in front of me, and my molecules and meanings were also spread out, maybe eight inches all around my body, maybe even farther. It must have been farther because when another person took a seat opposite me and began to spread out his work and his molecules and meanings, mine were disrupted. I tried to continue thinking, but my processes had been punctured. I made the reasonable request that the person move to another table and he was offended. That chair was empty, the space was free. Wasn’t it? No, it was most certainly occupied, though he could not see or believe that it was.
The image in my mind of what my aura looks like, if it could be seen, is something close to what we see in magnified images of zooplankton: an undulating misty gel that floats around my solid flesh and bone, spreading like a three dimensional halo with indistinct boundaries and a very delicate, sensitive skin just one scintilla thin.
That is just my personal space. There are many kinds of auracular spaces, both personal and communal; human and natural. There is also a resonance between the individual spaces and those larger spaces that are also filled with meanings and sensory experience. More than a resonance even, it is a visceral attraction, a kind of magnetic allure. We go to certain spaces—and we create certain types of spaces through architecture—that tickle and amplify the auracular sense.
In work-a-day life, the zooplankton don’t register in awareness and I’m not attuned to my aura while commuting from station to station. On the other hand, in wandering time and thinking time, the aura unfolds and glows with sensitivity . . .
We strolled up the Strand, past the Inns of Court to St. Paul’s Cathedral. It was closed, so we used the opportunity to have a bit of refreshment and conversation, and then took the tube to Westminster and enjoyed a leisurely stretch of time meandering around the tombs and chapels of the Abbey centered around the shrine of St. Edward the Confessor (c.1002-1066). Mosaics here date from 1268. Old cathedrals always evoke in me questions of sacred space: what architectural manifestations realize the worshipful thoughts of cultures and generations? What exactly were those populations worshiping, and why do we (I) visit these spaces in awe? Sacred space may be a species of what I am calling auracular space.
And a cathedral may be a species of human enclosure that seeks to replicate the experience of awe felt in some natural spaces. In his diary of 1832, the twenty-two year old Charles Darwin speaks of the rain forest of Brazil in these terms.
Whilst seated on a tree, & eating my luncheon in the sublime solitude of the forest, the pleasure I experience is unspeakable . . . . I can only add raptures to former raptures . . . . I was led by feelings ... to the firm conviction of the existence of God, and of the immortality of the soul ... [W]hilst standing in the midst of the grandeur of a Brazilian forest, it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of wonder, admiration, and devotion which fill and elevate the mind. I well remember by conviction that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/darwin/diary/1832.html
Human feats of soaring; enclosed space of stone or steel and glass are attempts to replicate that experience in human settlements. St. Chapelle in Paris filters light through colored glass to achieve a related effect, not soaring height, but visually intense and stimulating space. Is the effect of a place like Stonehenge thought to be the same? Was it an attempt to evoke other senses or to evoke spirit directly?
After Westminster we search out the underground Cabinet War Rooms where Churchill and his advisers spent the most dangerous days and nights of WWII. The rooms are preserved just as they were at the end of the war. Broadcasts of Churchill encouraging the citizens of England are tremendously moving in several rooms where photographs of the effects of German bombing surround the listener. Especially after seeing Copenhagen the previous evening, we can’t help but be awed by evidence of the devastation and extremity of war. In this space, I realize that I don’t fully appreciate my father’s perpetual retelling his landing at Omaha Beach on D-Day and liberating Europe with the First Infantry. This was the defining experience of his life.
Exhausted by so much concentrated viewing, listening, feeling, we take a respite in a low-ceilinged pub with another version of bitters and fish and chips and then return to our hotel for a rest and planning for the evening. By the time we get re-mobilized, a movie seems the best idea and we take a London cab (quite the luxury experience!) to see a film called The Last September about the final days of English imperialism in Ireland as “the troubles” were beginning to erupt. Some fine performances, but a very difficult script, confusing, gaps, etc. We walked home and found a late snack of hummus and nutty wheat bread at a local mini-mart just before closing.
We missed breakfast time at the hotel on Saturday morning, but that’s vacation! We walked to the nearby British Library and in far more beautiful, indeed inspiring, surroundings, had a brunch-time snack. This library, opened within the past two years, is a sacred space of a different kind. Its modern design wants a little exploring before full appreciation dawns on the explorer. The feature that transformed it from a building into a work of art for me was the six-story glass tower of books at its centre. Called “the King’s Library” this collection of 65,000 volumes from George III’s library is a stunningly beautiful, and yet practical, column that defines the core public space in the entire building. To be in the presence of this commitment to the history of human thought seems to me a kind of worship. I could sit here, in the fullness of this presence, and read and talk all day.
We spend deeply-felt time in the hushed and darkened manuscript room noting the qualities of documents such as the Magna Carta, the letter of King John listing the “liberties conceded by him to his subjects” in 1215, as well as many handwritten manuscripts of our favorite literary figures: Yeats, Joyce, Woolf, Auden, among others. In this room, you can put on headsets and press a button to listen to the recorded voice of many of the figures who did public broadcasts in the early years of radio. We both listened to Virginia Woolf’s broadcast from April 20, 1937 of an essay called “Craftsmanship.”
This power of suggestion is one of the most mysterious properties of words. . . . Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations. . . . they are so stored with meanings, with memories . . .
[Words] hate anything that stamps them with one meaning or confines them to one attitude, for it is their nature to change. Perhaps that is their most striking peculiarity--their need of change. It is because the truth they try to catch is many-sided and they convey it by being themselves many-sided, flashing this way, then that. Thus they mean one thing to one person, another thing to another person; they are unintelligible to one generation, plain as a pikestaff to the next. And it is because of this complexity that they survive. (203, 206)
We also spent some time with a real printing press and heavy metal pieces of type in another room. We are both attracted to the physical object of “book” as an important experience rapidly diminishing in importance in our globalized world. What does it mean if the texture and subtleties of paper, color, and weight are no longer associated with the process of reading or learning? Does it mean anything? We have always been subject to changes in technology that have one generation lamenting the loss of their valued experiences while another embraces new modes and values. Some say we gain the very fullness of association that Virginia Woolf lauds through our new web-based technology where links create a finely threaded network of meanings, echoes, memories, and potential futures. Have we lost very much as we gain this speed of technological association? I think so. It feels different to experience the associations coming via synapse firing in one’s own brain than via hypertext links across the internet. Loss or gain, is anyone measuring this?
It was hard to leave the rich auracular space within the library that resonates at the same frequency as my own aura. Vincent and I had our first date in the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. He was sitting outside on the steps between the stone lions waiting for me, wearing a red shirt. I approached via 41st Street and saw him first. We sat beside one another in the main reading room for hours. The compatibility established in that afternoon will last us a lifetime.
I was sitting in one of six chairs at a heavy oak table. My work was spread out in front of me, and my molecules and meanings were also spread out, maybe eight inches all around my body, maybe even farther. It must have been farther because when another person took a seat opposite me and began to spread out his work and his molecules and meanings, mine were disrupted. I tried to continue thinking, but my processes had been punctured. I made the reasonable request that the person move to another table and he was offended. That chair was empty, the space was free. Wasn’t it? No, it was most certainly occupied, though he could not see or believe that it was.
The image in my mind of what my aura looks like, if it could be seen, is something close to what we see in magnified images of zooplankton: an undulating misty gel that floats around my solid flesh and bone, spreading like a three dimensional halo with indistinct boundaries and a very delicate, sensitive skin just one scintilla thin.
That is just my personal space. There are many kinds of auracular spaces, both personal and communal; human and natural. There is also a resonance between the individual spaces and those larger spaces that are also filled with meanings and sensory experience. More than a resonance even, it is a visceral attraction, a kind of magnetic allure. We go to certain spaces—and we create certain types of spaces through architecture—that tickle and amplify the auracular sense.
In work-a-day life, the zooplankton don’t register in awareness and I’m not attuned to my aura while commuting from station to station. On the other hand, in wandering time and thinking time, the aura unfolds and glows with sensitivity . . .
We strolled up the Strand, past the Inns of Court to St. Paul’s Cathedral. It was closed, so we used the opportunity to have a bit of refreshment and conversation, and then took the tube to Westminster and enjoyed a leisurely stretch of time meandering around the tombs and chapels of the Abbey centered around the shrine of St. Edward the Confessor (c.1002-1066). Mosaics here date from 1268. Old cathedrals always evoke in me questions of sacred space: what architectural manifestations realize the worshipful thoughts of cultures and generations? What exactly were those populations worshiping, and why do we (I) visit these spaces in awe? Sacred space may be a species of what I am calling auracular space.
And a cathedral may be a species of human enclosure that seeks to replicate the experience of awe felt in some natural spaces. In his diary of 1832, the twenty-two year old Charles Darwin speaks of the rain forest of Brazil in these terms.
Whilst seated on a tree, & eating my luncheon in the sublime solitude of the forest, the pleasure I experience is unspeakable . . . . I can only add raptures to former raptures . . . . I was led by feelings ... to the firm conviction of the existence of God, and of the immortality of the soul ... [W]hilst standing in the midst of the grandeur of a Brazilian forest, it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of wonder, admiration, and devotion which fill and elevate the mind. I well remember by conviction that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/darwin/diary/1832.html
Human feats of soaring; enclosed space of stone or steel and glass are attempts to replicate that experience in human settlements. St. Chapelle in Paris filters light through colored glass to achieve a related effect, not soaring height, but visually intense and stimulating space. Is the effect of a place like Stonehenge thought to be the same? Was it an attempt to evoke other senses or to evoke spirit directly?
After Westminster we search out the underground Cabinet War Rooms where Churchill and his advisers spent the most dangerous days and nights of WWII. The rooms are preserved just as they were at the end of the war. Broadcasts of Churchill encouraging the citizens of England are tremendously moving in several rooms where photographs of the effects of German bombing surround the listener. Especially after seeing Copenhagen the previous evening, we can’t help but be awed by evidence of the devastation and extremity of war. In this space, I realize that I don’t fully appreciate my father’s perpetual retelling his landing at Omaha Beach on D-Day and liberating Europe with the First Infantry. This was the defining experience of his life.
Exhausted by so much concentrated viewing, listening, feeling, we take a respite in a low-ceilinged pub with another version of bitters and fish and chips and then return to our hotel for a rest and planning for the evening. By the time we get re-mobilized, a movie seems the best idea and we take a London cab (quite the luxury experience!) to see a film called The Last September about the final days of English imperialism in Ireland as “the troubles” were beginning to erupt. Some fine performances, but a very difficult script, confusing, gaps, etc. We walked home and found a late snack of hummus and nutty wheat bread at a local mini-mart just before closing.
We missed breakfast time at the hotel on Saturday morning, but that’s vacation! We walked to the nearby British Library and in far more beautiful, indeed inspiring, surroundings, had a brunch-time snack. This library, opened within the past two years, is a sacred space of a different kind. Its modern design wants a little exploring before full appreciation dawns on the explorer. The feature that transformed it from a building into a work of art for me was the six-story glass tower of books at its centre. Called “the King’s Library” this collection of 65,000 volumes from George III’s library is a stunningly beautiful, and yet practical, column that defines the core public space in the entire building. To be in the presence of this commitment to the history of human thought seems to me a kind of worship. I could sit here, in the fullness of this presence, and read and talk all day.
We spend deeply-felt time in the hushed and darkened manuscript room noting the qualities of documents such as the Magna Carta, the letter of King John listing the “liberties conceded by him to his subjects” in 1215, as well as many handwritten manuscripts of our favorite literary figures: Yeats, Joyce, Woolf, Auden, among others. In this room, you can put on headsets and press a button to listen to the recorded voice of many of the figures who did public broadcasts in the early years of radio. We both listened to Virginia Woolf’s broadcast from April 20, 1937 of an essay called “Craftsmanship.”
This power of suggestion is one of the most mysterious properties of words. . . . Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations. . . . they are so stored with meanings, with memories . . .
[Words] hate anything that stamps them with one meaning or confines them to one attitude, for it is their nature to change. Perhaps that is their most striking peculiarity--their need of change. It is because the truth they try to catch is many-sided and they convey it by being themselves many-sided, flashing this way, then that. Thus they mean one thing to one person, another thing to another person; they are unintelligible to one generation, plain as a pikestaff to the next. And it is because of this complexity that they survive. (203, 206)
We also spent some time with a real printing press and heavy metal pieces of type in another room. We are both attracted to the physical object of “book” as an important experience rapidly diminishing in importance in our globalized world. What does it mean if the texture and subtleties of paper, color, and weight are no longer associated with the process of reading or learning? Does it mean anything? We have always been subject to changes in technology that have one generation lamenting the loss of their valued experiences while another embraces new modes and values. Some say we gain the very fullness of association that Virginia Woolf lauds through our new web-based technology where links create a finely threaded network of meanings, echoes, memories, and potential futures. Have we lost very much as we gain this speed of technological association? I think so. It feels different to experience the associations coming via synapse firing in one’s own brain than via hypertext links across the internet. Loss or gain, is anyone measuring this?
It was hard to leave the rich auracular space within the library that resonates at the same frequency as my own aura. Vincent and I had our first date in the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. He was sitting outside on the steps between the stone lions waiting for me, wearing a red shirt. I approached via 41st Street and saw him first. We sat beside one another in the main reading room for hours. The compatibility established in that afternoon will last us a lifetime.
Friday, May 3, 2013
One Foot On the Ground
What comes to mind when you hear the phrase, “one foot on the ground”?
“Where is the other foot?”
In a literal sense, the other foot might be poised in the air, in liminal space, neither here nor there but utterly capable of landing fore or aft, higher or lower. The literal quickly gives way to the metaphorical, however, and I begin to imagine that other foot in seven-league boots at the end of a telescoping leg worthy of Dr. Seuss and extending across several pages to land quite anywhere in this galaxy or another.
Well, that isn’t exactly my story!
I have strong roots in several specific places and I love my home and family, but there have been times when I’ve been beguiled by the idea of reincarnation. At those times, I have felt strongly that my spirit sailed with explorers on uncharted seas. Seated at the very tip of the bow of a sailboat on a 360-degree plate of Atlantic Ocean, I tingled with the excitement of recognition. Maybe today we would make safe landfall, but if not, if never, this extraordinary elation might be enough. Sleeping out alone under the stars, albeit on my own farm, I felt the earth at my back and the deeply bright universe meeting me as surely as the familiar local views approaching through the windshield of my Prius. I would have lifted both feet willingly if my call to be taken by extraterrestrials had been answered in those nights.
I have one foot on the ground, a solid foundation for building a nest, loving children, and serving a community, but the other foot is a rambling rover. It has walked in heavy boots in the fresh furrow and in red high heels up and down the avenues. It has been tickled with my fancy for crossing bridges literally on foot, and humored my delight in walking down the middle of the street (not to be confused with the middle of the road). My itinerant foot has helped me cross many a line in the sand when that foot wasn't stuck in the mud or in my mouth.
It was on both my feet that I walked into the woods near Walden Pond where Henry David Thoreau created a small base for his peripatetic musings. With one foot on the ground, I appreciated his encouragement to keep the other firmly in the air along with scores of castles thriving in the celestial atmosphere. “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”
My nomadic foot has had a more profound influence on my career than its steadier mate. I embarked on an adult career path as a school teacher, one of the steadiest jobs in town. I heard my peers declare in our mid-twenties, “I have secured tenure and my own classroom, and I never need to do anything new for the rest of my life!” I nearly tripped over a foot bent on skipping off that path where a dim horizon spooled off slowly like a narrow rope.
Taking risk after risk walking in different shoes has rubbed my skin raw in some spots and built up calluses in others. There were some years when I willingly soaked both feet in lukewarm water and rested for the next incitement. Fortunately, we now have a term for the zig-zag career path I’ve had a hard time defending as an early adopter. This generation of workers who build skill sets that can be transported across professions is called “Generation Flux.” All in all, I’ve felt extremely fortunate to work and walk in locations as diverse as farm fields, hospital corridors, classrooms, and Rockefeller Center with people ranging in age from pre-school to the 95-year-old senior partners in a NYC law firm.
These essays are witness to life when my rambling foot has been ascendant, taking me around the block, over the mountain, or to another continent. It is written in a state of mind produced when—shoelaces, buckles, and velcro be damned—that foot has been given free rein to lead me a merry chase down a grassy lane, subway steps, jetway, or simply along a train of thought. My walking foot adopted a motto from Thoreau and infused my life with it: “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life . . . and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
I’ve been on a journey—not entirely footloose, but not tethered or blindfolded either—and these are the souvenirs that I’ve collected along the way. Some are as ephemeral as the rainbow I embraced with naked arms in an outdoor shower, and some are the same souvenirs that you carry with you because every time I put one foot forward, my human experience is both similar to and different than yours. This is not a chronological narrative of one or even of several travel adventures, but you will find many stories and anecdotes where vivid characters will do a holographic dance in front of your eyes. Behind your eyes, I hope you will experience the curiosity and wonder of not knowing where that foot will land next, and maybe even feel the tingle in your own mobile appendage.
“Where is the other foot?”
In a literal sense, the other foot might be poised in the air, in liminal space, neither here nor there but utterly capable of landing fore or aft, higher or lower. The literal quickly gives way to the metaphorical, however, and I begin to imagine that other foot in seven-league boots at the end of a telescoping leg worthy of Dr. Seuss and extending across several pages to land quite anywhere in this galaxy or another.
Well, that isn’t exactly my story!
I have strong roots in several specific places and I love my home and family, but there have been times when I’ve been beguiled by the idea of reincarnation. At those times, I have felt strongly that my spirit sailed with explorers on uncharted seas. Seated at the very tip of the bow of a sailboat on a 360-degree plate of Atlantic Ocean, I tingled with the excitement of recognition. Maybe today we would make safe landfall, but if not, if never, this extraordinary elation might be enough. Sleeping out alone under the stars, albeit on my own farm, I felt the earth at my back and the deeply bright universe meeting me as surely as the familiar local views approaching through the windshield of my Prius. I would have lifted both feet willingly if my call to be taken by extraterrestrials had been answered in those nights.
I have one foot on the ground, a solid foundation for building a nest, loving children, and serving a community, but the other foot is a rambling rover. It has walked in heavy boots in the fresh furrow and in red high heels up and down the avenues. It has been tickled with my fancy for crossing bridges literally on foot, and humored my delight in walking down the middle of the street (not to be confused with the middle of the road). My itinerant foot has helped me cross many a line in the sand when that foot wasn't stuck in the mud or in my mouth.
It was on both my feet that I walked into the woods near Walden Pond where Henry David Thoreau created a small base for his peripatetic musings. With one foot on the ground, I appreciated his encouragement to keep the other firmly in the air along with scores of castles thriving in the celestial atmosphere. “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”
My nomadic foot has had a more profound influence on my career than its steadier mate. I embarked on an adult career path as a school teacher, one of the steadiest jobs in town. I heard my peers declare in our mid-twenties, “I have secured tenure and my own classroom, and I never need to do anything new for the rest of my life!” I nearly tripped over a foot bent on skipping off that path where a dim horizon spooled off slowly like a narrow rope.
Taking risk after risk walking in different shoes has rubbed my skin raw in some spots and built up calluses in others. There were some years when I willingly soaked both feet in lukewarm water and rested for the next incitement. Fortunately, we now have a term for the zig-zag career path I’ve had a hard time defending as an early adopter. This generation of workers who build skill sets that can be transported across professions is called “Generation Flux.” All in all, I’ve felt extremely fortunate to work and walk in locations as diverse as farm fields, hospital corridors, classrooms, and Rockefeller Center with people ranging in age from pre-school to the 95-year-old senior partners in a NYC law firm.
These essays are witness to life when my rambling foot has been ascendant, taking me around the block, over the mountain, or to another continent. It is written in a state of mind produced when—shoelaces, buckles, and velcro be damned—that foot has been given free rein to lead me a merry chase down a grassy lane, subway steps, jetway, or simply along a train of thought. My walking foot adopted a motto from Thoreau and infused my life with it: “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life . . . and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
I’ve been on a journey—not entirely footloose, but not tethered or blindfolded either—and these are the souvenirs that I’ve collected along the way. Some are as ephemeral as the rainbow I embraced with naked arms in an outdoor shower, and some are the same souvenirs that you carry with you because every time I put one foot forward, my human experience is both similar to and different than yours. This is not a chronological narrative of one or even of several travel adventures, but you will find many stories and anecdotes where vivid characters will do a holographic dance in front of your eyes. Behind your eyes, I hope you will experience the curiosity and wonder of not knowing where that foot will land next, and maybe even feel the tingle in your own mobile appendage.
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