Ms. T.

This has been a hard year of losing teachers, first a high-school English teacher who was my yearbook advisor, and now the woman who embodied the Talented and Gifted Program for fourth- and fifth-graders in my city. That program gave me faith--that I have even now--that even if the place I found myself was dreary, somewhere only a shortbus ride away was a place where people did not laugh at me for being smart.

I learned from Tim today that the woman who first embodied that faith for me died a month ago. I suppose that these days the children of Newport News have a different teacher for that program, and who they will come to associate with their own faith. For me, though, there could be no other.

It is funny: I have, in my twenty-two years of formal education, had a lot of teachers, many of them immensely inspiring (let's not talk about the others today). But you never do forget the first teacher who really expected you to stretch, and gave you some idea of how to start, and made the whole thing seem like the most fun a person could ever have. Ms. T., each time I walk into my own classroom, I do it with the hope of bringing you back to life and introducing you to another group of kids hungry for what you gave us all.

Giving up on our tree, boy.

Despite my hopeful attitude from back in August, our ancient, beautiful (well, it once was: recently it has looked a little haggard) giant tree is coming down today.

In this neighborhood, there are many of these old trees, some in better shape than others. According to the historic preservation guidelines for our neighborhood and several others in the city, they are part of the "urban canopy." The one in our yard must be about two and a half to three feet in diameter. Sadly, and I do not use that word lightly, it is very diseased, and from the look of some of the scarring where earlier limbs were removed, it does not seem that it was very carefully maintained in the past.

But as I write this there is a man sawing away at some of its long limbs, and other men are collecting the branches as they fall and running them through a chipper. They started about a half-hour ago and I expect this job will take hours, as they move closer and closer to the tree's heart. I cannot keep watching this.

We will miss you, Tree.

Dear Madeleine L'Engle,

Thank you for writing all those books that I loved like I had never loved books before, and rarely have since.

Thank you for creating imaginary worlds that made me hurt because they were not real.

Thank you for permeating my mind with images that are still there.

Thank you for making me cry.

Thank you for convincing me that sometimes you can get to those worlds after all.

We'll miss you.

le Zattere

Ian Williams, over at xtcian, asked this morning, "what place do you miss terribly right now, and can you link to a picture of it?"

Here is my picture:



For those of you unfamiliar with Venice, that's a shot from the Zattere, along Dorsoduro, looking at the Giudecca at the left and out towards the shipyards off in the distance.

I was there with a group of other people interested in some of what I am interested in, and we had gone out to Dorsoduro that afternoon because it was important to us and to what we were interested in.

Witness this, from Canto LXXXIII:

San Gregorio, San Trovaso
Old Ziovan raced at seventy after his glories
and came in long last
And the family eyes stayed the same Adriatic
for three generations (San Vio)
and was, I suppose, last month the Redentore as usual

Will I ever see the Giudecca again?
or the lights
against it, Ca' Foscari, Ca' Giustinian
or the Ca', as they say, of Desdemona
or the two towers where are the cypress no more
or the boats moored off le Zattere
or the north quai of the Sensaria DAKRUON DAKRUON*

[DAKRUON in Greek (and the second time it should be in Greek letters--don't know how to do that with blogger) means "weeping."]

Ezra Pound wrote that while he was penned up in a cage at Pisa, having been arrested for treason. The poems he wrote there catalogue his losses, and his feared losses, as if they are fending off the loss of his mind or the ultimate loss. Of that same cage he wrote in the same poem:

Nor man who has passed a month in the death cells
believes in cages for beasts

The afternoon we walked around Dorsoduro, looking at San Gregorio, San Trovaso, San Vio, it was raining. In fact, as we had taken the vaporetto from San Servolo back to San Zaccharia, we had watched the storm roll in from the Lido.


While we were waiting for another vap to go over to Dorsoduro, the god of waters had opened a can of rain on our heads, and we had huddled together at the vap station, on the boat, in a walkway, waiting for it to stop. We bought umbrellas from the guys who show up with bags of them when it rains--never was 2 euros better spent (though the umbrella will soon disintegrate). Finally we gave up, and wandered together through Dorsoduro in the rain, looking for traces of the man who had lived there, had made the place into poetry.

At the end of our tour, we came to le Zattere, and the rain stopped, and that famous evening Dorsoduro light gave us an illuminated glimpse of what we came for, the Redentore as usual:


Isn't it funny how one person's nostalgia, one person's loss, can so quickly become another's?

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.

All the new thinking is about loss.

In this it resembles all the old thinking.

What is it precisely that signals us that we are in a moment that is winding to a close? Something about the light, and the way it quietly fades in the afternoon, signalling you that finally, if you are going to keep reading, you should turn on a lamp? Or that slightly elevated spinning sound that happens before you eject a CD or a DVD? The soundtrack and credits rolling? People starting to pack up their things? Hurry up please, it's time?

And whatever that thing is, is it the thing that makes us want to hold on to some possession, forgetting that, as Crazy Aunt Purl so eloquently said today, "it's just a blanket, it's not a soul"? Do we grasp, then, at a familiar idea? Or spin a new world view to accommodate a change of heart? Or do we instead hammer away as if nothing has changed, as if this present state of things will endure always?

Even as we are aware that we are in this moment, we are already imagining its passing, desiring it, fearing it. Do we panic then because we see ourselves out there, in some unimaginable later moment, doing something we think we might do but that we cannot yet envision? Or is it because we know what we did last time, and please God let us not do that again?

What is it we want when we imagine this future us? What should we hope for? (Wait without hope, Eliot says, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing.)

In these present moments, then, too often we scurry around, collecting, preserving, filing, trying to remember--staving off loss, because we imagine that this future us--wherever we are--will appreciate that, will remember us kindly, will forgive us. Or we decide that this is time we have been waiting for, to clean things out, chuck out the old xeroxes, cull our bookshelves, take a box to the used CD store, defragment all our drives (hard or otherwise). In this way, we tell ourselves, we will be unencumbered--our past will be more visible without these encrustations, and our future freer. We will have room to spread out, we say, with a slight laugh and a glance over our shoulder.

All this prevention, all this remorse--it is all a denial of desire. Or, "Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances."

What if instead I lay down the anxiety, and instead surrender? Put away the calendar, let a few things slip, cease taking pleasure at being called a model--instead just think about what each armstroke feels like, whether each hand is taking a handfull of water, whether there is rotation in the hips?

Stop planning: this is a time for relishing the feeling of today.