Professional

This is the fifth year in a row I’ve blogged some version of the rows of chairs Keene State College sets out each year for graduation. There’s something about the predictable geometry of neatly aligned folding chairs that I find aesthetically pleasing, and at this time of year, I’m always too busy grading papers to blog something new. So while I’m largely off-line dealing with my end-term paper-piles, I’ll leave you to contemplate rows of empty chairs as another class gets ready to begin their lives as college-educated professionals.

This is my contribution to today’s Photo Friday theme, Professional. As an amateur, I’m not exactly sure what makes for a “Professional” photo, but given the fact that paid crews take care every year to arrange the seats for graduation in meticulous rows, I figure this shot captures professionalism as well as any other.

 

Electricity

Circus performer Yelena Larkina looks positively electric in this photo from the Big Apple Circus last weekend. Surely this is what a cloud of electrons twirling around a nucleus looks like, at least if atoms consisted of circus performers spinning a half dozen silver hula hoops.

This is my contribution to today’s Photo Friday theme, Electricity. You can see a photo-set from the Big Apple Circus here.

 

Cold

Now that spring has sprung in Boston, it’s far too warm to walk the streets in full protective hockey gear. But the fact that these four goalies were walking out of a bar–along with the fact that their jerseys suggest they play for team Molson rather than either the Boston Bruins or Montreal Canadiens, who duked it out in a red-hot NHL playoff game at the TD Banknorth Garden last night–suggests that all hockey fans, regardless of team affiliation, share an affinity for beer. After all, both hockey and beer, like revenge, are best served ice cold.

This is my contribution for this week’s Photo Friday theme, Cold. Since we had plans to be in Boston yesterday afternoon, J and I tried to get tickets to last night’s playoff game…but now that the Bruins are winning, their tickets are a hot commodity, leaving J and me out in the cold.

 

Fragile

Imagine the fragile predicament of spring flowers. In the spirit of the early bird catching the worm, April plants send up sprouts to soak in as much spring sun as they can before being shaded by early-leafing trees, spreading shrubs, and even their flowering fellows. But an early bird on New England turf can face a deadly surprise when April nights plunge below freezing or even bring sudden snow.

This past week, the ex-girlfriend of one of J’s longtime friends passed away after a sudden illness, exacerbated by chronic medical problems, left her unconscious and brain-dead. I’d met D when J and I traveled to Atlanta last summer; she was J’s age, which is two years older than I am. Life is a fragile condition, and D had struggled with an ongoing array of medical problems: brain cancer, asthma, partial deafness. We’d known that D’s health was precarious, but when I met her, she seemed healthy enough: she didn’t look like the kind of person-turned-patient who could, in the span of a week, suffer respiratory failure, several heart attacks, and death. Intellectually, I know that life is fragile and sickness and death can strike at any time: still, I’d never imagined last summer that an otherwise lively person my own age would be dead by springtime. Although death is the inevitable and thus entirely “natural” result of any given life, human nature tends toward procrastination and denial. Yes, death happens eventually…but not now, not soon, and not to people like me.

Last week, before we’d heard about D’s decline and ultimate death, J remarked in passing that in ten years, all the pets we presently own will be dead. What he didn’t need to say, of course, was that in the course of ten years, either or both of us will probably experience other losses: relatives, friends, acquaintances. J and I have already attended our first wedding together, but we’ve yet to go together to our first shared funeral…but this too shall come to pass. In response to my recent post about Reggie and the not-quite Rainbow Bridge, a friend remarked that I’m “awfully young to be so mortality-aware.” In a world of cause and effect, isn’t it strange that an awareness of mortality should come as a surprise at any age? Given the natural and inevitable way of all flesh, shouldn’t it be more surprising that we insist on ignoring crystal-clear reminders that impermanence rules?

D suffered from asthma, as I do, and although I manage mine through medication, I know any disease affecting the lungs has the potential to be deadly. Having had one attack years ago, before I’d been officially diagnosed, when I nearly gave up the ghost out of sheer exhaustion, I know how easy it is to die. And yet, when you’ve contemplated your own mortality in an actual rather than an abstract sense, your remaining days have a certain gift-like quality. Having almost died once, you realize any extra hours you can squeeze from Time are an undeserved bonus, each day being a precious thing you’d previously taken for granted. Life is a fragile condition, and each day we spend above-ground is as precious, tenuous, and beautiful as an April flower.

This is my belated contribution to this week’s Photo Friday theme, Fragile. This is actually the second time I’ve titled a blog-post “Fragile”; the first considers flood damage to an old stone bridge that has since been repaired.

 

Emotions

Normally, if a guy the size of Glen “Big Baby” Davis got right in my face and started screaming, I’d probably have a heart attack. But when “Baby” appears in excited, larger-than-life glory on the JumboTron at a Boston Celtics home game to rally the crowd, fans don’t get scared: they get loud.

On Wednesday night, J and I watched Big Baby and the rest of the white-hot Celtics stomp the Phoenix Suns at the last home game we have tickets for this season. What I love about attending basketball or other sports events (as I’ve argued before) is the way the emotions of the game completely erase whatever worries or concerns I bring with me to the arena. Watching sports on TV can be similarly cathartic, but there’s something about being in an enormous arena with a sellout crowd of other rabid fans that works wonders for one’s stress levels. It’s possible, I’ve learned, to read student papers while watching televised sports; Stan Lombardo, for instance, once admitted that he worked on his translations of the Iliad and Odyssey while watching college basketball on TV. But grading papers or translating Greek classics just isn’t feasible if you’re actually at a basketball game. If you’re actually attending a professional or college basketball game, it would give a whole new meaning of March Madness even to try to squeeze in some work.

The ancient Greeks, of course, were the first to argue that drama is cathartic, and the ancient Greeks were equally fond of sports: they are, after all, the inventors of the collective catharsis we call the Olympics. I suppose on Wednesday night I could have set down my grading pen in order to watch a play…but they typically don’t let you scream, swear, and stomp your feet at plays. Drama can be psychologically cathartic because you become subsumed in the emotions of others: watching Medea poised to kill her children, for instance, you might re-visit every hellish break-up or desire for revenge you’ve ever experienced. But both watching and (especially) reading plays is essentially a quietly passive act: the actors on the stage or the characters on the page are doing something, but you as viewer or reader are “active” only in your own engaged mind.

For me, the most powerful emotions involve motion. When I have something troubling on my mind, I could sit down and try to mental it out…or I could go for a brisk walk and let my feet do my thinking. If watching a film or play offers emotional release by taking you out of yourself long enough to empathize with the concerns of fictitious characters, sporting events are equally cathartic with the added benefit of bodily involvement. No, can’t “participate” in an NBA game by jumping from your seat and taking to the hardwood to give the home team a hand…but the players, coaches, referees, and even arena security guards don’t expect you to spend the entire game completely silent and spellbound in your seats.

At least one of my sisters and several of my friends who are big-time film buffs would probably be dismayed to hear me admit it, but I actually have a difficult time sitting still for even the most engrossing movie: even my Zen school, with its emphasis on sitting meditation, expects practitioners to remain seated for only about thirty minutes at a stretch before getting everyone up for walking meditation. Does it come as a surprise, then, that I actually prefer walking to sitting meditation, and that my favorite form of collective catharsis isn’t sniffling through a sad movie but leaping to my feet to scream over a great play or swear over a bad call?

In other words, when none other than Kevin Garnett appears on the Celtics JumboTron exhorting fans to GET ON YOUR FEET…

…I am very grateful to comply. Yes, sir!

This is my day-late contribution to this week’s Photo Friday theme, Emotions. I shot the JumboTron images of Glen Davis and Kevin Garnett at the Celtics vs. Pistons game on March 5; the rest of today’s images come from Wednesday night’s game against the Phoenix Suns.

 

Found objects

Today’s Photo Friday theme, Found Objects, has my name written all over it. Not only have I previously blogged found objects like a child’s stuffed octopus, a rain-soaked pair of glasses, and a dirty pacifier, I have an entire blog category devoted to the subject. In a world where it’s so incredibly easy to get lost, it gives me a sense of hope to think that sometimes, precious things like stuffed toys, blankets, and binkies are found.

It seems similarly optimistic to think that someone stumbling upon a wallet in the woods would simply brace it on a branch, allowing its rightful owner to re-trace steps to re-claim it. Have I any way of knowing whether the various keys, watches, and cell phones (!!!) I’ve found in the woods over the years have ever found their way back to their rightful homes? No. But still, I hold out hope that somewhere and someday, possessors and possessions will be reunited, this wallet staying in precisely the same spot on a heavily traveled trail for several days before someone, rightful owner or otherwise, claimed it. Only a philosopher will dare ponder whether this wallet was finally found or merely lost again.

There’s something sad about a single lost glove bereft of both home and mate…but a matched but nevertheless lost pair is a real rarity. If you’re lost with a companion, are you truly lost? Or is a matched pair of gloves merely wandering, seeking adventure apart from any interfering appendage?

But if found objects like cast-off pacifiers give me hope, posters advertising the lost tug at my heart, pointing as they do to the way loved ones sometimes disappear and ultimately pass. It’s one thing to believe (on Good Friday of all days) in the God of Lost Things…but who but the most optimistic holds out hope for a kitten lost right before a massive snowfall? Whether one lost kitten makes it through another storm, shouldn’t we all find comfort knowing that someone, somewhere, believes, hopes, and prays she can?

Love is akin to hope, so those who love truly hope deeply as well. The posters J and I spotted earlier this month for “missing Max” looked brand new, but Max hasn’t been seen since August. Is an entire season or more too long to hold out hope for a returned friend? At what point do you stop putting up posters or take down the weathered ones that remain, reminders that the lost aren’t always found? Or does a faithful friend ever stop looking, wondering, and hoping, believing in his heart of hearts that Max is out there somewhere, and okay?

If faith were enough to bring lost cats and kittens home, return wallets to their rightful owners, reconcile mis-matched mittens, and return toys, blankets, and binkies to the little ones who love them, we’d have nothing in the way of Lost and Found in this world. Instead, we live in a messy and dangerous place where we sometimes lose, forget, or misplace the things we value the most, and people who don’t know or care about the true value of our sentimental things find them as if by mistake, not knowing the love, hope, and disappointment they hold. These aren’t just lost animals and objects, you see: they’re forlorn wanderers looking for home.

 

The good life

Years ago, when I was a hungry graduate student living in Boston, I did occasional word-processing work for a lawyer who was writing a textbook on Massachusetts landlord-tenant law. Out of the various chapters I typed and subsequently edited from dictation, one phrase of legalese has stayed with me over the years: quiet enjoyment.

From what I recall, quiet enjoyment refers to a tenant’s legal right to live undisturbed in their rented premises, free from unreasonably noisy neighbors, a harassing landlord, unsafe or unsanitary living conditions, and other sources of nuisance. Because of the implicit covenant of quiet enjoyment existing between landlord and tenant, a landlord can’t turn off your heat, refuse to repair or maintain your rental unit, or otherwise make it uncomfortable or unsafe for you to live in your own apartment. Even though your landlord owns the roof over your head, she or he can’t lord that fact over you. Regardless of how your landlord feels about your politics, your love life, your race, or your religion, she or he can’t interfere with what you chose to do behind your own closed doors as long as your pursuit of quiet enjoyment doesn’t interfere with the quiet enjoyment of others.

In other words, the principle of quiet enjoyment insists that an individual’s home is her or his castle even if that home is rented, not owned…and that’s a principle I’ve returned to many times over the years as I’ve lived in various rental units around Boston, a house my ex-husband and I owned in New Hampshire, and the apartment I now rent in Keene. Regardless of where I’ve lived or whose name has been on the deed, “quiet enjoyment” has become the benchmark of my own domestic happiness: do I feel like the queen of my residential castle, or do I feel as if I’m encroaching on someone else’s domain?

When my ex-husband and I first separated, I made a conscious effort to beautify my surroundings, recognizing my apartment as the place I’d be pupating in as I made the transition from “married and sharing an apartment” to “single and living on my own.” In those early days of separation, it felt absolutely essential that I be able to return to my apartment after teaching, running errands, or socializing with friends and feel like I’d come home to a place that was clean, quiet, and entirely mine. My apartment didn’t have to be fancy, and it didn’t have to look like Martha Stewart lived there, but it had to feel like it was mine, a place where I could close the door on the rest of the world and simply settle into my own quiet enjoyment. As one of my sisters said after her own divorce, “Sometimes I just want to come home, curl up on my couch, and enjoy a glass of wine.” At the end of the day, that’s as good a definition of “quiet enjoyment” as any lawyer dictating paragraphs of legalese could devise.

The good life, in other words, isn’t necessarily about how much you have: it’s about how free you feel to enjoy what you have. More than just a roof over your head, do you have a place that feels like home when you return to it: a place that offers quiet sanctuary to you, your loved ones, and the possessions you hold dear?

This is my day-late contribution to this week’s Photo Friday theme, The Good Life.

 

Surreal

It seems I’ve been thinking about upside-down tree reflections ever since Leslee blogged one recently. Or maybe I still have this picture of Waban’s festive holiday tree reflected in snow-melt still in mind. Or maybe I can blame the “Search” box at the bottom of my blog side-bar, for when I typed in “surreal,” this post was at the top of the search results.

Whatever the reason, the above picture of pine trees reflected in the half-frozen surface of Goose Pond in December, 2006 is what I’m posting for today’s Photo Friday theme, Surreal. It’s always odd to see an inverse version of ordinary objects, a simple pond or puddle de-familiarizing the same old sights. In December of 2006, Goose Pond was on the edge of a several-month deep freeze; now in March of 2008, New England is coming out of all that. Yesterday in Keene, a noontime walk revealed the family of snow-folk I’d blogged last week is now giving up the snow-ghost. Eaves were dripping snow-melt, and sidewalks that had never been shoveled were topped with a slushy soup of thawing ice and hard-packed snow.

The fact that last week’s snow is quickly melting is in no way surreal: snow falls and subsequently melts every year in New England. What’s surreal is the climatic (and often climactic) contrast I’ve experienced in my weekly “commute” between Keene and Newton. Yesterday in Keene the weather was mild and sunny, joggers ran in shorts, sidewalks were often impassable with slippery slush and shoe-topping puddles of snow-melt, and several feet of snow remained in yards and other shaded, un-shoveled spots. Today in Newton, there’s virtually no snow anywhere: the last of it melted yesterday, revealing grass, last year’s remaining leaves, and mud, mud, mud. Simply by driving the 80-some miles from southwest New Hampshire to the suburbs of Boston, it seems I’ve entered an entirely different climate, one where I can wear shoes rather than boots and can stroll down a sidewalk without watching my slippery step.

This time of year in Keene, you see, you don’t have to head to Goose Pond to take in the surreal sight of something reflected upside down in water. All you have to do is look at the sidewalk in front of you when you try to ford your way across Main Street.

 

Art

I’ve already posed the philosophical question of whether graffiti qualifies as art, so I won’t go there again. But given today’s Photo Friday theme of Art–and given the fact that it’s snowing again here in New England, so I didn’t take any photos on this morning’s dog-walk–I’m taking this opportunity to re-visit several more images I snapped on my way to the Cambridge Zen Center this past Sunday.

Annette recently shared a humorous video that tackles the vexing question of What Is Art? It’s a question I ask in a slightly modified form in a Literary Theory class I occasionally teach online: before we address the subject of literary theory, can we first determine exactly what literature is?

It helps, of course, that one of the books we read in this same class–Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory: An Introduction–begins with a chapter titled “What is literature?” It either does or doesn’t help that Eagleton duly refuses to answer his own question. “What is literature,” Eagleton asks; “What do you think it is,” Eagleton responds, as do I. One coy way of answering Eagleton’s question is to note that literature is a field of inquiry focused on questions that have more than one answer. Whenever students press me for “the answer” to Eagleton’s question, I note that my copy of the book doesn’t come with an Answer Key, the question “What is literature?” being a question I ask because I’m genuinely interested in discovering some decent answers, not because I’m looking for students to read my mind.

After we spend about a week grappling with the most basic of literary questions–how, after all, can you move on to the sticky task of interpreting literature if you don’t even know what literature is?–I’ll eventually observe that I personally think the very discussion and debate we’re engaged in is in large part what defines “literature.” Given a blank brick wall, most folks won’t find much to argue or analyze; given a brick wall with some sort of image painted therein, we can begin to pose (and debate) questions such as why is the image there, what does it mean, and what value or significance does it have in our lives?

And yet, even this answer is incomplete and unsatisfactory, for it ignores issues of intent. If audiences define art, then an accidentally spilled bucket of paint can qualify if onlookers subsequently wonder why or to what purpose said paint was spilled. Right now in New England, many winter-weary folks are shaking their fists at the sky and wondering “Why”: does that mean Yet Another Snowfall could qualify as Art if enough of us got together and started debating its meaning?

Things are complicated even further when I realize I have contradictory views about my own blog, which may or may not qualify as “art” or “literature” depending on whom and how you ask. If you were to ask me if my written posts qualify as literature, I’d probably say yes…but if you were to ask me if my posted pictures qualify as art, I’d probably say no. As a writer, I see my words as being consciously crafted to communicate an artful intent: yes, it does my writerly heart proud to think that someone might read my words and ponder issues of meaning or significance in response. But as shutter-snapper, I don’t see the pictures I post as having the same intentional import: the fact that I shot this rather than that is almost always accidental, and art (in my mind at least) is about authorial intention. If I snapped an interesting image by accident, would that image be art, or simply fortuitous? In my mind at least, the pictures I post are illustrations, but they aren’t art, for they don’t rise to the same level of conscious craft that my carefully chosen words do.

And yet, as a literary critic, I also know that authors themselves are often the least credible source when it comes to interpreting their own art, which again suggests a certain element of accident (or at least surprise) when it comes to creative matters. If an author or artist was thinking Idea A when she or he crafted a given work, does that preclude the possibility that Ideas B, C, and/or D might be appropriate interpretations as well? It seems the very questions “What is art” and “What is literature” are themselves rather artful and literary, inspiring as they do a complex internal debate that appears to be ongoing. My copy of Terry Eagleton’s book definitely does not come with an answer key, and I ask these questions because the more I think about them, the further it seems I am from actually answering them.

 

Misty

In my mind, the above is a misty scene. I remember taking this photo on a warmish winter night several years ago; a quick check of my blog and photo archives tells me I snapped the shot on February 3, 2006 and blogged it the day after. I don’t remember it being February, only foggy, and the above picture doesn’t capture any of the mist my mind so clearly remembers. Instead, there’s only damp pavement, a lone car, and the supernal glow of my local laundromat still open on a midwinter’s night.

This is the picture that captures the misty mystery of that February fog almost exactly two years ago:

This second picture captures the atmosphere of that two-years-ago February night more truly: it was the kind of night where you could see snow ghosts swirling above the streets, their presence blurring the normally piercing beams of traffic- and street-lights. But it’s that first picture of some lone soul doing Friday night laundry that resonated most deeply with me, perhaps because on most Friday nights two years ago I would have been sitting at home, a pile of papers being my version of a lonely late-night chore.

It’s strange how our memories are ultimately more misty than even the warmest mid-winter night. Now that I have photo and blog archives to refer to, I can nail down dates, times, and places in a way I previously couldn’t; if put on the witness stand with my laptop and an Internet connection, in most cases I could tell you where I was, what I photographed, and what I thought about on any given day. Without the record of my blog’s literary and photographic hatch-marks, however, everything would ultimately be subsumed in the mists of forgetfulness: was it two years ago or three that I went to that art opening, and was it in February or December? Left to my own devices, I’ll forget it all. With a blog and photo archives, at least, there’s some sort of definitive chronicle: oh, yes, of course. It was then, and I was there!

I’m not convinced that bolstering one’s own memory is the best reason to keep a blog, but it certainly is a convenient side-effect. This weekend, Leslee considered her not-very-Groundhog’s-Day-like existence, concluding that this year, unlike previous ones, “Everything is different now.” I don’t know if for me everything is different now compared to two foggy Februaries ago–I still teach the same classes at the same colleges, I still live down the street from the same laundromat, and I still spend too many weekend hours grading papers. But still, I no longer spend Friday nights alone in Keene, and these days I’m attending more sports events than art openings. Over time, given enough Februaries and the words and pictures that chronicle them, some things do change, and if we don’t record it all day-by-day, most of it will be lost to the fog of time, our memories being the most misty mystery of them all.

This is my belated contribution to this past week’s Photo Friday theme, Misty.