See

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These eye sketches are from a page in the Andy Warhol Idea Book journal Inge gave me a couple years ago for my birthday. It's Inge's birthday today. Happy Birthday, my dear friend. In this journal there are blank pages for me to write or sketch on, and every so often there are translucent vellum pages of Warhol sketches and quotes. I truly love them. No one saw the way Andy Warhol saw. He's the one who said everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. Everyone -- really?

The words below are sort of mine, if anyone's words "belong" to anyone (and then I made them into a text-rebus image at picnik.com). I think I am recycling these words from someone else, like G.I. Gurdjieff, Osho, Rumi, Rob Brezsny or Eckhart Tolle. Here, I give them to you, free of charge. If you believe them, use them wisely, and pass them on.

Here is a sketch I drew in that Warhol journal last October in response to reading a Rumi poem called "This Dove Here" (October 4 in A YEAR WITH RUMI, the book I post daily readings from on RUMI DAYS), when Inge and I had our writing retreat at the lake cottage. You would draw a dove in another way. You see differently than I do.

This Dove Here

Someone who does not run

toward the allure of love

walks a road where nothing lives.

But this dove here

senses the love-hawk floating above,

and waits, and will not be driven

or scared to safety. 

If love is annihilation, loving the unlovable as if you are in love with them is about as annihilating as it gets. There is no YOU left, no ego, but there is YOU-essence that appreciates THEIR-essence. See. Only you see as you see. Fortunate are the ones you are in love with, and the ones you see through loving eyes.

Everyone --- really? I have lists, just like you, of the ones everyone shouldn't include. Let's get annihilated. It'll be fun.

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Robert Duvall: delightful, de-lovely, de-VALL

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Did you hear him say on NPR that he has been approached to play Don Quixote in a film? I did, and I thought: I have to post about him. There is some information on the Net about Terry Gilliam's rekindled film project The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, which will also star Ewan McGregor, apparently, as Sancho Panza. According to that embedded site, Duvall wanted someone like Danny DeVito in that role - hello! But they need big names to sell movies these days. Danny DeVito would get me to watch. Well I would already watch because of Duvall. I like McGregor (OK, love), but Sancho Panza?

I have only seen Robert Duvall in a handful of roles: Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird, Tom Hagen in Godfather I & II, Major Frank Burns in M*A*S*H, Boss Spearman in Open Range, Pastor Sonny Dewey in The Apostle, and no doubt a few other lesser screen faces. I never saw Lonesome Dove, which he says is his favorite role. Crazy Heart is next on my Netflix queue, and I can't wait. I am no expert on Robert Duvall, but I can claim to have listened to him through a telephone.

I also have cushions dedicated to him in the salon of my heart. The first cushion is sunflower yellow - Duvall as Pastor Sonny Dewey in The Apostle with Farrah Fawcett. He directed the movie too, deftly. There are lovely old hymns I grew up with, such as "Softly and Tenderly" and "I Love to Tell the Story," which is sung by Emmylou Harris and Duvall himself. When Duvall-as-Pastor-Sonny preached, he was my dad (except for the Pentecostal part; my dad was not a "holy roller"). They even look alike with their balding heads and heart-melting smiles. I want to tell him how his acting affected me and rang like the truest church bell. To me, he is like my dad's ideal self, although Pastor Sonny has some serious flaws. Maybe being flawed and forgiving is ideal, somehow. Another strange connection is that his mother's maiden name was Hart, my maiden name, and she was from Virginia, like my dad.

Which leads me to the other (pin-) cushion hidden under the chaise lounge in my heart, the cushion with pokey down feathers sticking out the wrong way. I came this close to humiliating myself forever, with Robert Duvall. Oh the pain! I would have needed to be cleansed of my sin in the river of forgiveness.

One of our film students in the English department knew someone working on the set of Open Range in British Columbia Alberta. This 2003 film is maybe my favorite movie ever. It's a toss-up between it and Lost in Translation. Oh, and Rebecca. Oh, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. OK, I'm juggling now. 

I remember being blown away by the sound of bullets exploding from multiple Dolby speakers surrounding our theater seats the first time we saw Open Range. Never had gunfire been so real and close.  Never had a Western movie set been so authentically muddy, with timbers laid across the dirt road between the General Store and the Tavern while rain just kept sweeping through town. The two main characters, played by Kevin Costner and Duvall have a relationship that inspires me every time I watch. I'm not a huge Costner fan (I don't think I can forgive him for those endless monotone voice-overs in Dances with Wolves), but he really got it right in Open Range - directing, and also playing shy, quiet and driven Charley Waite. Duvall is Duvall at his best as Boss Spearman: cowboy, listener, straight talker, beautiful human being and best friend to Charley. Annette Bening might seem too 20th century woman as Sue Barlow, but she is radiant and leaves no questions about why someone would fall in love with her. Michael Gambon plays the opposite of Dumbledore in bad and powerful Denton Baxter so disgustingly well that you almost believe it is right to destroy evil with a gun.

So our film student arranged a telephone interview with Duvall on the set. There was some great new technology at the time that allowed a satellite call from high up in the Canadian Rockies. I set everything up for the call in the hall outside my office with a landline phone, and chairs for the three students. Andrew dialed the number.

Some darkly magical force was in that tele-kinexion from the Canadian Rockies, because from the time his voice came on speaker phone, I got teleported into a Twilight Area Code. (Well, Duvall did play in a Twilight Zone episode in 1963.) I got my Roberts mixed up, and in the foggy zone of my head, Duvall transformed into De Niro. The call had been arranged for a couple of days, and I knew very well who this Robert Du- was. I've always liked him, he's tops, the best! But the entire phone call, through which I was mercifully silent, I was picturing him in Raging Bull, and between student questions and comments, I kept almost blurting something out about his performance. I never got the chance, or courage, thank God. After the call ended, and the students floated in starstruck bliss out of the dark old English department hallway, I began to realize my mistake, with horror. If I had been rational, I could have told him how I felt about Pastor Sonny Dewey, him as my dad! It would have been a seminal moment in his career, right up there with his Oscar and Emmys, to hear from a preacher's kid that he had got Pastor Sonny absolutely right!

But all I could do was thank my cowboy guardian angel for lassoing my mouth shut and not letting these words out of my beak: "You really epitomized method acting when you gained an extra 30 pounds as Jake La Motta . . . "

Autographed photo of Duvall found here. 
Photo of Duvall as Boo Radley found here. 
Photo of Duvall in the water as The Apostle found here. 
Image of Duvall and Costner found here.
Photos of Annette Bening as Sue Barlow and Dean McDermott as Doc Barlow, and Costner behind camera found here. 
Michael Gambon photo found here. 
Photo of Robert De Niro as Raging Bull found here.
Disney poster found here.

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A Storm is Coming

A Storm is Coming

The afternoon inches along

like the string

of turquoise stones

rising toward my throat,

as if some new thought

were being formed, escalating.

They say a storm is coming,

and of course it will,

but for now

the cat anchors

the edge of shade

where breeze and sun

juggle the tree's shadow.

Elsewhere, mothers have yanked

laundry from the line

and are securing doors and windows

against the bang of wind.

A car skims blindly

home, driver brittle,

eyes bulging toward

the stream on the windshield.

The leaden storm with mountainous clouds,

gales lined with tearing,

tumbling sticks -

I want it here and now,

hail stones pounding

from a broken necklace

and me knowing what to do.

~ Ruth M.

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Ready to dance

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One summer you're madly sprucing up the farm for your daughter's wedding. You think you're not going to get everything done, even though your husband is a teacher with summers off and is devoting every hour of sunlight to wedding preparation. And not just him. You can still see Nancy on her knees scraping and painting the porch, Bootsie in her farmy bib shorts staining four Adirondack chairs Don built, Jennifer meditatively pulling weeds around the veggies and flowers and painting your studio roof, Peter shoveling dirt bare chested or bending over his Macbook creating the dance music play list, Don planting, grooming, tango-ing with sunflowers to get them to bloom, and promenading to and fro orchestrating all the activity according to Lesley's creative direction from a distance in NYC. You -- you do laundry, lend a hand here and there, throw pasta with tomatoes and basil onto white plates alfresco like a swing dancer throws a jitterbug. It takes months of love and help, last minute flourishes and light-hanging by Don's sisters and brothers, and in the end - twist and shout! - the occasion is beyond wonderful.

Comes fall. Maple leaves dervish around the barns. Then winter, and snow fills up the bowl of the meadow. You watch red and brown cardinals ornamenting the big spruce from your red chair. Then spring, and velvet lilacs welcome you home from work with their French blue waltz in the driveway. Now, with summer almost completely open, a perfect dress for a wedding appears ON SALE for $39 (it was $150), and yet there are . . . . . no wedding invitations in your country mailbox. You could wear the dress Farm Day August 7, but it would be over the top more than just a tad. You and Don could groove up your farm life a little bit in the Great Hall of the Wharton Center listening to Joe Lovano for a couple hours, and go dancing after. Wait a minute, is there any place to go dancing around here?

The dress is a wall flower, waiting to be asked.

On the other hand, there is no wedding to plan -- Woohoo!

Oh dear, there is no wedding to plan. Boohoo.

But no worries, you can come on over to my place, 'cause
. . . . everybody gonna dance tonight . . .





Lorenzo of The Alchemist's Pillow - an excellent blog with art, music, beautiful poetry and humor - pointed a nice finger at RUMI DAYS. Go see who dances on his shoulders.

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Morning bamboo

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my photo, inverted

Paintings by Teerth Krishnanand:

"Zen"

"Bamboo in Wind", Xia Chang, c. 1460, Metropolitan Museum of Art

"Bamboo in the Four Seasons", Attributed to Tosa Mitsunobu, 15th century
Metropolitan Museum of Art

bamboo salad servers found here

hand painted bamboo design vase found here

bamboo chairs found here

bamboo vintage children's ski poles found here

 bamboo bike found here

bamboo scaffolding in India found here 
(thanks, Lorenzo, I had forgotten how great bamboo is for scaffolding)

 I got so excited when rauf commented, because I didn't know
the tribal village in my favorite post of his (his 2 photos above and below), is built from bamboo.
It's so obvious, now that I look again with bamboo eyes!
rauf's beautiful Priya post is here.

bamboo house in China found here

bamboo bar in Vietnam found here

"Notice that the stiffest tree is most easily cracked, 
while the bamboo or willow 

survives by bending with the wind." ~ Bruce Lee

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Bamboo forest fight scene:

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Thirteen ways

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The Jungfrau in Switzerland is one of dozens of primary peaks of the Bernese Alps,

where I am standing in 1975 during my college study trip mentioned in the last post.

Among twenty snowy mountains,

The only moving thing

Was the eye of the blackbird.

~ from the poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" by Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens' poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" written in thirteen haiku-ish stanzas and published in 1917, was one of the first poems Diane Wakoski taught in my poetry class (in East Lansing, not Lauterbrunnen, alas). Thirteen Ways is an imagistic poem, a Modern (as in, the period) way of writing poems with clear, sharp language, unlike the focus on lyricism of the previous so-called Romantic period. Another famous Modern imagistic poem is Ezra Pound's short two-lines "In a Station of the Metro," written four years earlier after Pound was touched by a visual moment coming out of a Paris metro train:

    

IN A STATION OF THE METRO

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

It's so zen. William Carlos Williams, another Modernist, suggested that when writing good poems there are no ideas but in things. In other words, paint images with things instead of descriptions. Show, don't tell.

Back to Thirteen Ways. Marvel-ous as our eyes are, we can't see twenty snowy mountains all at once. Our eyes have to scan gradually. We can't see the eye of the blackbird either, in a scene like that. Our brains are censoring what we perceive every second. I suppose most often our eye catches what is moving, like that blackbird's eye, if the moving thing is big enough to be perceived. But we can imagine the scene painted by Stevens in that stanza. It's one of the thirteen ways he paid attention to a blackbird. I've posted the whole poem below. I hear you sigh, either out of bliss, or out of poetry fatigue. Is it long? you ask. See, about the different ways?

Feel the mystery in each way he looks. In some of his lines I don't know what he means. What is Haddam, without looking it up? But it doesn't really matter, when he writes:

The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

Because he's not just writing about looking at a blackbird. Bien sur. We live in days of change and mayhem and people knowing about it like we've never known before, more than the terrible decade of WWI when these poems were written. There are "thirteen" ways of looking at anything. I kind of like how that slows things down.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

by Wallace Stevens

I

Among twenty snowy mountains,

The only moving thing

Was the eye of the blackbird.

II

I was of three minds,

Like a tree

In which there are three blackbirds.

III

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.

It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV

A man and a woman

Are one.

A man and a woman and a blackbird

Are one.

V

I do not know which to prefer,

The beauty of inflections

Or the beauty of innuendoes,

The blackbird whistling

Or just after.

VI

Icicles filled the long window

With barbaric glass.

The shadow of the blackbird

Crossed it, to and fro.

The mood

Traced in the shadow

An indecipherable cause.

VII

O thin men of Haddam,

Why do you imagine golden birds?

Do you not see how the blackbird

Walks around the feet

Of the women about you?

VIII

I know noble accents

And lucid, inescapable rhythms;

But I know, too,

That the blackbird is involved

In what I know.

IX

When the blackbird flew out of sight,

It marked the edge

Of one of many circles.

X

At the sight of blackbirds

Flying in a green light,

Even the bawds of euphony

Would cry out sharply.

XI

He rode over Connecticut

In a glass coach.

Once, a fear pierced him,

In that he mistook

The shadow of his equipage

For blackbirds.

XII

The river is moving.

The blackbird must be flying.

XIII

It was evening all afternoon.

It was snowing

And it was going to snow.

The blackbird sat

In the cedar-limbs.

Terresa's sensual womanly-writerly post Random Marigolds and Yosemites reminded me of this poem this week, which led to the post. 

Read more Wallace Stevens poems here. My favorite is The Snow Man, because I have a mind of winter too.

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cross cultural rhubarb & my peeps

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I had been picking rhubarb and strawberries, making pie and photographing the process (hahaha, only a blogger) during Memorial Day weekend, nagging myself: If you post at sync about making a beautiful pie you might mislead people into thinking you are like Nigella Lawson (the British food maven who showed me that food is sensual). You are not like her, except that you love food.

I'm not going to show you all my "warts", but I also don't want to misrepresent the facts.

So I was happy for something to synchronize with strawberry-rhubarb pie and divert from oh-aren't-I-a-food-goddess fantasies when I read something about Samuel Pepys in the Writer's Almanac on Memorial Day. Thanks to Lorenzo, I resubscribed to the Writer's Almanac. I like reading the poems Keillor picks, and also the literary birthdays and histories. The May 31st post said it was the last day Samuel Pepys wrote in his famous diary, in 1669.

This jiggled loose two 1975 London eating memories, one with my peeps, I mean Pepys, and the other with rhubarb.

When I was little, our neighbor had rhubarb growing in the back yard. Jimmie and I used to go out in May and pick and munch a stalk right there, its sourness making our faces twist up like this just born punk rhubarb head in Don's garden this spring, below.

Raw rhubarb is an adventure, but I love rhubarb best in pie with strawberries. Rhubarb feels gritty on your teeth, especially raw. Even in a pie by itself, it has a texture that makes your teeth feel like the enamel just dissolved. But when it's paired with strawberries, the grittiness goes away.

At the end of the summer that I turned 14, I sat on the cabbage rose carpeted floor of my parents' house (which by the way had been Jimmie's, the one with the rhubarb, whose grand-in-a-soul-sense house we bought when I turned 12) while my brother Bennett showed slides on a big screen of his tour through Europe on a history study program with his college. I vowed sitting there under the snow-covered Jungfrau that I would go on that same trip when I was in college. The summer I turned 19, after one year of college in Illinois, I hopped on a plane with twenty-some students from Boston and fulfilled my vow getting my brand new passport stamped in 10 countries over an eight week period. Those were the days of eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches out of the backs of vans, sleeping in campgrounds outside Paris and Amsterdam, crawling out of the sleeping bag and tent and stepping in a cow pie, with Elsie the cow chewing grass ten feet from my face.

I was somewhat prepared for Europe to be different than the U.S., where English was not the native language. But I didn't expect England to feel as different as it did, which resulted in my having more culture shock there than in other places. How could we speak the same language but have so many different words for things, like lorry for truck and jumper for cardigan sweater?

London came in the second of eight weeks, and I was already feeling a tad homesick. My friend and I found an inexpensive restaurant on a London street, and when I saw rhubarb pie on the menu, I felt like my parents' back yard was behind me, and I asked for some. "They have rhubarb in England!" I declared. Little did I know that Europeans had it first and took it to America with them back in the day. (When I say "first," I mean before us Americans. The Chinese had rhubarb thousands of years before any of us.) The rhubarb tart was warm and served with warm custard in a small white pitcher on the side to pour over it. I had never in my life had warm custard on anything, and it was fabulous. Boxed instant vanilla pudding does not translate into this experience. There was something in that moment that morphed home and foreign into something new inside me.

It's funny, the things that educate you about life. I first heard of Samuel Pepys and his diary at a restaurant with his name. When you're 19 and trying to make your pocket money last for eight weeks, visiting shops and museums and falling in love with things that have price tags, you eat a lot of street food, like white cheese, tomato and butter sandwiches on baguettes. I had never eaten or seen a tomato and cheese sandwich, had I even had cheese other than plastic cheese known as American? Nor had I ever eaten tomato, butter and bread in one bite. I liked it. I liked it more than Miracle Whip, and at least as much as mayonnaise. But one evening some of us decided to splurge and make reservations at the Samuel Pepys restaurant overlooking the Thames River after a play in the theater district. I felt sophisticated eating a prime piece of British cow with my new Boston friends, dressed up in the one dress I'd packed in the suitcase between one pair of cut-off jeans, one pair of straight-leg red-tab Levi's, three t-shirts and a sweater for the summer, as we dined by candle light with flickering London lights reflected in the river outside. I remember John-of-the-khaki-pants, the bearded student who never wore blue jeans because he wanted to be different, pontificating about Samuel Peeps when we entered the restaurant and saw pages of the diary under glass. I saw how Peeps was spelled, and I silently learned that even English names can sound nothing like they appear.

And that weird spelling of that other word with a silent letter, the "h" in rhubarb? The Online Etymology Dictionary says:

rhubarb - c.1390, from O.Fr. rubarbe, from M.L. rheubarbarum, from Gk. rha barbaron "foreign rhubarb," from rha "rhubarb" (associated with Rha, ancient Scythian name of the River Volga) + barbaron, neut. of barbaros "foreign." Grown in China and Tibet, it was imported into ancient Europe by way of Russia. Spelling altered in M.L. by association with rheum. European native species so called from 1650. Baseball slang meaning "loud squabble on the field" is from 1938, of unknown origin, said to have been first used by broadcaster Garry Schumacher. Perhaps connected with use of rhubarb as a word repeated by stage actors to give the impression of hubbub or conversation (attested from 1934).

Rhubarb is a great world traveler, starting in China at least 2,000 years BC. You can read more about the history of rhubarb, including Marco Polo's excitement about finding it in China, because Europeans were crazy for Chinese rhubarb's medicinal qualities, here. 

I leave you with the recipe for rhubarb pie. The version with strawberries is toward the bottom. Oh, and you know how you can find anything on the Internet? Here is a site with daily readings from Samuel Pepys' diary.

-Betty Crocker

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