Dialects

In the car with the small male who requests the hockey match on the radio, ma obliges, as I listened it was delivered in language a code that tripped me up. What’s a PK? Translation from the back seat. Which team is this? Why did that just happen? Small male patiently obliges. The talk turns to play-off hockey and how this is a different kind of play (akin to tiger mauling I deduced) to normal hockey. Perplexed we carry on up the hill. In my head I am thinking in another language, but the unfamiliar dialect continues to draw my attention and prompt questions. Small male speculates. Phone rings when something occurs in match of significance. It is Tall male to weigh in with the news to small male.

We are on our way to mama’s extra gymnastics session. A last minute decision.

Initially there’s only one woman throwing beautiful layaways and somersaults, (new language, my dialect) while two men are stretching. Again and again the woman peacefully tumbles. Then something happens. We’re talking about planes and ash when she hits the ground. The language/dialect changes tone, over content, to analysis.

We all disperse. There’s few. An hour and there’s more. Then more. The more divide into trampoline, the floor has swollen full of martial arts (all men) and break dancers. There are 3 others who are doing something with the bars on the wall. There’s the solitary woman, the tumbler, whose now on bars. The physical activity is in three dialects. The bouncers, the twisters and the outnumbered straight gymnasts.

Back in the car, the match resumes. The language re-explodes. We listen, talk, decide. The evening will yet be full of even more dialects, strange and surprising, and some as familiar as the handle on a cup.

Becker Part

Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death and Arvo Part’s Te Deum: spuds and butter on a sunny Sunday afternoon in the window of the uterine cafe here. Combination incroyable. I vehemently disagree with aspects of Ernest’s Chapter 2 P 13 Para 1 but we are otherwise compatible.

I continue to think on the line of a tumbling sequence and the shape of a sentence. Throwing a tumble or a single move requires you to launch your body and you will not be assured of the outcome. (ie. feet or flat on your arse). The hop step into the first movement in any tumble (The round off) is critical because you cannot throw it from two feet, it must be from one. Your hands and the snap push you back to two feet from which your pike fall off the two feet and arms already popped up from the floor take you into your back handspring and on …

So we have one foot take off to two feet landing to two feet take off to usually but not always a two feet landing to carry on. And the landing must be solid.

A simiiar insistence on rhythm occurs to me in sentences or rather my sentences insist on forming themselves or emerging along some kind of rhythmic line.

Perhaps unsurprisingly I find my appetite for acrobatic increases and I long to pick up another session every week, but am not sure about the how and where and whether.  Last week a woman remarked that she could see I have muscle memory when I was working with the coach on this backflip. It was sweet and reassuring, but perhaps a little generous. 25 years seems a long way back.

The cure for a headache today turned out to be a rivetting conversation. Thanks L.

*

Today I woke to the thrill that a new baby was in the world and I was going to meet him. I put on my lipstick for I had to be at my best and headed out. I was even more thrilled to find his mother sleeping with a do-not disturb sign on her hospital door. I remembered the days following my son’s birth (which was equivilant of search and rescue of ship lost at sea) the exhaustion was unlike any other ever. It was like being run over by a semi-truck, standing up and running a twenty-six mile marathon and then discovering you’d now to attend a barn dance at the end, followed by some kind of farming inspection after the shindig ended and now off you go to the nightshift.

Your baby needs everything from you, you are his food and he may have a hard time adjusting to acquiring it and your body may not entirely co-operate either. You’ve grown this life, now you feed this life every hour, second hour, all night long.

*

Last night in a strange incident I was caught in a robbing situation at a shop, which then boiled over onto the street and was very startling. There was a moment where I was suspended between this heightened situation and my son was beyond, unbeknownst, in the car. Between he and I were a bunch of unpleasant circumstances that briefly cut off my passage.  It was horrible. Today at the hospital I remembered that early fragility of life and recognized that it still continues in different shapes, despite his strapping height and searing intelligence and gentle jokes. I am glad to be reminded of this.

Single view

Increasingly I have been thinking of the single reader in the last year: if thoughtful literary criticism has little place in our medja then where is it to sit. We can tell such criticism no longer has much if any place because of the obvious “life-span” of a book. The book is of interest when it is released. Sometimes it is not of interest at all when it is released.

This week it came to me on Friday that one solution could be to consider such pieces as photographs and to frame them for mounting and sell them to a single reader rather than a newspaper. Thus the single reader would be assured an exclusivity to your thoughts and considerations and may very well appreciate them sufficient to continue collecting them paying the same fee (v poor) that a newspaper pays. This could alleviate some of the frustration that I experience in taking time to write about books (outside the current conception of lifespan) only to find a newspaper decides they’re not in the national interest and some other old purposeless waffle is.

The backflip has progressed. I am now doing it unassisted on the trampoline. There’s a moment before I throw it that is identical to moments that strike me sometimes if I think about the book I’ve just written.

The impact of the mind on an acrobatic move is massive. And can destroy it. Yet the mind has to be engaged to remind the body. The challenge is for long over high, straight arms, an arch, lift the hips with the legs straight, the push off against the floor from the shoulders for the final snap of the legs. The second part is crucial because that will give you the impetus to follow with more of them eventually.

I think of good tumbling like a sentence.

Cleo 4-6

Cannot sleep between 4am and 6am. Very odd altogether. What’s happening between 4am and 6am that so appeals to my brain? I must have a chat to the birds and find out.

I wake with astonishing ideas in mind on completely useless things like how impractically to build a bookshelf. Or how to invent a bed that keeps the body only in one position (mousetrap bed) and other pointless entities that belong in outer space. Like visions of a garden I have not grown or sporting rebellion.

Last week I invented (realized after the fact) a completely new graveyard that I could practically plot and draw for you in this city … so vivid, utterly disappointing it does not exist.  And it’s not exactly easy to just rustle up your own graveyard. A pumpkin pie maybe. A salad perhaps. …. but a graveyard on an average Monday. All a bit Charlie Brown.

There is a particular tone on the D string of my son’s violin that is pure lovely. A certain timbre. The odd thing is the string is old and should be replaced, so it suggests the timbre is coming from his bowing and playing of the string.

Another peculiar thing is how the ear can be attracted to and isolate the sounds it likes and yet for whatever undulating mishap in my brain I cannot read the notes very well on the D string, better than the G string which I cannot read at all. By rights my ear should be nesting with A or E sounds since I am familiar with them on the score.

There’s something “tunnel” or cylindrical is about that rich tone of the D string.

10.59  I am not reading Cortazar. I may be too tired to read Cortazar. This is a terrible pity. But I am keeping company with Mme Agnes Varda this late evening. And I may spend the rest of my life reading that Cortazar book. It’s the kind of piece it is. There’s a lovely biting cold in the wind this night. Sharp. The temperature has dipped and the daytime highs are daytime lows. I like it when the high becomes a low. The variety keeps me pondering. Plus there have been some good old gusts. The other night I woke in the middle of a moderate storm, but it being moderate failed to keep me awake, which is very unusual for a committed storm stirrer.

I ask about Asbestos because it is likely what killed Malcolm.

Basically it was a vicious substance that also killed Christie Hennessy the singer. It was ubiquitous in garage roofs when I was a child. I remember my mother commenting on it. She was terrified of it. I can’t visualize the actual roofs anymore. I think they were slanted. I can’t recall whether you could visually identify something as Asbestos by looking at it.

It will have killed many more than Malcolm. Anyone working on building sites or demolition may have been exposed. Asbestos became dangerous when disturbed.