Word of the Week - 42

Van Morrison sings "Caravan" from the Martin Scorsese documentary THE LAST WALTZ.  Van the Man.  Wholehearted.  Not a lukewarm performance to be found in the whole blessed movie. 

Word of the Week - ARDENT

It is the Solstice night as I write this, time of the new moon, beginning of the return of the light.  We have been reminded throughout the day about setting our minds to new ways of being, of doing.  If we remain or become ardent, how can we go wrong.  Ardent, fervent, passionate.  Aflame, unbounded, electric, aglow, burning.

Music and musicians, color and color and color.  Tepid is not the temperature we require to carry us across winter's dark expanse.  Caliente, all spice and tang, flavor and, again, color.  We cannot find our way by candles too dim.  What we need is emphatic, even extreme.  We will not melt our own frozen beliefs without turning up the heat.  Our rigid joints will not loosen without a glow that matches the sun.

If luggage can be ardent, here it is.

Yes, I covet this vintage English watercolor box.  I covet it ardently.

Oh, fortunate possessor.

Oaxaca pillows.

On the longest night of the year, even Los Angeles yearns for a hearth with warming flames.  Heat in its dazzling manifestations expands us, will not let us shrink nor be less than we are.

Word of the Week - 26

Word(s) of the Week:  PASSION and CURIOSITY

For three nights this week we watched documentaries, having completed all episodes of "The Sopranos" and the brief third season of "The Killing."  As one day spooled into the next, I thought I spotted similarities among the films, themes that were shrieking, mutedly, in my own life.  My son's life as well.  On Saturday night our choice was a 2014 release called "Particle Fever," following the completion and launch of the Hadron Collider with the hope of explaining the origin of matter.  In the film scientists frequently discuss how long they have been searching for, waiting for this answer.  It illuminates impatience over drying ink or paint as the microscopically trivial matter it is.

On the previous nights, we watched "The Battered Bastards of Baseball" which follows the impossible arc of one man's dream, to own a winning minor league ball team, and "Valentino, The Last Emperor," during which we get to attend the extravagant gala that marked the designer's retirement after 45 years as a man who made women look beautiful.

Valentino gowns.

Where the three stories intersect is that each, as I interpret it, was fueled and sustained by passion along with a curiosity, a refusal to leave until it is known how each drama turns out.  This is where my writer son and I could see ourselves, aware that if we don't write whatever has demanded us as its authors, neither we nor anyone will learn what happens.

We are called by some unlikely sirens, passion sparked by thoughts of a white pastel pencil in one moment, a scalloped circle paper punch in the next, while a dimly-lit slide show of text and images plays in the background.  However odd we may find these sequential obsessions, we would be fools to ignore their allure.  They call for a reason.  They may be considered pieces of passion, separate elements that will join forces when all have been collected, not unlike the thousands of scientists involved with the collider project, each an essential part, each bringing what they have to obtain the elusive answer.

The line between passion and obsession may become blurry, we may ask ourselves is this folly or wisdom and we may not be able to respond.  What we do know is this:  if we dismiss curiosity and intuition, decide not to follow the trail however poorly marked, we will never learn what it, what we, might have been. 

Passion is the answer. You know the question.

Illustration by Gianni de Conno, with more information here.  Again, thanks to Alice Vegrova.

I have an unnatural affection for the balloons in Macy's Thanksgiving parade.  Not necessarily the characters, though they are frequently dreamy, especially the vintage models, but the fact of them.  Great green frogs hovering over Manhattan streets, blimp-like creatures afloat on wintery currents, reluctant, airborne, marginally domesticated life forms out for a walk with a master who is in it way over his head, so to speak.

When I saw Gianni de Conno's illustration of the wizard and the tethered fish, I declared love.  From the stoop of his back, we know the wizard is not an apprentice.  He is venerable, possibly ancient, the real deal.  Who else would be involved in such an audacious stunt?

In the nicest thing he ever said to or about us, my father dedicated one of his books to my brother, sister and me, labeling us as practicing magicians.  My wizardly longings are less about spells than about knowing the secrets, which may be where writers and wizards intersect.  The magnitude of simply knowing, of seeing, ingesting, interpreting, translating, being the instrument of metamorphosis in order to do the job well demands brass I never really expected of myself.  In the middle of the night my waking and sleeping dreams allow me to soar.  Some mornings I retain the sense of possibility, some mornings my gold has reverted to lead before I've written a word.

This weekend the CBS Sunday Morning show was their "Eat, Drink and Be Merry" edition, all about food and foodish matters.  I arrived in time to see Lidia Bastianich: Food is what connects us, and be ignited by her passion.  It was one of those moments when the mystery dissolves and the now wide-awake mind realizes that passion is the only cure for all that ails us.  To see her caress the pasta, hear her speak of how she must touch food, was to feel in my cells that any response to life which blazes less brightly than a comet's tail is not going to suffice.

Living passionately requires energy, even madness of a sort.  There is no room for ambivalence and depression, even if only occasional, is a classic passion extinguisher.  I see it as riding a horse, full gallop but having to stop every half-mile or so to move an obstruction off the path.  It is not momentum anyone else would recognize, yet if every delay or interruption is followed by a fresh and undiscouraged forward hurtle, well, I have to assume passion can be kept glowing if not aflame by sips rather than gulps.

What Lidia Bastianich said to me in the secret language I've decided we share is that the heat of loving something or everything is what has always saved me, that it will continue to save me, even on days when I have egg beater hair and vision that looks mostly to the rear with tear-inducing regret and spasms of paralyzing shame.   These are my issues, or as Monty Python would say, "amongst" my issues which does not mean they are real.  Wizard wisdom could tell the difference, horse sense could tell the difference.

Grab selfishly at every bright-burning image, thought, gesture.  Throw your arms around all that speaks to your heart.  A friend of my son reported finding a story on-line the other day of a woman who married a ferris wheel.  I imagine an ordained wizard performed the ceremony.