not native fruit

my birthday: happiness

On my birthday, I received an email from an old friend with this picture of us as kids.  I am ten, and the two girls next to me are eleven.  The children in front are nine.  What do you think, did I fit in?  This was my dilemna as a child.  I was shy, yet I 'stood out,' so to speak.

It rained all day on my birthday this year.  I went out for breakfast with a friend. We talk a lot about 'truth,' a very interesting subject.   I came home and found this photo in my email.  I spent the afternoon alone, embroidering to the sound of rain.  I am enjoying the colors so much.  This is something I used to do a lot in my twenties, when I was detoxing.  I would go on long walks, and then spend some time either writing or embroidering.  I liked Gerda Bengsston's botanicals from Denmark, and I still do.  I'm wondering, why did I stop doing this?  Well, I know the answer.  Because no one around here thought much of it, and, as in my old childhood quest, I wanted to 'belong' - in Berkeley, where the word 'belonging' is probably some sort  of anathema! But the reality of belonging is very strong.  I've grown a little bit wiser about the whole issue, and am finding my 'belonging' more within, and in the context of my own life, which is primarily about my marriage to Gary, my work and my volunteer work, and my writing and other 'creative' activities, including the practice of self-knowledge.  I'm enjoying the embroidery very much.

Anyway, I sat alone and embroidered to the sound of the rain and the soft crackling of a fire in our small wood-stove.  In the evening, Gary and I walked through a light rain to a little bistro in the neighborhood and enjoyed a delicious meal, and a good talk. 

A friend gave me an article on a new book entitled, "Happiness: A History" by Darrin M. McMahon.  The article was good (Wall Street Journal, Sunday, January 21-22, 2006, Books Section), and here is my favorite paragraph: "The idea was not to shut out but rather to embrace discontent, setting aside any happy-ending hopes.  The great Romantic poets mined the bittersweetness to be found in the depths of yearning.  Nietzsche declared struggle itself to be sublime.  Freud argued that an intimate acquaintance with our own anxieties can lead to a kind of mental equanimity.  And existentialists prized precisely those aspects of life that seem an absurd waste.  As for the letdown that follows a successful quest - Schopenhauer's post-achievement dissatisfaction, indifference and emptiness - classical thinkers seized on these feelings not as impediments to happiness but as portals to it.  Such emotions, (according to) Virgil, Lucretius and Seneca in Mr.McMahon's telling, should prompt us not to stage yet further quests but to minimize our desires and plumb the pleasures of a simple life of retirement and contemplation."

I would have to say that in my life-experiment I have found these words to be correct.  To be 'true.'

"As for the post-conquest sense that our best days lie behind us, classical mythology showed how a solitary achievement, even if long past, can suffice to give an individual's life its shape and purpose."  I actually feel this way about taking care of my parents in their old age, and about working through my problems and our working through 'our problems' in our marriage. These may sound like fairly simple goals, but I have to tell you, it hasn't been exactly easy.  There have been so many twists and turns on the path, but it seems as if we have found our way along our path pretty well so far.  Things may not look the way I expected them to look at this stage of the game, but they look pretty good.  So I guess we'll keep going.

den grimme aelling/the ugly duckling

i'm enjoying reading hans christian andersen again because i enjoy his 'story-telling' capacities.  He really draws you in, with a conversational sort of style.  My father was known among his small circle as a great story-teller.  Not flamboyant or dramatic - far from it - in a very quiet, confidential way he would 'spin his yarns.'  Being a sea-going man, the spinning of yarns was probably expected.  But there was something about his story-telling style that was similar to Andersen's.  I noticed, when I visited Denmark, that many other people also spoke in a measured, thoughtfully developed story-telling style of speech.  Maybe it's only because they were translating in their heads.  Of course, this was a long time ago.  It may all be different now.

Anyway, Andersen fills us in on details of time and place that make his little morality tales all the more enjoyable and informative about a particular time and place, Denmark in the mid-nineteenth century.  I'm enjoying the process of translating the Ugly Duckling and comparing my rough, literal translations to the English translations that are around.  Some are so 'English' that they lose the Danish humor, and become 'thoroughly' English.  On the other hand, some Danish expressions wouldn't make much sense in English, although i can see how they got there, so i'll make a note when i come to them.

And now, the Ugly Duckling...

"nineteenth-century-gal"/and May Sarton

I used to walk back and forth to the train station in the dark when I worked in Center City and lived in Germantown.  For morning shift I caught the 6:15  a.m. train, but if I worked evenings, I was walking home at about 11:45 pm.  One night, a young man who'd been my 'beau' in first grade was standing in front of his house.  He was then twenty years old, just like me, and when he saw me he sang out: "she's a twentieth century fox!"  He invited me to come in, but I said no, I've got to get up for work early tomorrow for the morning shift at the hospital.  (That was the hardest, when I'd worked the evening shift and then had to go in for the morning, but it didn't happen all that often.)  'Frankie' looked rather crestfallen.  He was a small-boned man, of no great height, very pale white skin and wavy 'strawberry blonde' hair, who'd always had nervous tics, and a severe lack of concentration.  Today there would be a diagnosis for him, ADD.  At the time I didn't know that he had become addicted to heroin and he died about a year after this brief meeting.

But the truth is, my career as a twentieth century fox was short-lived, and a good thing too, since I might have been susceptible to the same kinds of problems as my friend Frankie, but luckily emerged nearly unscathed (but not quite).  I very quickly reverted to being a nineteenth century gal, or close to it.  I think it might be because my parents were from the nineteenth century.  My Dad was born in the late 1890's and my Mom just a few years later.  Their parents and grandparents were squarely from the nineteenth century.  Our home and the homes of many of our friends and relatives were full of nineteenth century artifacts, values and moods.  Perhaps this is partly why I feel so driven to translate nineteenth century danish poems, like Traekfulgere, and fairy tales (see an upcoming post in which I translate part of an HC Andersen fairytale).  I must ask your forbearance.  (This last sentence is danish humor, for those of you who may not be aware of it.  And, by the way, it is not necessary to be 'from' the nineteenth century to feel drawn to it, just fyi.  Same thing re: Denmark. As the Cat avers below.)

I found this paragraph by May Sarton that encapsulates something about me too: "[In June 1958 May Sarton bought an eighteenth-century farmhouse in Nelson, New Hampshire, and moved to it from Cambridge those belongings associated with her family's European heritage.]  "Well, once an old lady in her late eighties walked into the big kitchen-living-room [in the Nelson house] where 'the ancestor' now hangs, looked about her, and asked in a rasping old-American voice, 'Why do you have all this Belgian furniture in an old American house?'  I was too dismayed to answer.  But I think this book is the answer, although she, brave soul, is dead; and will never read it.  The answer is, 'Katherine Davis, I have brought all that I am and all that I came from here, and it is the marriage of all this with an old American house which gives the life here its quality for me.  It is a strange marriage and its like does not exist anywhere else on earth...and just that has been the adventure."

I liked May Sarton when I read her twenty years ago, and I especially liked her writings on 'solitude.'  But this paragraph just fits so perfectly exactly where I am at right now.  The 'adventure' seems to be primarily internal, by the way.

inner northerness

As you know, I've been peaking on northerness lately.  Studying Danish, reading about Denmark, joining the Danish Sisterhood.  And now I'm reading 'Smilla's Sense of Snow,' and 'The History of Danish Dreams.'  In the process of going through all this, I'm getting connected to something within myself that I've always felt ambivalent about: a sort of gray, lonely space inside = inner northerness.

It's cold today and the sky is an intense clear blue with both silver-gray and white clouds piled and strewn across it.  We rarely get such cold weather here.  There is snow on top of Mount Tam, Mount Hamilton and elsewhere in the high places of the bay area. 

The hint of frost in the air is thoroughly overwhelmed by the moisture of our climate, reflected in the heaviness of our clouds.  Yet the sun is shining so brightly through them, between them, like the brightest of smiles, like an illuminated white ice in the sky.  No wonder the european northerners  worshipped the sun. 

We're living in 'northern california,' and believe it or not, it is 'northern' here, in a wet, rainy sort of way.  As a young person I resisted the silver-gray nature of winter, and yet, when I landed here in the Bay Area, I discovered that there is silver-gray-world here too.  And a wet one.  Even in our dry summers, the thick fog comes pouring through our hillside communitites.  From a distance it looks sparkly white, not glittery like snow, but pure, cool and clean.  Up close, when you're in it, it's a silver-gray world.

It' so interesting that I've always feared and resisted the lonely gray space.  I always thought it had something to do with the abandonment issues of my infancy.  It was a breakthrough for me in my thirties to claim that gray empty space as my own, and to find that the sorrow it seemed to contain melted into a sweetness and an intimate presence with myself.  'Going there' constituted my spiritual practice for several years thereafter.  But then I began to have a veritable 'light-show' within - perhaps not unlike the northern lights - that took its place and sustained me, again, for about seven years.  That was succeeded by another very intense period of emotional work, personal work, and i was fortunate enough to find olga louchakova, who is a sort of kundalini therapist, and she helped me with all of that.  Then came a quiet period of work, relationship (my husband semi-retired and we had more time together), and an exploration of my own 'secular' spirituality, ie the spirituality of 'just living,' a spirituality not defined or circumscribed by any religious tradition. 

Now that path has brought me to my studies in danish, and most especially to my reconnection with my spiritually wonderful father.  I am rediscovering jylland (jutland) with its various weather issues: snow, rain, wind, gray skies, and, of course, SUN.  And I'm finding that all of that variable weather is inside of me!  That inner northerness is not so bad, after all; it's part of me, and I find myself in it.  Yes, I find myself content with its silver-gray rains, its glittering snow, its battering winds, its sunny days, its northern lights.

tilden park

Gary and I hiked in Tilden Park this morning.  We are in between weather fronts and it's a beautiful clear sunny day, so we drove up in the truck to one of our favorite trails and hiked up.  At one point, Gary shed some outerwear and jogged on, while I walked along, lost in thought about moorland, and the grassy hills of the East Bay Regional Park system, with its soothing shades of sage-green, gray-green, olive-green, tan and amber.  Wild yellow forsythia dotted the verges lower down, but eventually I came out onto the crest-trail with only sky around me.  As I walked along the trail I could look out across deep green valleys, up tree-clad slopes and over the tops of rolly little hills, like the humps of camels' back, to see the water of the bay.  In the distance, between the camel's humps, I could see the sky over the Pacific Ocean, and San Francisco, the Marin headlands and the Golden Gate Bridge seemed like floating islands in a blue haze.

the heath of jutland

Den jyske hede (the heath of jutland):here is a typical scene from Jutland (the continental part of Denmark) from the turn of the last century.  I remember my father telling me about carts drawn by cows and it seemed unbelievable to me.  Of course, I just assumed that carts were drawn by horses.  I don't think I was even aware yet of the oxen-drawn prairie-schooners of the pioneers.  Anyway, here's what Dad was talking about.

It turns out that Jutland is comprised largely of moors.  I can't tell you how much this kind of terrain and its weather resonate within me.  Are genes that powerful?

When I first met my husband Gary, I'd just finished up with friendships among people who were doing television and theater in New York.  For a while it seemed as if that were going to be the direction my life was going to take.  I also lived and socialized with some wealthy young people in New England, and my life, for a time, was a whirl of people, parties, stories, colors, costumes, props and so forth.  Then when I married Gary, we travelled out across the country, ostensibly on a visit to his friends in California, and then we settled here.  We spent all our vacations in the mountains and deserts of California and Nevada.  At first I felt a kind of despair that I had somehow unwittingly chosen 'the desert' in which to live my life.  But later, I began to recognize something deep and familiar in the desert, and grew to love it.

Now I find out that my father's people came from a desert terrain.  In fact, this is part of why the old Danes, aka the Vikings, were such seafaring marauders.  They weren't able to farm much of their land. 

The Bay Area's climate is actually similar to Denmark's, in that there is a fairly even temperature spread, with rain and wind being the chief weather elements, and there isn't all that much seasonal variation to the climate.  It's milder in the Bay Area and we get more sun, but like Denmark, the seacoast dominates our terrain, and our natural environment is a sort of coastal moorland.  This can be seen when driving along highway 1, although mediterranean grasses have supplanted the original vegetation.

There's also a soul dimension to this Danish resonance.  I feel those moors inside myself.  That lonely life on the windswept moors feels key to my psychology. 

It feels good to have identified this spiritual home.

I remember that as a young woman, one of the most helpful books for me was 'Jane Eyre.'  It may be seen by many as the seed-potato of the gothic romance novel, but for me, it was a story about a young woman of pathetic means, who had the strength and stamina to do what she needed to do for herself, to protect herself, to advance herself, to be true to herself, without resorting to crime, pretense, or any other immoral behaviors.  When she ran away to the heath, it seemed so right to me, so perfect.  Alone on the moor.  It was a moment of spiritual catharsis.  And she found a good life there, found her relatives, made herself a home.  It was perfect. 

golden plover

This is the first verse from Traekfulgere by Steen Blicher:

Golden Plover!  has he not an Air?
even in the minor key;
that voice is a little melancholy,
and yet I cry, 'Encore!'
I love his majestic style well,
it fits out there on the heath;
when the sea gannet clothes the heavens in gray
and the moor owl hoots.
it fits with the sighing winds
across the tops of the kairns,
to the king eagles' bloodthirsty cry,
scouting all the high places.
It gives Life in the whispering wilderness
yet is not far from merriment;
when the sky is gray and the earth dark,
that flute sounds cheerfully.
that leader of the Spring concert enters
with a serious Andante.
The more to amuse the soul and mind
with the lark's allegro brilliante!

I am certainly not sure of my translation, especially the words in parantheses.  But please, feel free to give it a go yourself:

Hjejlen!  han har ikkun een Melodie,
og den endda i Minore;
den stemmer lidt til Melankoli,
og dog jeg raaber: encore!
jeg ynder hands Maestoso godt;
den passer til heden derude;
naar havsulen klaeder himlen i graat,
og moseugleme tude.
den passer ret vel til blaestens suk
hen over gravhojes toppe,
til kongeomens blodtorstige kluk,
alt som han speider histoppe.
det giver live dog i skumle ork,
om langt fra ikke et lystigt;
er skyen graa og er jorden mork,
den flojte klinger dog trostigt.
den leder foraarsconcerten ind
med en alvorlig Andante.
desmeer forlystes da sjeael og sind
ved laerkens Allegro Brilliante.

raised on moonlight

formed by moonlight
eye and bone,
alone
at midnight.

raised on moonlight,
thin and pale,
unreal
yet magical.

fed on dreams,
and
whisked on winds
from nowhere
to places
dreamed and undreamed.

yes,
made of moonlight,
glimmering
in shards and scimitars
of shells
and desert cherts,
of chalks,
of water-colors,
moonlight in rain.

gained:
a life of dreams.
yet moonlight
slips
along.

birds of passage

I've begun listening to Danish music.  I have some wonderful contemporary folk music by

Svøorbsk and Lang Linken, and I'm also spending time with some of the old classics from the early part of the twentieth century: Carl Nielsen, Poul Schierbeck, Oluf Ring, etc.  Some of it is so beautiful!  Both lyrics and melodies. 

I've found a poet and teller of folk-tales, Steen Steensen Blicher, from Jutland, the part of Denmark my father came from, who composed a piece called 'Traekfulgere' (Birds of Passage) that was set to music.  The music seems to be lost now, except for the "Prelude,"  alternatively called, 'Sig Naemer Tiden', which is included in many collections of Danish songs.  You can listen to a short snippet of it on Amazon at this site, scroll down to #10.  (They've mispelled the title.)  I include the lyrics and their translation from the booklet accompanying the CD, below.

In my spare time (*)  I've been enjoying attempting to translate the lyrics to the entire piece, and thought I'd include my attempts here.  If I come to anything that is just beyond me, I will include... (dots, which in fact have a more literary name).  His work is a tad melancholy, and I guess this is where Soren Kierkegaard fits in to the picture.  But personally, I find a reminder that death is a part of life (endings as well as beginnings) rather refreshing.

Here is the Prelude to 'Birds of Passage':

Sig nærmer Tiden, da jeg maa væk,
        Jeg hører Vinterens Stemme;
Thi ogsaa jeg er kun her paa Træk,
        Og haver andensteds hjemme.

Jeg vidste længe, jeg skal herfra;
        Det Hjærtet ikke betynger,
Og derfor lige glad nu og da
        Paa Gjennemreisen jeg synger.

Jeg skulde sjunget lidt meer maaskee -
        Maaske vel ogsaa lidt bedre;
Men mørke Dage jeg maatte see,
        Og Storme rev mine Fjædre.

Jeg vilde gjerne i Guds Natur
        Med Frihed spændt mine Vinger,
Men sidder fast i mit snevre Buur,
        Det allevegne mig tvinger.

Jeg vilde gjerne fra høien Sky
        Udsendt de gladere Sange;
Men blive maa jeg for Kost og Ly
        En stakkels gjældbunden Fange.

Tidt ligevel til en Smule Trøst
        Jeg ud af Fængselet titter,
Og sender stundom min Veemodsrøst
        Med Længsel gjennem mit Gitter.

Lyt og, o Vandrer! til denne Sang,
        Lidt af din Vei Du hidtræde!
Gud veed, maaskee det er sidste Gang
        Du hører Livsfangen qvæde.

Mig bæres for, som ret snart i Qvel
        At Gitterværket vil briste;
Thi qviddre vil jeg et ømt Farvel;
        Maaske det bliver det sidste.

(This was written when the poet was nearing death, by the way.)

The time draws near when I must go!
I hear the voice of winter;
for I too am just migrating here
and belong somewhere else.

I should have sung a little more, maybe,
and maybe a little better, too;
but dark days I had to face
and the storm tore my feathers.

I would rather from the high sky
have sent out more happy songs;
but stay I must for bed and board -

as a poor prisoner held for debt.

I would rather in God's nature
freely have stretched my wings;
but I am stuck in my tight cage
which compels me everywhere.

I have a feeling that soon tonight
the lattice-work shall burst;
so I shall twitter a tender farewell, -
it might be my last.