Somnambulism and Vampire Coyotes

Saturday, Jan 21, 2012

A day or two ago I was bitching about an accident I had while washing dishes.  Such was the fit of housewifely enthusiasm that took hold of me that I set to scrubbing a set of stainless steel measuring spoons with escalating (and increasingly imprecise) vigor.  Finally my hand slipped, and although the spoons were not at all sharp, the edge of one made contact with the pad of my thumb so hard and fast that  it gashed my skin open.  The resulting wound was part bruise and part cut.  In light of what happened next, I should have considered quitting my bitching.

You may also remember a somnambulist episode that I had a month and a half ago.  It was the night before I was supposed to head off to Hawaii on a long trip, and my pre-travel sleep is always... erratic, at best.  I gather that I'm quite an active sleeper.  I talk, I walk, I've been known to instant message, and if you try to tell me that I'm just sleeping and should lie back down, I might just hit.  All with only the vaguest memory left with me the next morning. On this particular night, I somehow managed to break a glass in my sleep.  I woke up, on my knees next to the bed, mid-clean-up, with my hands filled with huge shards of glass.  I wasn't hurt, but I can't describe it as my most soothing ever awakening.

I put the worst of the glass on the bedside table and went back to sleep, and a couple of hours later I woke at the crack of dawn and left town.  For the next month, I only returned home long enough to crash for a few hours and then rush off again.  During this time, I wearily picked my way around the part of the room that was still covered in shattered glass, launched myself in the vague direction of the bed, and was unconscious within seconds, sometimes before the bouncing had even calmed from my acrobatic entry.

Long story short, that glass didn't get cleaned up for five weeks.  That's the kind of housekeeper I am, and why I can't have nice things, like pets or children.  Or, apparently, real glasses.  But although I'm slovenly, I'm also canny: in the course of this five weeks, I never once cut myself on the broken glass.

Until last night.  I was collecting recycling from all over the house, and frolicked, shoeless, too close to the bag holding the shards of glass.  I brushed against the edge of it with the inside of my arch, and then looked down in shock: my right sock was already soaked in blood, and it hadn't been more than a second.

Things I learned from this incident:

• Feet bleed a lot, and quickly.  It took me about thirty seconds to realize that this was an effect of blood pressure. "Get the cut above the level of your heart," I kept muttering to myself.  Well, let me tell you, that's something of a challenge if the cut is on your foot.  Yogic training notwithstanding, the next minute found me in a position devoid of dignity: turtlelike, on my back on the kitchen floor, one leg in the air with both hands clamping a paper towel to the wound.
• It only takes ten seconds of bleeding to make it look like you've committed a murder in your kitchen. Seriously: it was everywhere, and it was lurid.  If I had seen it as a crime scene on TV, my only comment would have been, "Pshaw.  Everyone knows blood isn't that red."  Well, it's bloody red.  I'm here to tell you.
• It's surprisingly hard to get bloodstains out of polished concrete floors, even if (in a fit of good housekeeping, because you've learned your lesson) you wash them as soon as the bleeding has stopped, and before you actually attend to clean and bandage the wound.  I kept thinking, "Should I be bleaching this?" and then "Who are you expecting, CSI?".
• When you live alone in Nova Scotia, the monologue that follows this sort of incident goes something like this: "OK, pull it together, Sycorax.  You've stopped the bleeding, now get rid of the bloody paper towels and get a bandage.  Wait.  So where, in the six-part garbage collection system, do the bloody paper towels go?" [I begin to feel a bit lightheaded.] "Well, they're, let's see, organic material, that's kind of a sobering way to think of your own blood, but that means... compost, great.  WAIT! But they're a meat product (shudder), so I can't put them into the yard compost.  They have to go in the city compost." [At this point I'm swaying, so I sit back down on the kitchen floor and look despondently at the bloodstains.]  "Dammit."

You know you're living a different sort of life when you begin to contemplate the fact that composting your own blood could poison future vegetable gardens and draw coyotes to your door.  Coyotes with a taste ... for Sycorax.

Degradation in Feathers: A Processional Reaction to La Dolce Vita (1960)

Friday, January 20, 2012

Is it possible to get a coherent sense of this film?  Not for me, or not on a first viewing.  It might be more appropriate to give you a series of episodes or fragments from my viewing: fractured thoughts in response to Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita.  Not a review, but a processional, a ritual progress towards the Shrine of Our Lady of the Fragments.

I.

I saw my first Fellini (8 ½) when I was about 20, and I hated it.  Or perhaps not “hated” - rebelled against it.  More than anything else, I wanted coherence at that point in my life.  The world was vast, and I wanted to know it.  I was reluctant to cede control in the face of what already seemed overwhelming complexity. What purpose did art serve if not to be a handhold on the unscalable mountain of life?  If I couldn’t grapple with a text, it rankled. I didn’t watch another Fellini for about a decade.  Alas for a misspent youth; those years I’ll never get back.

II.

Of course, if I were a character in this film, I’d spend those years in indolent driving, excruciating self-consciousness, and the purchase of infinite pairs of elliptical sunglasses. I’d be paying a prostitute not for her body, but for a frame that lends my life the meaning of taboo, of the illicit.

III.

Poor Marcello. He’s on assignment puppying after a “big doll” of an American actress, all impulse and no innards. We begin almost to pity his exhaustion in the face of rapacious nymphishness of his manic pixie dream girl Sylvia, who has the same attention span and selfish absorption in sensation as the kitten she adopts and abandons in a matter of minutes.  She makes the Trevi fountain look small, a trick of scale played by her vast solipsism. (And her breasts.)

IV.

These paparazzi (a term this film spawned), hovering and clinging and crawling into the cracks of these lives like so many fruit flies, ever multiplying as their subjects grow more and more ripe. Sweeter, more openly rotten. Marcello can barely bring himself to swat them away, so humid with boredom is the air of Rome.

And of course everyone is always acting (out) for them.  Spontaneity becomes pose.

V.

"Miracles are born in silence, not out of this confusion!" -a priest interviewed by Marcello at his next assignment: the “field of miracles.”  In this long and longing scene, we get the confusion, not the miracle.

VI. 

Ah, here come children in oddly nuptial attire leading Bacchic, ecstatic crowds from spot to spot in an empty field, pointing at nothing, crying 'the Madonna!" and falling to their knees, eery giggles creeping out the corners of their mouths.  It’s Euripidean, the vengeance of being led down the path of your own arrogant desire.

VII.

Oh good, it’s time for a cocktail party blowhard - no, not Marcello, who confines himself at this boho do to caressing the hands of women who speak no Italian and admire his work (no, wait, his decorative qualities).  No, in fact it’s this man, late into middle age, who to annoy his wife responds to an Indian singer’s performance with the comment, “The only real woman is the Oriental woman. […] The Oriental woman huddles at your feet like a little tiger in love!”

VIII.

I hoped too soon.  Marcelo’s now holding forth to the blowhard about the bouquet of children, all of different colors, he’d like to have. I think his attention was caught by the idea of a little tiger in love.

IX.

“You have two loves: journalism and literature.  Beware of prison.” - The eccentric poet Iris at the party.  (A messenger from the gods.)

X.

Jesus.  They’re recording all the cocktail party conversation, wiping out the sounds of natural Sturm und Drang their host (Steiner) has recorded before. I’m largely pro-artifice, and even I find this unbearably bleak.

XI. 

Children are here, again, puncturing the artificiality of it all. This film has the tragic structure of ancient Athens.  No sooner do these angelic tots arrive then I begin looking over my shoulder for Medea.

XII. 

But Marcello is mistaken in his envy for Steiner’s boho-domestic bliss: his host is the first to tell him that this is too civilized, too organized, too deadened an existence.  Better to be more miserable, more free.  And then he goes off to kiss his perfect children in their swathes of protective, diaphanous curtaining. “An enchanted order,” Steiner calls the feeling of an artwork completed. The ideal of love as detachment.

XIII. 

The thirteenth station of this cross. The fear of tomorrow in a nuclear world.  Better to destroy the world than to live with this … waiting?  Longing?  Passing the time?

XIV.

Marcello’s the kind of guy who wears a dark suit to work at a beachside restaurant whose busboy is a little boy wearing a speedo and a captain’s cap.  He’s the kind of guy who then yells at the teenaged waitress to turn off the music and let him get some work done.  (This reminds me of something my best friend said to me while visiting us in Hawaii: “You’re the only person I know who rocks a smoky eye at the beach.”  It’s true: every time.  It’s time to come to terms with it: I’m a Fellini sort of girl.)

XV.

Degradation.  In feathers.  And out of them.

A cruel (post)mistress

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

I came home from the holidays to find a marvelous, heartwarming backlog of Christmas cards, all of which now fondly grace our mantel. I'm now reminded, however, that I may have told some of you that the postal service wouldn't deliver the mail unless you put an exclamation point after the "Canada!". I may even have described it as a tyrannical whim of the postal beaver's. 

[Cough.] Sorry about that. I'm going to try to be more honest in 2012. Thank you for delivering my eccentrically addressed mail through the snow and sleet, postal beaver.