Tag: Musings

OF FIREWORKS AND FLOWERS AND MY SHORT FUSE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

A well-designed fireworks display can be a thing of beauty. No matter its scale – whether vast as Boston over both banks of the Charles River – or small-scale like Portsmouth, New Hampshire, around its old mill pond or Needham, Massachusetts, assembled on the long lawn of its high school, the intelligent use of an imaginative palette and the use of the sky as a canvas canopy reaching from the ground to its zenith can turn into a piece of breathtaking performance art, a combination of fleeting painting and wordless theater.

What too often turns up, unfortunately, is largely senseless bang-bang-bang without any subtlety of timing and proportion. Think of a standup comic who can’t tell a joke. No pauses, no phrasing.

In contrast, I think instead of the revelation of a single burst of color – perhaps a small tulip, in the terminology of pyrotechnics – followed in the same spot in the sky by another and then another. In the process, the shots run through the color wheel like slivers of rainbow. And then it’s repeated, with two identical bursts side by side – red turning to orange turning to yellow turning to green turning to blue turning to purple. Simple, elegant, commanding.

Do that right and you’ve announced that what follows will be amazing. You’ll lead the eyes all over the sky – up and up, out, back down, just over the crowd, and back up again. Small that expands beyond the ability to take it all in — or the opposite, leading your eyes to a vanishing point. You’ll create movements the way a symphony or sonata does – each one distinct yet playing off the one before. (Well, Boston’s was traditionally designed to fit music – each section, a song or overture or dance. Now that’s impressive! Oh, and we’d listen along with our radios — everywhere, tuned to the classical station.)

Think, too, that many of the traditional fireworks are named for flowers – blooms that open and then fade, often into another. Hyacinths to chrysanthemums to … well, to see how it works the other way, try this link to flowers arranged to look like fireworks by Sarah Illenburger. Pretty amazing. I appreciate her illustration of how fireworks don’t have to be gaudy greens, reds, and yellows. The more sophisticated designers blend colors into dark brooding as well as shimmering pastels. One memorable show consisted largely of silvers and golds. What was I saying about imaginative design?

A pyrotechnics show works in another dimension as well – it’s a time of public gathering and celebration. Apart from whatever’s happening on your blanket in the dark, there’s nothing private about it. (And we’ll assume you’re jammed in with others.) You can’t do it in your house, at least safely. So it’s a time of community spirit. Even pride. And in the United States, that means the Fourth of July. (The northern half of the country’s just too cold during much of the year to assemble outdoors at night, so this one comes at a perfect time of summer. Not that we don’t try.)

For Dover, where I live, though, the event points up one of the geographic shortcomings of my city. We just don’t have the right spot to mount the event, much less to design it to do much more than the old bang-bang-bang honky-tonk.

Some years, it’s launched from the top of Garrison Hill, where the shots can be seen from much of the city – if trees, houses, or other obstacles don’t block your view from below. Some years, it’s at the high school, but that’s not centrally located. Since few people can walk there, that creates a traffic problem and erodes much of a small-town feeling befitting its scale. Dover’s not an unfocused suburb the way this site suggests.

Downtown along the river would be ideal, if there were only a proper spot. The riverfront park is narrow, though, and too near the old mills, the nearest one once the scene of a disastrous fire. One possibility a little downstream is a gravel-strewn lot awaiting development, but it has little easy access. One elementary school that might do is in a residential area that would not welcome a crowd.

So here we are. If I watch the show, I’ll just get angry, knowing what could be done with the resources in the right setting. As I was saying about the single tulip? It needs the right setting to be appreciated.

CHECKOUT EXPRESSION

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

The supermarket checkout express lane can trigger some hot buttons for me.

One, of course, is the customer who plops 15 or 20 items on the conveyor belt when there’s a state 12 Items max limit. The poor clerk’s not going to bounce them. It’s simply the rudeness to the rest of us that bugs me.

Another is the use of credit cards, when permitted. It slows everything down.

The other day, though, there was a geezer who cut in front of a girl with a shopping cart. She was, from appearances, a quiet teen.

“Excuse me,” I said, “There’s a girl in front of you.”

“I can’t hear you,” he replied.

So I repeated the situation.

“Mind your own business,” he retorted.

We were all shocked.

“You can go in front of me,” she finally said.

Any suggestions for how to handle this?

He’s an embarrassment to all geezers, am I not mistaken?

I’m still miffed. Whatever happened to manners?

 

LIBERATING IN THE END

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

A central question facing compositional artists of all stripes (in contrast to performing artists like actors, dancers, and musicians) is the matter of determining when a work’s finished.

How do you know?

Is just out-and-out satisfaction a measure? A trusty one? Hmm.

Let me suggest some others.

Sometimes it’s a sense that you just can’t go any further with it. And if it’s in a state beyond notes and fragments, maybe that’s it. You’ve hit a wall, a property line, or just the shore or riverbank. So you stop. Period.

There are times, admittedly, when you think something’s finished and put it aside only to find, on returning, it needs more – revision, for starters, and maybe additions and major restructuring. (A friend spoke the other evening of drafting a memoir in the third-person and then redoing it in the first-person, the kind of change I’ve done in some of my fiction. And Brahms had an early symphony that became a piano concerto, if I recall right.)

Working under a deadline can simplify matters. Time’s up! Next!

Nice, if you happen to have an advance or pipeline of delivery or the concert’s coming up.

Novelists might even find doneness appears as the time they find their focus obsessing with the book under the one they’ve been tackling.

Some poets will say that once it’s published, they can let go of it. Finito!

~*~

In the bigger picture, the “finished” question isn’t just about having a manuscript ready. For a writer, it’s ultimately about landing the work in a reader’s hands. A place where a dialogue can begin. And getting that manuscript from a polished draft into circulation can be a huge, energy-depleting limbo, especially if your life is filled with competing claims on your time.

In short, you can either focus on seeing that one work through to publication – or you can create the next one, while the inspiration’s still hot. For me, as I tried to balance my writing life with a journalism career, personal relationships, spiritual practice, and so on, I wound up with a huge backlog of finished material. At least I’d wisely not put off the writing for retirement, as had a number of colleagues I’d known – none of them ever managed to fulfill that dream.

What I did find, though, was that the unpublished work became a burden of its own. Its emotional weight inhibited new work. Why bother? It even had a way of twisting my sense of identity – who was I then and who am I now? Think, too, of the relationships that fed into one work – and the people I’m with today. As in lover or spouse.

So the experience of having my book-length works finally being published brings the “finished” consideration across yet another threshold – the matter of being liberated. I can let go of trying to hold that memory, treasuring that epiphany, honoring that friendship.

Should I have just trashed them long ago and moved on into other, non-literary endeavors? Just think of the hours that could have been directed instead to overtime pay, which would make my retirement more secure. Or travel or …

Maybe it’s just a case of hoping for acknowledgement. Hey, here I am!

Still, it’s what I’ve done.

What I have is a feeling of being true to a responsibility carried to its completion at last. What happens from here is, well, liberating any way it goes.

YET ANOTHER PILE OF OBSOLESCENCE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 7 Comments

Years ago my father gave me a small metal cabinet with 18 one-inch-deep plastic drawers, each 2.5-by-6 inches. It was intended to hold screws, nuts and bolts, and other small items for the household repair shop – but mine wound up in my studio, where it holds small items of the writer’s trade. An artist’s pencil sharpener, push pins, souvenir fossils and flakes of mica, fountain pen cartridges, staples (for the stapler), a measuring tape, clothespins, business cards, foreign coins, colorful paperclips in both small and large sizes.

The last item – three of the drawers, in fact – recently stopped me cold.

Not so long ago, or so it seemed, I started collecting them at the office as we went through the mail. My literary work at home included a hefty dose of correspondence – not just submissions, either – and the bright-color clips seemed a much brighter option than the usual shiny steel in circulation.

As I gazed on them this time, though, I started to wonder what I’ll really be doing with them. Submissions are all done online these days, as is most correspondence, even of the personal streak. Maybe I’ll clip materials together when offering a workshop here or there, but I’ll never go through my stash.

Add to that the manila envelopes and cardboard backing, the loud bursts of colorful folders and binders, even the three bottles of typewriter correction fluid.

Not too long ago I wanted more filing cabinets, but as elder daughter informs me, folks can’t even give those away these days. Besides, I stopped printing out manuscripts long ago. Talk about downsizing?

Makes me wonder what’s next to go. Not that I’m really comfortable with any of these changes.

RADAR VIEW AND THE EXPERIENCE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Looking at the forecast a while back, trying to figure out whether we’d actually be hit by thunderstorms, I played with the radar view on the online map and saw – for the second or third time in as many days – some heavy activity in Upstate New York. The stuff that was headed our way.

Brought back some intense memories of my first summer after college, when I was living with two others in a neighborhood that fluctuated between Italian during the day and black ghetto at night. Much of it, I should add, has since been leveled, at least from what I see in the satellite photos of the neighborhood.

We lived on the second floor, with a porch on the front that overlooked the street as well as windows in the parlor and dining room that looked out into the foothills – or mountains down the valley, as this flatlander viewed them. Still, it seemed that most late afternoons that June included a dramatic thunderstorm rolling in. The mountains would disappear in swirling gray and then emerge in slices, at best, before becoming whole again. It was nothing like anything I’d viewed in the Midwest.

The radar, of course, doesn’t present that part of the experience. But for me, at the time, it was magical.

Don’t think I’ve ever viewed a thunderstorm quite the same since, either.

 

CRACKLING IN OUR AIR

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

In blogging here, I’ve generally tried to steer clear of current events, as in political and economic news. Even my reflections on the weather have been, I hope, along a larger or more timeless horizon than mere day-to-day changes. Think of watching the grass grow.

But I do live in New Hampshire, and the campaigns for the November 8, 2016, presidential election are already generating daily front-page headlines here. Remember, that’s nearly a year-and-a-half away.

The primary is tentatively set for February 9, but that could move up, depending. We hate when it clashes with Christmas.

The point is, politics is already crackling in our air. How can I possibly avoid it?

FOR THE WIDER GOOD

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

Be wary of folks who seem to believe they’re better than the rest of us. (They’re likely to expect more than their share.)

Yes, respect superior skills and abilities, especially when they’re used for the wider good.

But see through the mask, as well.

(Oh, I hope I’m not wearing mine …)

DIGGING OUT INTO SUMMER

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Now that winter’s over, some of us are finding difficulty in trying to shift gears. Yes, the snow’s finally melted, but that’s not how I feel.

I suppose officially I’ve been enduring a mild depression, though for me that means mostly emotional numbness along with some simmering anger. Call it the blahs. No need to go into details here, other than to admit there were a few complicating elements of chronic negativity in the air.

What does matter is the feeling of being stuck. Molasses. Even impoverished, no matter the reality.

Where’s the joy, the sunlight, the ongoing pleasure?

There have been small steps. The daily indoor swimming, for one. Yes, it’s still a daily effort but also an emerging sense of accomplishment and meeting some goals. I’ve also been growing my hair out, which is going much slower than the first time around – don’t know if I’ll keep it this way, either, just wanted to revisit that side of my hippie past. Still, the seemingly terminal winter chilled much of my desire to play with my Christmas-gift camera, even if I did get some shots I’ll likely post next winter. (I just didn’t want to put any more snow and ice up on the Web. It was getting tedious.) And there’s been some overdue reading, including a bout of Philip Roth, pro and con.

The question, on this merry-go-round? Well, a cluster of questions, actually.

What’s really at the center? Where’s my core energy? What do I have to offer to others? To the world? How do I become a better person, more open to others? More compassionate, especially? In other words, how do I more fully engage the spiritual life before me?

Time to turn some soil, transplant sprouts, plant some seeds. Ideally, helping others – or sharing companionship in the process.

In other words, here we go ’round again.

YET ANOTHER SCANDAL

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Growing up, many of us were instructed that the Fourth Commandment, “Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain,” was a prohibition against using certain curse words, not all of them confined to four letters.

But that misses a much larger situation: those who arrogantly claim to know or do what God wants, even when that harms others or runs counter to Scripture.

Faithful action, from all I’ve seen, requires humility and compassion. As humans, any of us can be wrong or fail, especially when we mistake our egos for divine guidance.

Newer translations of Exodus 20:7, I sense, capture this difference by using “misuse” instead: “You shall not misuse the name of Yahweh your God, for Yahweh will not leave unpunished anyone who misuses his name” (New Jerusalem Bible). The New International version, meanwhile, finishes the line with “not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.”

Everett Fox, in his close-to-the-grain rendering, presents the passage this way: “You are not to take up the name of YHWH your God for emptiness, for YHWH will not clear him that takes up his name for emptiness.” In a footnote, Fox explains “take up … for emptiness” as “Use for a false purpose.”

I can’t help but think of this in light of the continuing news reports involving the cablevision series 19 Kids and Counting.

We’ve heard their lines of argument.

Now listen for the “will not leave unpunished” part of the commandment. Who’s standing up for the alleged victims? And where’s the true, full submission in place of arrogance? Let the tables turn rightly.

For now, the words fly. And fly. Can we ask how many are empty?

ALL THE FITNESS THAT FITS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

Physical fitness has never been high on my list of priorities. Not the ones that actually find action. Yes, there have been stages where hatha yoga was a routine activity. And getting ready for mountain trails could be another.

Right after college, as I mentioned a while back, I did swim indoor laps through one winter – maybe two or three times a week.

So here I am, in retirement, getting back into the swimming – in part a consequence of elder daughter’s Christmas gift of a yearlong pass to the city’s indoor pool, and in part due to the urging of my physician.

It’s interesting watching the stages of adjustment here.

The first month, three laps – a mere three – were my limit of ability. And that was a fight, three times a week. A fight for air. A fight to get to the end of the lane. It was embarrassing.

Slowly, I’ve been edging up to 10 laps a day, five days a week. Sometimes more.

Each length of the pool has its own kind of stroke, a rotation of free-style, back, breast, and each side. It helps keeping count, too.

Since nine laps is a bit more than a quarter-mile, it’s adding up.

With my sinuses and allergies, breathing will always be a problem. At least I’m able to do half of my lengths without the nose clips now. (What a relief!)

One breakthrough came in sensing I was no longer fighting to get from one end to the other but instead engaging the resistance of the water to my advantage. That’s not the same as being at home in the water or even relaxed, but it does change the relationship.

And then there was the recognition of moments of ease – say in the glide pushing off from the end or easing off at the other, or the lift between strokes.

The other afternoon, pausing before returning to my car, I realized I was exhausted, as I always am after the laps. But there was also another sensation. I felt GOOD. As in satisfied.

Allelujah!