Thought for the Last Day of the Month

It's really the late afternoon bird that gets the worm.

image: Christie B. Cochrell, Yellowlegs, Shoreline Park

Auguries

The sweet, melancholy downwards triad of the Golden Crowned Sparrow is always a sure augury of coming and advancing Fall. A song in a distinctly minor key, the singer usually invisible.

Listen here:



image: Golden-crowned Sparrow (Zonotrichia atricapilla), Gary Kramer

Places I Would Rather Be Today

Floating with the ducks . . .


image: The Jungle Palace in the Hanover Zoo with the male Mandarin Duck Aix galericulata at sunset. Photo by Michael Gäbler.

Thought for the Day

"There were moments when Hilary saw life as tending always toward chaos, when it seemed that all one could be asked was just to keep the ashtrays clean, the bed made, the wastebaskets emptied, as if one never got to the real things because of the constant exhausting battle to keep ordinary life from falling apart."

(May Sarton, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing)


image: Cluttered study of American zoologist Edward Drinker Cope (1840-1897)

Bolognese

I think maybe the change in weather has taken away my energy and left me feeling too weary to move. I go out shopping for ingredients for Bolognese (the authentic sort that simmers gently on the stove for five hours or more), and come home with radish sprouts, a royal blue Bundt pan, and a ceramic lamp.

The Bolognese is restorative with an accompanying salad of thin-sliced zucchini rubbed with olive oil and garlic and cooked until striped on the grill, laid on their bed of radish sprouts, layered with good red tomatoes (the last, alas) and basil.

My thoughts have been in Italy a lot lately—going through old pictures, taking a class on the archaeology of Rome, going to operas by Puccini and Verdi, just generally missing it.


image: Christie B. Cochrell, Dandelion Seeds

Harvest Festival

My thoughts turn to the pallette and palate of Fall—

For a little harvest festival at work I gathered
spiced cider
hibiscus cranberry juice
gingerbread tea
roasted gorgonzola crackers
cranberry hazelnut whole grain bread
French country olives
Le Rustique Camembert (fabriqué en Normandie)
Dutch gouda with walnuts
Vermont extra sharp cheddar
Havarti with dill
fondue Brie with herbs
pumpkin cheesecake
pear almond tart
rosemary potato bread
rustic multigrain bread

I've just made a delicious Rosemary Ricotta Quiche with Figs & Italian Sausage, with the last fresh figs of the season, and am planning to bake that heavenly old favorite Pumpkin Cake with Chocolate Glaze Friday for Halloween, or for the end of the month, the season, the longer days. A fitting farewell!

Then on with chilis and soups.

And a good book to curl up with under a quilt would be Marsha Mehran's Pomegranate Soup, about Iranian sisters in Ireland, with lots of recipes for chilly weather.


image: Christie B. Cochrell, Leaves

Thought for the Day

There is a vitality, a life-force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost.

(Martha Graham)


image: Etruscan dancer, Wikimedia Commons

Sunday Morning

Fall is definitely in the air today, and fog.

I got up early and bought a chicken, onions, and potatoes for roasting with fresh herbs. One of the great pleasures of Sundays.


image: Christie B. Cochrell, Yellow

Places I Would Rather Be Today

. . . despite the lovely just-washed autumn sunlight here.


image: Christie B. Cochrell, Blue Boat under the Ponte Vecchio, Florence

Tosca

We saw Tosca on Saturday morning, live from the Met in forty-two countries around the world—technology at its benignest and most impressive; something my father back in Sandpoint would have been thrilled by. I was reminded of the power of Puccini's music, and of the iconic image of the Castel Sant’Angelo, the famous fortress/prison/ mausoleum high above the Tiber, on its top the angel with its downthrust sword and lilting wing.

One afternoon or evening, years ago, I almost didn’t come out of Tosca. I was aware of being literally lost in the music, willing my loss, absorbed too utterly in what was possible no place but there; disbelief not just suspended but become belief in the salvation of the fine, alternate world. I wanted more than anything to stay where the collective trance held me—in that very Italian otherworldly realm, the swell of the Te Deum in the peopled Roman church, the vision of beauty and transformed pain that kept me from myself until the lights came on, the curtain down, removed from my failures to cope with the reality outside. In the operahouse, I was safe. In Tosca’s church, I was far better than I was anywhere else. If I could have chosen, just then, I would not have emerged. My soul was drawn fatally from me.

I don't know if I found the Willa Cather story before that or after—A Wagner Matinée, in which the narrator’s aunt, a music teacher at the Boston Conservatory before her marriage and move to a remote farm on the Nebraska frontier, is brought to face her lost life, in another operahouse. Watching the unmoving woman next to him at the performance he has given her as an imagined treat, the nephew observes “I could feel how all these details sank into her soul . . .” During the Tannhäuser overture he feels “an overwhelming sense of the waste and wear we are so powerless to combat.”

And then, as Siegfried’s funeral march begins,

“The deluge of sound poured on and on; I never knew what she found in the shining current of it; I never knew how far it bore her . . . From the trembling of her face I could well believe that before the last number she had been carried out where the myriad graves are, into the gray, nameless burying grounds of the sea; or into some world of death vaster yet, where, from the beginning of the world, hope has lain down with hope and dream with dream and renouncing, slept.
“The concert was over; the people filed out of the hall chattering and laughing, glad to relax and find the living level again, but my kinswoman made no effort to rise. The harpist slipped the green felt cover over his instrument; the flute-players shook the water from their mouthpieces; the men of the orchestra went out one by one, leaving the stage to the chairs and music stands, empty as a winter cornfield.
“I spoke to my aunt. She burst into tears and sobbed pleadingly. ‘I don’t want to go, Clark, I don’t want to go!’
“I understood. For her, just outside the concert hall, lay the black pond with the cattle-tracked bluffs; the tall, unpainted house, with weather-curled boards, naked as a tower; the crook-backed ash seedlings where the dishcloths hung to dry; the gaunt, moulting turkeys picking up refuse about the kitchen door.”

(Willa Cather, Youth and the Bright Medusa, Vintage Books, 1975)

image: The bronze statue of Archangel Michael, standing on top of the castel Sant'Angelo, Rome. Foto di Giovanni Dall'Orto

Lemon Zest

Some lemon zest for a gray day. (This from when I made lamb and fig stew with olives and herbes de Provence.)

A picture which I thought I had erased by accident coming to light again.



image: Christie B. Cochrell, Lemon Zest

Thought for the Day

Pirates could happen to anyone.
(Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead)

(Even the French navy!)

"But wait a bit. We object to pirates as sons-in law."
"We object to Major-Generals as fathers-in-law."
(Gilbert & Sullivan, The Pirates of Penzance)

image: Shipwreck at Roatán, Honduras, Chris Vaughan

Chaos Theory

Alas, the clutter’s winning . . .

Chaos theory states that the behavior of chaotic systems appears to be random, but is in fact deterministic. Though I am determined to change my chaotic habits, I cannot.

In ancient Greek, chaos was the nothingness out of which everything else—all objects—appeared. The objects themselves are my chaos; not nothingness, but its opposite. Too-muchness, overwhelming and impenetrable presence.

The antithesis of chaos is cosmos. An orderly or harmonious system. My little green sphere—opposed to everything else in my head and in my life.

In Russian, cosmos means space.

Order, harmony, space—all things I am without.

Not coincidentally, I’m sure, the discussion in our Roman Archaeology class is on chaos and order—the need of the Romans to have their world ordered. The sacred, to the Romans, meant having things in their right place. This strikes me as Zen Buddhist as well, cleaning every day just so things “look as if someone has paid attention to them.” Why am I so far from either, when I agree in principle?

In the saner outside world, the farmer’s market offers me the momentary space of travel; escape to other, cleaner lands: Basque frying peppers (the lofty stretches of the Pyrenees), purslane (an herb known to bestow health, by the pharmacists of Cairo, the archaeobotanists of Greece, the Elizabethan English), chanterelles (Henry James’s Paris, with tall windows looking out on a slow boulevarad), dates from Indio or the far deserts, wind-scoured, vast.

I saute the chanterelles in butter, to stir into eggs, and learn later that Tamasin Day-Lewis has a recipe for the same. A clean moment in a cluttered time.

image: Christie B. Cochrell, Heirloom Tomatoes

The Clutter Conundrum

It occurred to me yesterday morning, as my senses were rejoicing in the cinnamon and peaches of a baking cake, that it was possible to fill a house to the rafters with smells and colors, music and moments of light, instead of with things that weigh and halt. Why not live that way, simply, with the fragrances of beeswax and lavender, the extravagance of clean Egyptian cotton sheets, birdsong through the open windows (until a burbling pot steams them)? Or paint a room an intense blue and put nothing else in it but a single tangerine or orange? There are ways of living that are not so ponderous. Getting rid of the piano that I never play, the sewing machine buried under a huge computer monitor never turned on, the books I have no hope of reading. The eternal clutter.

And yet, and yet. The things that make the lightness possible are not themselves insubstantial. For the golden cake, beaters and pans and bowls. For music, stereo systems and unsightly wires, or pianos that scarcely fit through doorways. For beeswax, the long-grained wooden farmhouse table to rub it into; jars and rags and storage shelves. And so it all accumulates.

And what of lost chances? The song I want to find to play again someday on my piano, out of tune and sticky keys or no—the song by Faure or by Grieg, without words, that I regret to this day not having had the courage to play that lilac-haunted spring evening of high-school baccalaureate in the lengthening evening sun coming through the open door of the unfamiliar church. My music books given away, even the name of song and composer lost.

And what of other objects that take on themselves the light, allow the momentary grace? My little light-struck fetishes, the jeweled river of the Tiffany window, the green-glazed sphere above the (laden) writing desk?

I shall weigh the consequences to spirit of letting go—and in the meantime breathe the lingering spice and listen again to what might be my lost song, Faure's Romance sans Paroles, loosed these more than thirty years later.




Image: Christie B. Cochrell, Bear Fetish