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March 25, 2006

The Moon as a Doorbell, the Sky as a Pan

Having lived so long in New York City, I’ve never felt quite natural in nature. Nature hardly even seems second nature, but more like a trope for elements of urban culture. For example, those purple crocuses poking up, now that it’s spring, remind me of fluorescent neon. When they open a bit to show their golden filaments, they’ll resemble black-light incandescent bulbs. (I do realize the blooms actually were bulbs. The organic kind.) And pastel impatiens and sweet peas make me think of those wave-softened bottle shards known to beachcombers as sea glass. I then remind myself they’re flowers.

I rarely make reverse associations, comparing something manufactured to something natural. I don't seem to perceive directly, without the imposition of metaphor. It's always been like this.

Years ago I arrived at a rural place for a brief stay. Fresh (or rather stale) from the city, I overheard a tall woman complacently praising the beauty of the sunset. I muttered, “Smog makes better ones.� There was no leeway to discuss the illusive hues of sullied heavens during industrial sundowns, for my remark was met by a chilly frown cast from withering heights.

Something similar had happened on a previous sojourn. I’d made the mistake of comparing the shiny curving sky, silvered at dusk, to a stainless steel pan tarnished at the bottom (thanks to a horizon of dusky shrubs). An offended pragmatist retorted: “And I suppose you’d compare the moon to a doorbell?� “Bravo!� I laughed, raising a finger to press the minute celestial knob and wondering who might come to the door.

Early one morning I went walking alone in a rural lane. I couldn’t help but compare the grazing, honking Canada geese to flatulent jalopies backing up. The taut gray ground was covered with dew-frost, glittering like sidewalk mica. The crows were as still as milestones. Invisible critters in the leaves and underfoot sounded like a miniature factory mechanically clacking from afar.

But the scent in the air stymied me. It was like nothing human-made. It was the smell of newness, but not like new-car leather, or Ivory soap, or just-poured concrete on a construction site. The air smelled simply new. Kind of like rain.

Posted by Jane on 9:35 AM | Comments (0)

March 19, 2006

Ghost Colony

Once I spent a year, from one January to the next, in the Catskill Mountains. I’d often wake to see that during the night, late-winter ice storms had painted a Chinese scroll on the panes. Faint, fog-colored patches spread across the glass in the shapes of distant hills, mountain grottos and ragged pines. Lost in reverie, I‘d forget that beyond the watermarks, accidental stains and brushstrokes were their real-life counterparts: actual hills, grottos, pines.

One unexpectedly warm March day, I went walking in the woods. The snow clusters on the coarse brown ground looked like coconut meat in the husk. I drifted farther in, following a remote noise that sounded like applause. I half expected to stumble upon an elfin ensemble tuning up in a woodland concert-hall. No concert-hall, but a rushing cascade, now quite loud, performing an entire sustained opus like a voluble ovation.

When I emerged from the woods, I found myself on an unknown, isolated, sallow field. Over a half acre or so, abandoned lawn toys languished on dun hummocks of tall yellow grass. The jungle-gym, whirligig, and tether-ball stake seemed to have been waiting, abandoned and drab, for a surreal eternity. Good props for a creepy movie, rusted creakings, ghostly movement and all.

Surrounding the field was a fringe of winter-waste, dominated by the wreckage of truncated trees - fallen dinosaurs snapped in half by disease, age, or the wind — natural forces all, the malevolent effects of which were outlandish, and cast upon nature a preternatural taint. On the ravaged field itself were upright grizzled trees, whose branches seemed scribbled in gleaming chalk.

The playground belonged to a derelict camp colony composed of several careening buildings, once painted sun-yellow, now collapsing, gaunt and scrofulous. The roofs sagged like animals with broken backs; the doors gaped like cadaverous jaws; the shattered windows were vacant as eye-sockets. The peeling paint, jaundice-colored, hung in scabrous curls, like the fungal growths on the felled trees that, moments before, I'd admired with juvenile fascination and disgust.

Every cabin threshold was rotted and threatened to have me plunge through. The eeriest building, dimly marked “NURSERY,� was full of ruined games. As I put a few ancient alphabet blocks in my beret to carry off, I thought I heard a plangent protest, perhaps the croon of ghostly kiddy songs.

Then I left the colony, quickly stepping from the allure of one bad dream into a safer one. It was colder and getting dark. I picked my way across someone's hibernating garden, and my purloined souvenirs rattled in my beret like death relics.

Posted by Jane on 11:30 AM | Comments (0)

March 12, 2006

OVERHEARD IN PASSING, Part 4 or 5

1. “She had dreds to the heels of her shoes.� 1/8/06 – one homeless woman to another in public toilet, Washington Square

2. “When you stop being a fan, it sucks.� 1/28 man on cell phone pushing baby carriage

3. “I left by the rear fire escape and jumped over a wall.� 2/23 young guy on cell phone in Tribeca

4. “Yeah, he got acquitted but he still wants to talk to you.� 2/24 man on cell phone in bookstore

5. “… And number three, I’m having a fling with a guy from work! But that’s not all …� 3/9, young woman on cell phone, West 4th Street

6. 1st woman: "Colitis? At least it's not life-threatening."
2nd woman: "No, but it's quality-of-life threatening." --Health food store, 13th Street, 3/12.

A NEW SURREPTITIOUS DIVERSION: SPYING ON SUBWAY READERS

In addition to street-eavesdropping, I’ve begun a new hobby: straining my eyeballs to read a line or two from the books in subway riders’ laps. The array of printed matter (limited to books) is instructive and entertaining. Here’s my first collection.

1. Heart of Darkness:
“We had carried Kurtz into the pilot house; there was more air there. Lying on the couch, he stared through the open shutter. There was an eddy in the mass of human bodies and the woman with the helmeted head and tawny cheeks rushed out to the brink of the stream. She put out her hand, shouted something, and all that wild mob took up that shout in a roaring chorus of articulated …�

2. Desire after Dark: “Oh please, don’t give me any of that macho vampire crap. What about the other night?�

3. Modern Philosophy: “But what about the converse: things which are possible but inconceivable?�

4. Frankenstein: “I threw myself into the chaise that was to convey me away, and indulged in the most melancholy reflections.�

5. A Wild Sheep: “About her background I know almost nothing. What I do know, someone may have told me; maybe it was she herself when we were in bed together.�

Just after I jotted down #5, I glanced up to an ad for Club Med that was posted above the seat across from me. A lot of words touting sharing, bonhomie, urban manners, etc. The last bit of advice: “Wait until the person reading over your shoulder is done before turning the page.�

Posted by Jane on 12:17 PM | Comments (0)

March 6, 2006

A Bronte Pilgrimage

On my last trip to England, some years ago, I spent a day at the Bronte Parsonage. I visited the house, which is a museum, and wandered on the unchanged moors, wool-gathering; also gathering bits of wool snagged in the heath, doubtless from descendants of Brontëan flocks. At the Parsonage, I learned that the manuscript of Jane Eyre is in the New British Library, in London. The previous week my sister and I had been there, in the India Office, doing research for our respective projects.

So I got on a train at Leeds and returned to London. Back at the Library, I asked to see the manuscript of Jane Eyre. A classically dour superintendent, who could have auditioned for the role of Mrs. Danvers, explained (with more severity than I thought strictly necessary) that only for Very Good Reason is Jane Eyre ever brought out; it is among the most priceless treasures; it is in the class of The Bhagavad Gita and Finnegans Wake.

I stood my ground. With an air of suspicion she finally handed me a request form. The questions were as prohibitive as an application for citizenship:

1. Why must I see the original?
2. Why won’t a facsimile do?
3. What university am I associated with?
4. What have I published?

I sensed that an umbrella answer such as: “It’s my favorite book� wouldn’t suffice. So I wrote out the scanty truth, though not very hopefully.

1. I wish to see the original because Charlotte Bronte breathed upon the pages.
2. The facsimile is not the real thing.
3. I am not affiliated with a university.
4. I haven’t published much, except for a four-part essay, “Jane Eyre: A Subjective Appreciation,� in The Brontë Society Newsletter, which, though an American publication, is under the proprietary scrutiny of its parent organization in Haworth, Keighley, West Yorkshire, England.

A day or two after my petition, I was informed that I could see the manuscript. Still frowning, Mrs. Danvers said: “This title is in three volumes; Volume Two is in on display and not available for inspection; that being the case, would you prefer to look at Volume One or Volume Three?

“Oh, Volume One, please,� I said, and the opening sentence appeared instantly in my mind’s eye: “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.�

Coldly, Mrs. Danvers said: “Have a seat in one of the carrels and it will be brought out to you.�

I sat down, dwarfed by the scale of the furniture and the heavy air of concentration in the room. The tables were burdened with mostly medieval books, and the elbows of furiously intent academics who all looked exactly like academics. Each brandished a magnifying glass, and buried (with almost prurient absorption) a scholarly nose in the deep vellum cleavage of a borrowed ornamental tome.

‘Ere long, a smallish bound manuscript was put in my hands, which I accepted with the awe of one being offered a newborn to hold. It was small and plain, like the eponymous governess herself. Opening the cover, I read the precise penmanship: “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.� Turning each page, I noted down the few changes (one of them, a substitution of “port� for “harbour,� the latter neatly crossed out).

Two hundred fifty-five pages, a third of the entire, delicately scribed by quill with hardly any alteration — a work conceived and produced as a whole. The scene where 10-year-old Jane is in a window seat, looking at Bewick’s Arctic wood engravings, and looking out on a dismal November day: “At intervals, while turning over the leaves of my book, I studied the aspect of that winter afternoon. Afar, it offered a pale blank of mist and cloud; near a scene of wet lawn and storm-beat shrub, with ceaseless rain sweeping away wildly before a long and lamentable blast.�

If I remember correctly, Charlotte wrote this immortal masterpiece in Manchester, where she’d taken her father for cataract surgery. Not a bad way to pass the time in a doctor’s waiting room.

Posted by Jane on 7:09 PM | Comments (0)