Quick Takes, March Madness Edition

1.  I can't help it.  This is the time of year that makes me miss my old place, and my old place in the world, more than I do at most other times.  The grayness, the bleakness of late winter, punctuated occasionally by the nearly-forgotten sound of bird-cries, the dirty patches of snow at the curb, the wind that rages and at the same time brings the barest hint of cleansing freshness with it -- all of these make me recall New York at this time of year, and walking through it, walking for miles, which is one of the most wonderful things one does there.  Today in my mind I am walking and walking in the neighborhood Madeleine L'Engle described in my favorite of her YA novels, The Young Unicorns.  I'm walking up Riverside Drive along the edge of the park as the wind whips the bare trees and the river sits like a dull strip of lead down below.  If you're a poetically-inclined young girl on this walk, the wind whipping your coat and hair around you will evoke all the sorts of things you long for, even though most of them are things with no names, but after the walk you will go to the Hungarian Pastry Shop (whose facade is pictured above) and have something hot to drink and write, no doubt, in your journal.

2. Nonetheless, I have it on good authority that the present moment is the one in which God dwells, and that to allow yourself to sink into the hot bath of the past -- one of those baths that feel heavenly at first, but soon grow ice cold, but you fear you'll be even colder if get out and dry off -- is to turn your back on God, to deny Him the gratitude that's His due for the abundance He's pouring into your life right now.  This is probably true.  And yet, I am thinking right now of all those dirty patches of snow by the curb and that biting wind, which seemed, in my beautiful former city, to presage so much more than their counterparts, here in Northern Appalachia, seem to do.

3.  I wonder to what extent I'm a prisoner of my past, and to what extent this is neurotic and unhealthy.  There is something perverse, perhaps even decadent, in constantly turning your mind to something that's gone, even if it was where all the excitement was, and where all the beauty seemed to be.

4.  I'm glad that Lent and Easter come so late this year.  As usual, I don't feel ready for spring at all.  If snow, to paraphrase of the great Tommy Wolf-Fran Landesman song "Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most," will not be returning to hide the clover, at least penance will keep me from overweening lightheartedness at this time of year.



(By the way, I recently found out that "Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most" is from a forgotten musical about beatniks, The Nervous Set.  Here is the show's poster, designed by legendary cartoonist Jules Feiffer.)

5.  March can really hang me up the most.  I'm usually a stressed-out nervous wreck this month, for no reason in particular.  Though it's true that two dear friends of mine died in March, a year apart, and that the year the second dear friend died, I had a painful and difficult pregnancy loss a few days later.  And I just realized the other day, after many years of mistakenly assuming that it would have been in April, that my first, lost child would have been born in March, twenty years ago.

6.  Here is a sad song which some of you may recognize, and which I don't dare post until February is past.  No matter how bleak and saddening March can be, perhaps it's not quite so much so as February.

Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most, part 2

I wrote a post about this wonderful song about a year ago, and, in browsing back to it, I realized I'd linked to the wrong version of it.  In the meantime, some kindly soul has uploaded the correct version to Youtube.  Here it is -- it's magnificent.

More on the song from Maclin Horton here.

Anyone Lived

Spring at last.  We are all dust (and to dust we will return), but it's a very good thing that the vernal equinox breaks through the inescapable Lenten ethos of human frailty and contemplation of death -- Not only Christ's, but also our own.

Here is a beautiful poem about the cycles of life by e.e. cummings, "anyone lived in a pretty how town":

anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn't he danced his did

Women and men(both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn't they reaped their same
sun moon stars rain

children guessed(but only a few
and down they forgot as up they grew
autumn winter spring summer)
that noone loved him more by more

when by now and tree by leaf
she laughed his joy she cried his grief
bird by snow and stir by still
anyone's any was all to her

someones married their everyones
laughed their cryings and did their dance
(sleep wake hope and then)they
said their nevers they slept their dream

stars rain sun moon
(and only the snow can begin to explain
how children are apt to forget to remember
with up so floating many bells down)

one day anyone died i guess
(and noone stooped to kiss his face)
busy folk buried them side by side
little by little and was by was

all by all and deep by deep
and more by more they dream their sleep
noone and anyone earth by april
wish by spirit and if by yes.

Women and men(both dong and ding)
summer autumn winter spring
reaped their sowing and went their came
sun moon stars rain

Music and Memory, Part 9: February

While many of my New York City compatriots hate pigeons (a.k.a. "rats with wings"), I have always loved them, because they are so beautiful.  If you look closely, you can see that each one is different, and the way their necks ripple with brilliant shades of purple and green in the sunlight is a reminder of the beauty hidden in the even the drabbest-seeming among us.

Today I saw a bird in my backyard that was not a pigeon (some days, here, I'd give a lot for a glimpse of one), but it reminded me of one.  It was a dull, blackish, starling sort of bird, and its head was subtly colored with an iridescent green that called to my mind images of pigeons strutting and scrapping in the city sunlight, and reminded me that spring was not far off.

Not two weeks ago we were shoveling, and now it's mild, though the mountains all around are still covered in snow.  I used to have a recurring nightmare that I had missed spring entirely, having slept through it or been too distracted by whatever I was brooding over to notice the loveliest of seasons.  But these past few years, I've wanted the winter to go on and on.  I never feel ready for the reawakening of spring, for its lightness, its nakedness and simplicity.  But the seasons rarely respect human desire; as T.S. Eliot wrote in the first lines of The Waste Land:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow . . .

Here is a song about winter giving way to spring, Dar Williams's "February," from her 1996 album Mortal City.  It is one of the saddest songs I know.

Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most

When I was a very young woman, I bought, one Sunday, a homemade cassette tape of the great jazz singer Betty Carter at the now-defunct Canal Street flea market. This tape helped me through a long, difficult period of heartbreak, in particular Carter's idiosyncratic interpretation of the Landesman-Wolf standard "Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most" (from her 1964 album Inside Betty Carter), which you can hear here. The lyrics convey the louche, wised-up attitude of most 1950s standards, and yet they are also resigned and truly poignant.

Morning's kiss wakes trees and flowers
And to them I'd like to drink a toast;
I walk in the park just to kill the lonely hours.
Spring can really hang you up the most.

The sparse arrangement and the understated playing of Carter's trio, suggestive of wide-open spaces not yet warmed by the sun or populated with blossoms, combined with her restrained, intellectual, and yet deeply affecting read of the lyrics, give this song a kind of verisimillitude, a true-to-life musical depiction of loneliness as the modern condition.

The funny thing is that I have always felt, no matter how hard the winter has been, that spring has come too soon. I am never ready for it. By the time March rolls around, I feel as if I've allied myself completely, inside and out, with wintriness, the essence and substance of winter, and that winter is the only state in which I will ever feel comfortable. In spite of the universal longing for spring, I feel that I should hang back (as the song says, "like a horse that never left the post"), and I would like to delay the warmth, the fecundity, the light-heartedness, of the new season.

The cold, gray days of early spring are, however, especially evocative and nostalgic for me, and in my mind I have always associated them with certain pieces of French Impressionist music that I had the great good fortune to study as an undergraduate. These pieces have always been a kind of balm for loneliness to me, not because they counteract it, but because they so marvelously depict and deepen solitude. These are pieces that (like "Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most") convey a sense of wind-swept openness, and also of rushing movement, of forward motion without resolution. Whenever I hear Debussy's string quartet, I'm taken back in memory to New York. It is early March, a Sunday, and I am walking up Riverside Drive ("I walk in the park just to kill the lonely hours"); the huge trees are black and bare, with just the merest hint of a grayish-green penumbra shading some boughs to suggest the coming leaves; the air is cold, and the river is gray. To me Debussy's music is gray too, in many varying shades; it is the music of early spring, of hearts that lie dormant. Ravel's quartet, though it too suggests wide-open spaces with sweeping melodic gestures, is for later, much later, after hearts have begun to be awakened by the warmth of spring, awakened to love and pain.