incidents and accidents

Chais qu'chuis pas une bombe latine, ni une blonde platine, DJ!

Filler.
I'm working on actual content, I promise.

1.
Proof I've been watching the wrong shows :

Wife : Well, the least we can do is go search his room! If we find any more, we'll confiscate them.

Husband : You want to take away his condoms?

W : If we leave them there, he'll think we're condoning it!

H : Honey, ...

W : WHAT!??

H : We can take away his condoms if you insist. But he's a 16-year-old boy. We could take away his penis and he'd still try to have sex.

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2.
Click over to Make Poverty History. The film is called "Click." That's all the time it takes.

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3.


Create your own personalized map of the USA*

*Map corrected to include South Dakota. Unfortunately, Wall Drug doesn't make the lists (though if you've driven anywhere within a 600-mile radius of it, you'll know that it should).

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4.
Snapshot from France : If one day you hear, on M6 musiques at the 6e arrondissement apartment of a friend whose mishmash collection of black skirts and urban music, plus her lavender-painted walls, never ceases to astonish you, a song that includes the line "Laisse-moi kiffer la vibes avec mon mec" - you will understand why I rejoice in language. And why I despair. Because even once you've finally parsed out all the lyrics and figured out why the syllables sound the way they do, nobody, nobody from the monolingual side of your life will have the slightest clue what makes it so cool, and you won't be able to explain it.

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5.
Usual drill : bold for the books you've read.

#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Koran
#5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#7 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
#11 Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
#12 Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Capital by Karl Marx
#37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
#43 Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker
#58 Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck
#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
#91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
#98 Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Émile by Jean-Jacques Rousseau*
#103 Nana by Émile Zola
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

*cited incorrectly in original list as Emile Jean by Jacques Rousseau.

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6.
Plus ...

I could watch this all day and it would never stop being funny.

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7.

You're Spain!


You like rain on the plain, as well as interesting architecture and a diverse number of races and religions.  You like to explore a lot, but sailing, especially in large groups, never really seems to work out for you.  Beware of pirates and dictators bearing bombs.  And for heavens' sake, stop running around bulls!  It's just not safe!


Take the Country Quiz.

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8.
And finally ...
I am no longer a redhead.

A bientôt.

How Decisions Get Made.

Brain (thinking) : Hmmm. That feels like hunger. I should start thinking about fixing dinner.

Stomach : Fixing? Just get a pizza.

B : No, after 3 days of bronchitis and almost-total bedrest, a pizza would be way too hard on the system.

S : Don't sell the system short. We can handle it. Right, dudes?

Liver, Kidneys, Small Intestine, Large Intestine, and Heart (in chorus, like the bobbly green alien-things in Toy Story) : Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!

B : Not gonna happen. How about ... hmmm ... soup?

S : Soup? Screw soup. How about pizza?

B : Soup is mild and low in calories. It's better balanced and has more vegetables, less fat ... We've got antibiotics to factor in here, remember. Soup is better for the whole system.

L, K, SI, LI, and H : PIZZA!

S : The whole system wants pizza.

B : The whole system can blow me. Three days of lying around on my ass, and you want me to eat cheese?

Ass : Listen, the rate we're going, one pizza is not going to make all the difference in the world ...

B : I don't remember asking you, you traitorous specimen of bulbosity.

A : I'm just saying, as the lying-around-on-ee here, I think I deserve a say in this decision.

B : You deserve liposuction. Our soup choices include Italian Vegetable, Chicken with Wild Rice, ...

S : We had Chicken with Wild Rice yesterday! And Italian Vegetable the day before that! I WANT PIZZA!

B : You want to walk out in the rain to go pick it up, too?

L, K, SI, LI, and H (muttering) : euh ... well ... umm ...

[a pause]

S : Can we have toast with that? You have butter, right?

Easter Update.

1. Happy Easter.

2. My aunt had a heart attack Friday night. She's in the hospital and doing okay - a bit out of it but no paralysis, for example. I won't know more until tomorrow. Please pray for her.

***Update Update : The heart attack was mild. She had an angiogram this morning and it showed a blockage in an artery just above her hip. They removed the blockage and her blood pressure dropped immediately. The doctors said that was the only problem they could find. Alleluia !

Prise de position.

I am good at a few things. I can follow a recipe but I'm a more passionate cook if you take the measuring cups away and let me play around with spices and wine and whatever is simmering into being on the stovetop. I can sight-read a Beethoven piano sonata, but I'm better at playing melodies by ear and adding my own chords and background music. I can explicate a poem and, if you really want, I can give you a Marxist reading, a feminist reading, a structuralist reading, a deconstructionist reading ... but I can really bring the poem to life by, instead, telling you a bit about Rimbaud's life and what makes his language so rich and compelling, and what it must have been like to live in Paris just after the Commune in 1871. Basically, even at age 35, I can paint by numbers if I have to but I'm still a better artist once I color outside the lines.

I am very good at a very few things. I can speak French, or so French people tell me, without an accent, even though my own ear is sharp to the heaviness of my own tongue. I can explain when to use the subjunctive and how morphology works. I can write about liturgy and music and how they overlap and why that's important. I am very good at the things I love. This is sometimes a personal failing.

I am not at all good at a great many things. I dance like a broken marionnette. My Spanish is horribile. I play the violin but it sounds like a wounded possum shrieking for release. I can concentrate for roughly 3 minutes forty-seven seconds at a time before getting distracted. Self-discipline? An open package of Girl Scout Cookies is an empty package of Girl Scout Cookies. Math? I got a 420 on that portion of my GREs - and I didn't just mark "C" for every question. (For information, the GREs are scored out of 800.)

And I'm not good at standing up for what I believe. For a long time this was directly related to the fact that I didn't know what I believed. It's hard to have the courage of your convictions when you don't have any convictions to be courageous about. When everything is relative, you can believe in everything with equal weight. It's different now, and harder. I disagree with my family and most of my friends on major issues, political and religious. I'm uncomfortable with how intertwined those categories are. I am more conservative than I used to be, and I don't speak up about it most of the time. Nine times out of ten I hold my tongue. Not because my faith is fragile, but because I don't have the experience or the verbal apparatus, the vocabulary, to make a strong case. It was easier to speak up for my beliefs, such as they were, when they were what everyone else I knew believed.

I'm not good at rejection, and I'm not good at going against the grain. Also, speaking up for yourself requires strategy : you have to choose your battles. And choosing battles means situating yourself clearly on one side of a battlefield, and designating someone as your opponent. You have to know when to advance, and when to retreat, and how your advances and retreats will be met by the person you've decided you're "against." I'm not good at that. I don't like being against anybody. I don't like knowing anybody is against me. I am not a strategist.

And so a lot of the time I keep silent. It's a useful tactic - you learn a lot that way, and see more sides of an issue than if you go in braying your opinion from the get-go - but not a particularly courageous one. And silence is a hard habit to break. I have spent three days writing this post. (Three days! That's like three decades in blog-time.) I don't know that I have anything new to offer, but after reading and rereading and hunting around on the web through the blogyrinth the past few days I have realized that I do have something to say about politics and the Schiavo case, and finally, religion. These are not answers. They are opinions, from someone who has not studied all the legal and medical and moral ramifications of the case. I am not an expert. But neither do I simply swallow propaganda without asking any questions. So here is how I see it.

(1) I would like to say to the ultra-conservative hopefuls out there : Terri Schiavo is not going to sit up tomorrow and ask for a Filet-o-Fish Value Menu and the first season of Alias on DVD. She is not going to sit up tomorrow and say "Hey, Michael. Hey, Media. Hey, Internet and everybody, I want to eat." She is also not going to sit up and say "I want to die." She cannot respond that way. And I would like to say, to the more liberal, or more callous : starving her to death is not the answer. As I type that sentence I find myself marveling at the fact that I am sitting before my computer, in North America, in 2005, putting that thought into words. That I live in a nation whose legal system has been vaunted and studied and flaunted as a model before the rest of the world, and yet it actually comes down to the country's populace and representation taking sides on the ethics of starving a woman to death. In one women's studies class I read an article about the plight of women under the Taliban, and the headline was "Afghan Woman Stoned to Death For Not Wearing Veil." I have read about human-rights violations, specifically against women, the world over, and the stories incite the international community to start letter-writing campaigns and hold peaceful vigils. We all seem to agree, with varying degrees of activity or involvement, that these global incidents are abominations. Here's a headline : "American Woman Starved to Death For Having Brain Damage." Where are the global activists? Where are the feminists? What happens the next time a husband decides he wants the courts to help his wife die? Don't imagine this case doesn't set a precedent. Once we start deciding who deserves to live and who doesn't, where do we stop? How do we stop? Part of my silence on the issue, aside from not knowing quite what to believe with all the strong words out there, has come from sheer disbelief that we have come to this.

(2) I would also like to say that Michael Schiavo is not - as has been suggested in comments elsewhere - a Nazi. He is not a modern-day Mengele, and Terri's predicament, though I personally consider it a gross abusive miscarriage of justice, is not Auschwitz ; and I hope the person who wrote that is ashamed of himself. What a despicable comparison to make. Michael Schiavo is not an evil man. He is very probably a man who has suffered greatly during the 15 years his wife has been comatose. He wants a life with his children and new family. He does not want to continue living in the conditions he has had to endure since 1990.

Aside note : You know what I was doing in 1990? Wearing a red polyester visor with my name in puffy-paint on it and a Hard Rock Café pin shaped like a blue guitar, frying food from 6 pm to midnight and then going home to read Henry James and Shakespeare for the next day's classes. I wrote artsy reviews for the campus newspaper in which I used as many adjectives as they would let me get away with, because I was paid by the inch. I shared a two-bedroom apartment with my boyfriend and took the pill so we could have unmarried sex without worrying about getting pregnant. It was lifetimes ago. My life has changed since 1990, and I consider that a great grace, I am one of the lucky ones. I have a neat little box of souvenirs I can look at from that former life of mine, and be nostalgic and reassured because it's over. Michael Schiavo doesn't. Fate has not been kind to his marriage with Terri Schindler. She was not hit by a car. She didn't die from a gunshot wound. She didn't die from any one of the fates we see daily in the news or on CSI and which are horrifying but mercifully both immediate and terminal. He doesn't have a neat picture of her from the time before that he can look at with occasional melancholy - he has watched her deteriorate, bit by bit, over the years. Why he hasn't petitioned for a divorce is beyond me. Michael Schiavo cannot look at a photograph of Terri and say, "That was my wife." He has to look at her nearly lifeless body and use the present tense. It would take the courage and the patience of a saint to accept living with that situation for as long as it takes for Terri to recover (not likely) or die naturally (not soon). Michael Schiavo is not a saint. He is a suffering man. I thank God for many things. Among them, these days, is the fact that I am not in Michael Schiavo's position, that I don't have to make the decisions he has had to make. And so it is with all the compassion I have, and the knowledge of how truly lucky and blessed I have been and how unjust my next statement must be, that I say I hope I would be strong enough to make a different decision. I hope my strength would lead me to better battles, that do not shake the faith of a nation in its leaders or in each other, and do not have this outcome. That is what I hope. But, as other people have said better, I don't know what I would do.

I hope that I would make the best decision possible. The one that would alleviate as much suffering, and bring peace to as many people, as possible, while preserving the integrity of my loved one's life and memory, and wishes, and family, and of my own soul. I also hope I wouldn't take a step that made the Vatican speak out against me. Or the governor of my state. Or my former in-laws. But more than what anyone else might think of me I hope I would take into account the sanctity of the life I was making a decision about. I wouldn't want to be arbitrary and absolute about just that life's continuation. I would want to consider its wholeness. Its meaning. Its relevance in the intersections with my own life. And I suppose I might wonder if I was capable of making that decision on my own. I hope I would be able to hear the voices of people who had loved that life first and longer, and possibly stronger, than I.

(3) A word about faith, and the faithful. I learned a new expression in Italian the other day, because - in a scene that has played out again and again over the months - I didn't have the words and said it in French and my Italian friend got frustrated and scrawled it on a Post-It : fin'che c'è vita, se espera. So long as there is life, there is hope. Hope may not give us the comfortable results we visualize (Terri stands up and tap-dances her way down the hospital corridor!) ; it may have other things in mind that we will learn from. This is where faith comes into play. Faith is the courage to wait through the unspeakable, and keep hoping. And I would like you, who know me here, and have left me flattering comments or sent me emails when I write something from the heart, to remember this. The next time you think with derision about the people who are fighting against time and the courts to keep Terri Schiavo's hope alive, the next time you dismiss their efforts or label them delusional or hypocritical or regressive, the next time you write that perfect sarcastic sentence that lumps together Christian conservatives and right-wing zealots who are taking over the courts and tearing apart our Constitution and destroying American civil liberties as we know them and playing into the hands of a manipulative administration - you are writing about the faithful. You are writing about me.

This is where I stand.

In the "HUH???" category ...

I just received the following email :

Maximal I had been pappy, me desirability.
I cricket's she forestalled amalgamation has farewell her. Collar has ire, him have Steele overlapped. Braziers has enameling, him could cousins Seoul. Ammonia she are bout's, me attache. Bouncer it has lidding, them decisions. Capella Sonoma, he cropper's anther is meets yors. They Vientiane being nullified theirs. It jelly she median's darts has been interrelating her. Congeal fermion yor can blisters mine. Barbells I be brashly, his Libya. Courts loblolly I be difluoride her. Codeword commonness I has been allegoric her.

Angry clearing, we causally habitation's is celled his. Yor Gaylord does ennoble. Indulging is i's, her be jackpot deploys. Cheryl Woodlawn he could insults you pater. We criers we creator fount being beaux his. He insect's he larder notary had been focus me. Breakthroughs be grilled him Thermofax. Bagpipe's hilt's he is appendix's them. Backtracker Hollerith they would nettlesome me Bohemia. Elizabeth would inexpert, mine have mysterious coulomb. Hookup flares, they can organism him. Nadia has been administrate her idealizations.

There's so much I don't understand here, I don't know where to begin. Any thoughts?

Three.

The evening songs I know begin three different ways : a plea, a call, a statement of completion. Deus, in adjutorium meum intende. Its square neumes are measured curls across the stave, the first steam of morning skimmed off the rippled surface inside a white mug. O Lord, open up my lips. The prayer rises in English syllables by candlelight, a boy soprano with a tone pure as the unburned wisp of wick at the center of light, in a Henrican cathedral whose clear high windows slowly let in the dark, in the hour just before spring. Amein. A grand chord, an impossible thing that lifts and sweeps and pulses over the span of the octaves, wind chasing sunset from the sky. These are my Vespers. Here are some antiphons.

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1. Audi, benigne Conditor.

My first grand'messe, the Sunday High Mass with its luminous liturgy and expansive rituals, the first time I heard a full church of voices move in the then-unfamiliar rhythms of Gregorian praise, I sat mid-pew just over halfway back, in a pool of wood-gold light, and struggled to follow. I felt lost and exhilerated, infinitely small amid something infinite, surrounded by uplifted voices with three hundred enthusiastic ways of touching God. I'd arrived late for Mass, and sat transfixed through it, then stayed as the church emptied after the recessional. And stayed as the church filled up again and the next Mass began - with the melodic arc of the Asperges me, its shape a thin wand like a question mark on its side. The genuflecting priest intoned it before making his way down the center aisle to sprinkle blessed water on the faithful. I kneeled when the crowd around me kneeled, and rose when it rose. I knelt and bowed my head for the final blessing, and rose and looked the priest in the eye as he passed down the aisle again, another recessional. He had very blue eyes, I remember, and was roughly my age. I knelt again, and the church emptied, and laughing voices rang from the dark wood vestibule at the entryway, and then they distanced, and others came, and another Mass began, and I stayed on my knees for most of it. When I left the church that day it was no longer morning, and I was no longer the same person who had walked in, two and a half hours earlier.

The first time I went to Vespers it was a wholly different atmosphere and experience from Mass. I was timid, and sat in a dim stone corner as close to invisibility as I could manage, behind the organ, in a tiny chapel at the back crossbar of the church, off to one side of the transept and the red flicker in the tabernacle. I held a leaflet for the Vêpres des dimanches de Carême and followed along with the psalmody as well as I could manage. I was cold, and lonely, and confused. My great-uncle had just died, in California, and I was going home the following weekend for his funeral. I was, above all, glad no one could hear (or see) me. I was sad. And the church was sober, at 6 pm, the nave silent in a way it never could be at noon, when it echoed with life and prayer and the inevitable howling of infants too young to sit through Mass. I folded my leaflet quietly closed and reached one hand in my pocket to touch the worn pale wood of the rosary I'd bought in Paris the year before, whose beads I'd taken to folding in my palm as sleep slid through me every night. I let my eyes unfocus, let the music break quietly over me, and followed the loops and whorls of Gregorian patterns as they fell gently open then gently closed over themselves : simple, graceful leaves of sound.

Scapulis suis obumbrabit tibi

Vespers soothed me ; the office is made to soothe the edge of the day drawing closer and closer to the horizon, the zero-point of darkness. Its late-hour dimness reminds us that faith does not always shout and sing, that sometimes it bites its lips and carries what we give it, and does not call attention to itself. From the opening notes of Vespers - the sustained puncti, the first podatus rising, then the second one rising beneath it to the first's place of departure - the evening antiphons and modal psalms quietly circle and lilt. The psalms either begin on the same note where the preceeding antiphon ended, or they begin on the subdominant of the scale beneath that note, four steps below, and work up to it in gentle progression. The wholeness in the progression quieted some unquiet place in my soul, and I listened. Dixit Dominus Domino meo, the celebrant intoned, and the other priests responded, Sede a dextris meis. And Confitebor tibi Domino in toto corde meo, and Beatus vir qui timet Dominum, and Laudate pueri Dominum. And Magnificant anima mea Domino. And Audi, benigne Conditor, the opening of the Lenten Vesperal hymn. These were not the lush crazy harmonies of Monteverdi with his shattering high As and glissades in major thirds like coins shaken loose from a jar and sent tumbling down an escalator. These notes had no harmony. They were sung in unison. They rose to be nearer God ; they fell because man fell. Man always falls, note after note, and Sunday after Sunday, and has to reach all the way from Earth for grace - grace that can seem, in the bleak midwinter, infinitely far away.

Scrutátor álme córdium,
Infírma tu scis vírium:
Ad te revérsis éxhibe
Remissiónis grátiam.

Above all the other notes, I kept coming back to the intervals of the introductory plea : Deus, in adjutorium meum intende. The progression of whole steps was the most obvious, the most astonishing, music I'd ever heard. I'd never dreamed that moving from F to G - from Fa to Sol - and back again could contain so much mysterious divinity, or convey so much divine mystery. If you look at a piano keyboard, F is the note just before the three black keys, and G is the one between the first two black keys. Visually, it doesn't look like much. But the heard interval steps over accidentals, sharps or flats that change the color of a chord. The whole step is a pure interval, an interval from before time. From before skies. Before music itself. It wasn't a major chord. It wasn't a minor chord. It was everything.

When I left the church that evening the sky was black over the river, and I walked all the way home, across one river and the almost-island of the centre-ville and then across another river and down its wide turbulent banks to my own quartier. I don't remember how long it took to walk. It was not a particularly safe place to walk, but that didn't matter. I'd forgotten my ever-present Discman : I didn't care. It must have been cold : I don't remember. My understanding of the world, and its music, the music that carries and comprises me, had altered forever. Because God moves through Vespers, in the dark flicker of quiet on a winter Sunday evening, from F to G.

And By The Way, My Sister Is Hot.

Cheeks asked for photographic evidence a while back, but I think this is even better. Yes, folks, my sister is both smart and beautiful, and she interviews guys from bands with numbers in the names. How cool is that?

1996.

(a snapshot)

Chris was stationed at the Navy base in Whidbey Island, Washington. We got the notification that summer, and started planning our move. I left graduate school, careful to maintain a status that would let me return eventually even though I couldn't think of anything I wanted less. Leaving Massachusetts, I thought with luxury about the days ahead - time! freedom to read whatever I wanted in English! mystery novels! - and Chris dreamed about being back where he came from, the region nowhere else in the world could replace when he heard the word "home."

the winter here's cold and bitter
it's chilled us to the bone
i haven't seen the sun for weeks
too long, too far from home

We had no way of knowing Chris would be sent to sea less than a month into our Pacific Northwest life. That he would ship out until December and only be able to call once. We ended up, both of us, far from home, and we didn't handle it well. The house was literally infested with large brown spiders that I spent the first two weeks killing with a specially purchased broom and an arsenal of carcinogenic sprays. I didn't understand how long a day could be, once the novelty of the region's grocery stores and the town's single bookseller-slash-music shop had worn off. And it seems so clear now, but was so mysterious then, that as much as I unreasoningly resented him for the place I'd been transplanted into - with its spiders and rotten fruit in the garden and a 28-inch lawn that needed mowing - he unreasoningly resented me, for getting to stay there while he had to go live on an aircraft carrier. I'd never imagined myself envying a man who was forced to wear tan polyester pants. But I did, I envied him his regimented life that made the world seem so simple.

i feel just like i'm sleeping
and i long for solid ground
pulled down by the undertow
never thought i could feel so low

I had no bedtime. I had no reveille. I woke up in the morning, sometimes, and usually got dressed. I went for drives. I remember crossing the landscape - it was green and grey, mostly grey. Even the water. I spent a lot of time at the Wal-Mart or Value Village, buying other people's old clothes, some of which I never wore. Or just walking. Sometimes I went to Bellingham, or Anacortes, following the way the wind's eerie fingers stirred the Sound. I checked email, chatted on the IRC with friends in England. I don't talk to them anymore.

The next time he left, it was for 6 months.

I tried to live with the pretense of having a purpose. It only occasionally worked. I told myself I would read one serious book per week, for my "upcoming" Ph.D. qualifying exams. The pile grew taller and taller, to the left of my orange Value Village armchair, as "upcoming" became the fabled shifting signifier of some postmodern depressive theory course and moved from year to year. Friends with actual lives (jobs, goals) grew frustrated or pitying. It was the kind of thing you could tell by the tone of an email. I rearranged the living-room furniture and bought second-hand recipe books.

if all of the strength and all of the courage
could come and lift me from this place

Nothing lifted me. Every now and then something broke. I couldn't explain it. I didn't get out of bed. I didn't answer the phone. My mother left long messages into the voicemail ("Are you there? Pick up. Pick up. Okaaaaaaayyyyyy ... C'mon, pick up. Pick up.") that I didn't return. I slept on the floor under the twin bed upstairs. I stopped turning on the lights.

I tried to grow strawberries in a windowsill-garden kit. They bloomed like tiny fuschias that never opened, bulbs with skin that shone brilliant red, like things on the verge of breaking. I wept brokenheartedly when they died.

it's just we stay too long
in the same old sickly skin
oh darkness, i feel like letting go

I can't tell you how the hours passed because it was a mystery to me that they could move. Time was so heavy. It rained every single day, as if something huge and dangerous had sprung a leak. I don't know what I did with all that time. There aren't enough mystery novels in the world to fill it. It seems unfathomable that one person could accidentally open her arms to hold time and end up with so much of it. You have to be careful what you wish for.

One long afternoon I sat on the bed in the darkness with the CD on repeat. Sarah McLachlan sang, and I listened to the echoing caress of her voice and the harmonies of the chorus - breathy, aching backup, a major key that rang bittersweet. The song hurt me the way certain songs have the power to do, and I thought of a drive several years earlier, when we'd turned the music up as far as the Jeep's radio would allow : Your love is better than ice cream, better than anything else that I've tried. We sang along in harmony and laughed as we drove. How did we never pay attention to the chorus? It's a long way down. A long way down. A long way down. A bleak Washington afternoon later, Sarah sang I know I can love you much better than this, full of grace, and I pressed all ten fingertips against the hunter-green flannel sheets and bit my lips, and an empty place in my soul hurt hard, a thousand knifetips digging.

It never, in the course of three years, came true. When grace came, when I finally started trying to live according to its call, he didn't want me anymore, and I found I wasn't able to love him much better than before anyway, no matter where in the world I lived. We had reached the limitations of our hearts and what we wanted from each other, what we had to offer. Nothing else I've learned has proven as disappointing as that.

Translator's Notes.

He comes to my office and hangs around in the doorway for a few moments without speaking. I can feel him standing there, watching me but wanting to look like he isn't watching me. Finally he clears his throat. I look up. He smiles.

Come va? he asks, an innocent look behind his eyes which I should distrust immediately but don't.

Bene, grazie, I say. And you?

He enters the office and asks if he can ask me a question or two. (I do not point out that he has just asked one. I'm pedantic, but not that pedantic. Plus, the remark involves verb tenses that require more calisthenics than I feel able to consider.)

Have a seat, I say, and he does. Do I mind if he closes the door? I do not. But the surprise must register in the arch of my eyebrows. Usually when people in my office ask if they can close the door it is because (a) they are angry with me, (b) they are about to cry, or (c) they see that I am about to cry. He extends a long arm behind him and pushes the door closed so that only a sliver of hallway shows through the wood-colored crack.

I want to ask you something, he says.

This sounds serious, I joke.

He pauses. Looks at his feet. My heart beats. He looks back up. And asks, quietly, with a little embarrassed smile, How do you say "va fan culo"?

Oh. We're about to have this conversation.

*

1999, Paris. I am on a bench in the Jardin des Plantes with my friend Ariane. We hold sandwiches, hers salami, mine three-cheese. She has just been to class - a lecture course on filmic adaptations of literary classics and her head is full of Sense & Sensibility. I should be working on my dissertation, but a question is troubling me.

Ça veut dire quoi, "putain de pétasse"? I ask her, with no transition. She lowers her sandwich and narrows her eyes at me. I give her a small embarrassed smile.

Where did you hear that? she asks.

On the métro, I say, deciding not to inform her that the secretary to my department chair has used the phrase about a fellow graduate student with questionable ethics and a tendency to wiggle her ass at the male professors to get extra teaching assignments. This is a tidbit Ariane does not need to know.

On en entend de toutes les couleurs, Ariane says, shaking her head slightly and blushing as she forms the words to tell me what the phrase means.

*

There's really no way to translate these words. Books exist, and they're the kind of books you buy when you're 16 and wondering how to make the link between the words you study for an hour a day in the classroom and what life might be like for someone who is 16 on the other side of the world, studying your language for an hour a day in a classroom. How do you function in the streets if you're that girl? How do you talk to you friends?

And so you start wondering, and eventually it becomes less esoteric. You think of concrete examples and test them, with your "what they won't teach you in school" vocabulary book. You tip your hat at an angle, pout into the mirror. Start with something simple. "Ma poule." Giggle at the mere notion of calling your best friend a roosting hen. Move on. Ask questions. How do you give a literal meaning for "fuckin' A" in another language? Where do you find the dictionary that defines oh, crap? You have to give a specific definition, but you also have to express the particular nuance of desperation, elation, fatigue, or victory in the original phrase. It's hard to find an equivalent. Shit does not equal merde. Not quite. In the beginning you overstudy the words themselves, taking "pétasse" down to its phonemic roots and analyzing the syllables' morphology. You learn that attaching the suffix "-asse" makes a thing sound dirty, and practice on other random words : jaunasse, noirasse, fainéasse. (Later you will hear the vocabulary for "head gasket," the bewildering joint de culasse, and think the mechanic saying it is committing a vulgar indiscretion with you : What did you call me?) You end up using one language or the other, knowing someone will always miss out. It's not that one end or the other doesn't understand the words, which are essentially universal in vocalization, if not syllabification. (My cat understands when I shout "BORDEL DE MERDE!") But the shades of meaning get lost. Eventually, you find yourself swearing in a borrowed language because it doesn't feel like swearing, because you don't fully "get" the words so they don't seem as bad as they would if you'd grown up with them as linguistic taboos.

*

I throw a look at the door : still closed. Okay. I tell him my best translation for va fan culo.

Va te faire foutre, I say, knowing he will roll his eyes and pretend he hasn't understood, because it is French and he wants English slang damn it.

He rolls his eyes. Vha-teuh ...? he says, feigning confusion. I'm sorry, I don't think I understand ...

I say it in English. He practices.

Go and fuck yourself! he says happily.

Just "go fuck yourself," I repeat.

Go and fuck yourself!

No "and," I correct him.

But then it's two imperatives in a row, he objects.

I know. You have to get beyond grammar here. "Go. Fuck. Yourself." Trust me. No "and."

He practices some more. A Spanish teacher knocks on the door, and he turns around to face the widening crack, still repeating the English translation. Go fu- ...

Oh, you're ... busy, the Spanish teacher says, and backs away.

I have created a monster.

He nods, adding a sotto-voce go and fuck yourself to be sure he has the words right. Okay, he says. Next.

Oh, dear John Wesley, I say. Because teaching English curses to Italians shall not make me take the Lord's name in vain.

*

Stronso, he says, after a brief, memory-consulting pause.

I ponder.

C'est une pièce de merde, littéralement, he says, in French. A concession. But what it means is the person who acts like that.

Una piezza da mierda? ... Piece of shit, I tell him. But I frown. It's not quite right. Then suddenly I have it. Asshole! I explode. The word bursts loudly from my mouth, and I realize I am happy, nearly giddy, at having found it in my mental archives, even if it has made footsteps pause outside the office door.

Asshole? his eyebrows furrow. I reach for the pad of small Post-Its and draw him a picture. Oh! Ass-hole, he says with the emphasis of sudden comprehension, so it comes out Ass! hole!

Esatto.

We grin at each other stupidly in the ensuing pause of affirmation. I am flushed. This is more than I have sworn in English in months. I take a sip from my water bottle. He fans himself with the Post-Its. Then our eyes meet, and our hands drop to table-tops, pockets, anywhere we might have stashed a pen. We have both just realized the golden value of this exchange. I rifle through my skyline-esque piles of papers for another pad of Post-Its.

I should have been taking notes all along, he says. We scribble.

How do you spell "coglione"? I ask.

A few minutes go by then : Ah! "Che cazzo." How do you say that?

I suspect "Such penis" isn't quite the expression he's looking for, and chew a fingernail as I rack my brains for an appropriate English version.

How does Amen sound?

You hear it at the end of the minor chord, the lost interval you can't describe. Is it hunger, is it sight? It punctuates fatal deeds and grace, sweeps like a storm through things in the fields that shouldn't make noise. You feel it in the pit of your stomach, or thudding against the bones around your heart. It reaches through the unblack dawn with thin forlorn hands. When it reaches you it will ring huge and baroque like ornate chords in a stone. Or tiptoe, and you will have to listen more closely. Its blaze shakes the glass in the windowframes. Take a breath and smell the matchtip just before you strike. It is a muscle and a rivulet of blood. It is a hand holding a sea that could drown you. Its trumpets pierce the skies with triads of acclamation. Its pallor walks on legs that don't change pitch : there is always a full octave underneath. It is Victoria and Gorecki. It is Perotin and Ravel. Peace at the center of a dark corridor of sound and the dark reminder of weary dawn after a holy night. It is the chill of marble on a winter morning in an ancient abbey, when your knees find grooved knee-places by themselves. It is the moment you walk into the first place your soul understands, the ache behind your eyes of coming home. It brings truth and endings. It brings peace and mourning. The Requiem has finished, the Benediction fading on your lips, the Host gone pale on your tongue, it is your thanks, it is the only word you recognize in foreign liturgy. It is the way the air smells in sacred places : incense and rain, the glow of a novena in candleglass, plainchant, and dried roses at St Teresa's bleeding feet. It is the last word. Eight o'clock at night, dark hanging from the lowest branches of the trees. It is the first word. 3:55 a.m. The moon bright silverwhite, something that could break. It is the only word, the gleaming black river you dive into and everywhere it takes you, the thing that leads you the thing you become, when you raise your eyes and follow, in an imperative country beyond wanting, because you must go.

3"47'.

Ici Phil Collins, sur RTL 2 by Zygote.

It's just another day
for you and me
in Paradise ...

T'es réveillé? she asks.

Dix minutes, he says. His voice is muffled by the pillow.

She has switched on the radio for the early-morning parade of news punctuated by 2-minute pop songs. She has noticed the Top-40 stations cut the songs down. Her French friends don't seem to notice it - they have always heard them truncated. Why would anyone need more than two minutes of "Time After Time" or "L'Aziza"? Usually the third verse - the one that develops the conflict, or else throws a plot twist into the song - is zapped, and the announcers' cheery voices return to debate whether "j'ai crevé l'oreiller" in that Bashung song really is about masturbation.

Mais ... j'ai bien entendu, là ? C'est ce que je pense ?
Mais oui, Alex, bien sûr.
J'ai pas compris, moi.
"J'ai crevé l'oreiller"? Allez, sois pas stupide.
Oh là là ! Mais on ne peut pas jouer ça à la radio !

The typical punchline. The radio announcers joking, you can't play that on the radio.

She leans back with a pillow folded up against her lumbar region, a book in her hands. She is re-reading A Tale of Two Cities. Coffee steams from a thick earthenware mug on the table to her right. She slides her legs over his, pivots her weight so she can clamber carefully from the bed. Hovers over him a second, weight in her lock-muscled arms, and - it's irresistible - lowers herself to brush his cheek with a kiss. His lips part for an instant. He breathes in (does he breathe her scent, the scent of the morning, the scent of her kiss?) and mumbles something incoherent, and flops onto one side, away from her. And she pulls herself into an oversized sweatshirt and tiptoes across the room to boil the water to make the coffee. The radio plays 2-minute pop songs and she lets him sleep.

He snores.

Allez, she says, poking him between ribs that protrude when he inhales. Lèves-toi, jeune homme, et marches. She smirks to herself.

Encore un peu, he says in his sleep, the words stumbling forward from the back of his throat, his lips almost not letting them out.

He's your boss, she mutters, and turns back to Dickens.

The song changes.

Combien de mots dans la phrase on se jette à la figure
Combien de fleurs dans la vase pour refermer la blessure

She is dreaming, on the coach between London and Dover, a rocky ride on tall wooden wheels in a place without ruts. She is travelling to France with the man she does not know she loves. Something about him is savage - an anger just beneath the skin, like the scar a bruise would leave, if a bruise could leave a scar.

When she wakes - head to one side, coffee gone cold on the table to the right, radio spouting inanities as always about the various bits and pieces of news the pop station has been authorized to report - her book lies at a slant in her lap, and her bed is empty.

*

She works the earbuds into place and stretches on her way down the stairs. Somehow her mp3 player has slid into a "random" mode she can't undo, and so she doesn't know which songs will accompany the walking part of her workout, and which she will have to run to. On a lucky day she gets the blues thing about a Mercedes Benz for the three minutes it takes her to reach the river. Or the catchy Cuban song : "El es un chico chevere!" An unlucky run begins with the remake of "Maniac" and slows to fill her river crossings with Shawn Colvin or Nina Gordon. Good songs. Just not good running songs.

This workout starts with Rachael Sage. Broken-upside-down piano chords and heart-beat rhythms keep her mind and feet occupied, and she finds herself at the water's edge before she has registered being in the street. Let fate fall on me now - I'm gonna be here till the end, Rachael sings. And her feet begin to move.

The river holds a part of her heart. A part of her soul. Her first days in this city, she came to the river first of all, early in the morning before the stars gave in to city lights. She took the métro - the blue line, then the green. Gare de Vénissieux, OU Gare de Vaise, the female computer voice announced, at the station where the lines overlapped. Vaise, the computer voice pronounced, its diphthong like a nude stretched on a public bench, the "ze" a hummingbird dipping for sugar in the creases of her throat, something you should look away from. Who programs these voices? She sat in the last car of the blue-line train, poured out with the crowd, channeled herself into the undulating arrow of arms and legs heading for the up-escalator one alcove behind the staircase. She sprinted the last few meters and tucked both feet in as the doors of the green-line train pulled shut with a schnoack, then waited three stops for the tall escalator with its archaeological findings behind glass on the way up, the remnants of an ancient hillside turned into a city. She took the métro - and emerged into the pre-dawn unsilence of streets not yet awake, and made her way to the river, and walked down it toward the south. Right at the Napoléon bridge, past the tabac and the cotton-blue bookseller's storefront, past the barber shop and the inexplicable store where some man gave piano lessons only on Sunday mornings. Past the seedy café with its coat of paint the color of dark wood, and its cigarette-burned tabletops in yellow Formica. Past the medieval house with a Madonna in a high alcove. Cross the street from these landmarks, follow the river, one hand on the concrete railing. She reached the passerelle and held its red steel in one hand, looking down. Her discman played "I feel so light - this is all I wanna feel tonight, Tonight and the rest of my life," and she watched the changing water shapes, its faces and its moods, watched as the lights above the Napoléon bridge burned a little lower and the sky's bright blackness faded and she couldn't hear the plash of ripples three meters beneath her feet for the traffic passing at her back, and she turned off her discman and crossed the asphalt dodging cars, and the temperature didn't matter, she never felt cold until she left the water's edge.

Running she doesn't mind the cold. Running she holds the whole urban cartography in her grasp, measures it to her pace. Running she takes the city's rhythms - the call and answer of the marché, the Eritrean woman she passes in the early morning with her basket and muumuu and faded face tattoos, the hum and thrum of engines along the quais, the scents of baking bread and gutted fish and 60 cheese varietals, the gypsy men barbecuing something nameless down in the abandoned boathouse - and matches them to the way her feet strike the pavement, the song of her energy as she circles the river, and circles back. The shudder or spring of wood in the passerelles as she loops over the water, the laughing lycée boys who go shy and polite when she calls them by name. And always her music underneath the whole conglomeration, in a logic indecipherable by logic, though it usually somehow seems to fit.

- Nouvelle édition, mois de février, Sans Abri, un euro seulement.
- Bonjour Foucauld! Ta maman sait que tu fumes?

It's a perrr-feeecccct da-ay ...

- Hé la coureuse, plus vite, plus vite!
- Bonjour Madame.
- Allez, on continue, c'est les Bleus qui vont gagner!

She's a maniac, maniac on the floor ...

She is, on occasion : chased by unleashed dogs. Mocked by groups of teenage boys. Applauded by men setting up the Sunday marché, the biggest one of the week. Stopped by young mothers from church who laugh and blush to see so much of her skin. Admonished by a senile woman from her neighborhood to cover her hair. Flashed by a man with a curiously brown but disappointingly flaccid penis. Encouraged to run faster by barefoot gypsy men around a makeshift barbecue. Doused with what she hopes is Mountain Dew flung from a passing car on the quai. Laughed at. Told by a priest to keep running while she is still fervent, the adjective a play on physical and spiritual lingo.

She runs through pooling streaks of pee on the tar of the quai. She stubs her toes on cobblestones. She scrapes her shins on the concrete steps leading up from the fishing platform a centimeter above the water. She weaves through the market stalls and waves at the man at the bridge, in the drinks kiosk. She comes home exhausted, dirty, and sore, and happy. She loves it all.

Let faith fall on me now - I'm gonna be my own godsend.

*

He waits at the top of the stairs. She dances upwards, in time with the last few seconds of the song - "Run, just as fast as I can, to the middle of nowhere" - and startles to a stop when she sees him. She still has her sunglasses on.

Hey, she says, pulling an earbud out. She hears Pink from a strange perspective, both intimate and tinny. Tu travailles pas?

A stupid question. He's obviously not at work.

Entres, she says, pulling at the waistband-string of her running shorts with the silver doorkey threaded through its loop.

He comes in and she sets the bouilloire to boil for tea while she stretches. You'll excuse me, she says, balancing one foot on the windowsill and leaning over the extended leg, otherwise my muscles get stiff. He leans back on her couch, thumbs through a pile of paperbacks about history.

What I like about you, he says, is that you always have plenty of books.

Thanks, she says, and it's only a little caustic.

The bouilloire clicks and steam rises from its bright orange mouth. She crosses the room and turns on the radio, crosses back and scoops up the kettle of boiled water and sets it on the table. Her hands measure out small activities : pull clinking mugs from the mug-hanger on the kitchen wall, pull the tin of sugar cubes from its spot on the refrigerator, locate the shapes of two spoons in the silverware compartment of the dish-drying rack next to the sink. And teabags. All she has is green tea. He shrugs.

They stir their tea and he casts appraising looks at her, across the tabletop in the warm afternoon light.

Quoi, she finally says.

What what, he says.

You're staring.

I was just thinking, he says.

Yes, that much I gathered.

He reaches across the table and touches her hand. Laura Pausini sings on the radio. I was just thinking, he continues, that you should make more of yourself. Find a man.

He smiles at her, and as always she is struck by the frankness of his gaze. Brown eyes, full lips, a slightly hooded level stare. Languid eyelids. Strong chin. And an untrained tenor voice, unaware of its soaring power, that shakes her soul. He shows up, and shares her bed, and leaves again. From time to time. He's not the love of her life. They have agreed - it's a thing. Just a thing. She has taught herself not to ask questions.

E ritorno da te nonostante'l mio orgoglio
E ritorno perchè altra scelta non c'è.

Is that what I should do, she says. Her voice is flat. Her hand is flat on the tabletop, underneath his.

You're still good.

I'm still good, she says, uncomprehending.

Still ... attractive. It must be all the sport. It does you good.

Oh. Thank you, she says, quietly.

They listen to the radio.

E ritorno da te perchè ancora ti voglio
Ritorno perchè ho bisogno di te

I love this song, he says, closing his eyes halfway and humming. It was on the radio all the time when I was in Italy.

Who'd you sing it for there? she asks after a beat, surprised at how nonchalant her voice sounds.

Marco, he says, without opening his eyes. No hesitation.

Why didn't you stay in Italy with Marco? she asks, before she realizes she doesn't want to know.

Ah, because Marco sang it for someone else, he answers, and she is surprised at how nonchalant his voice sounds.

Silence and evening fall.

It was too hard to stay there and be in love only one way, he says. She nods.

It's a good song, she says. He nods.

He holds her hand and they listen, steam rising from green tea in her heavy pink mugs. The afternoon ends before the song reaches its three-minute-forty-seven-second mark, a reluctant sun slipping politely from the glass of her high windows. She tries to play the song in translation in her head, keeping her English words in time with the Italian syllables. I come back to you even though it hurts me. I come back to you because there's no other choice. It doesn't last long enough for her to translate the end of the song, and she realizes that unless she hears him singing next to her, she doesn't know all the words.

Tu dimmi solo se c'è ancora per me
Un'altra occasione, un'altra emozione
Tu dimmi se ormai qualcosa di noi c'è ancora dentro agli occhi tuoi,
Dimmi solo se c'è, e ritorno da te

Just tell me it's true, and I'll come back to you.

*

When he leaves in the morning she pulls herself limb by limb from the warm hollow in the blue flannel sheets. On the radio, the announcers make puerile jokes about a song, something about poking a pillow, and one of them pretends she hasn't understood it, then pretends to be shocked. You can't play that on the radio! she exclaims.

She pulls on her running clothes and mouths the announcers' shtick in rhythm. She works her earbuds into place and threads the waistband string of her shorts through the doorkey. On her way down the stairs she figures out how to get her mp3 player off its random "random" setting, and the first song she hears is Norah Jones. Sunrise, sunrise, and her feet move more quickly through the measures, and then she's at the river and turning left and waving at the lycée boys who are sons of her friend Marie, and balancing her footfalls over cobblestones and tarmac, and the wooden passerelle, and counting the beats in the measure and the steps she takes around the river.

At home fresh coffee waits for her to pour the boiling water into the carafe, and she has a novel to pick up at page one-two-three, imagine that, and she will stretch at her windowsill and breathe in the morning and listen to two-minute songs, and it will be enough. Any longer would be too long.

A Roe Deer By Any Other Name ...

Turkey has renamed some "divisive" animals. Apparently, erasing Armenia and Kurdistan from the Latin nomenclature of the animal kingdom diminishes political tension. I'm sure the "Capreolus Cuprelus Capreolus" is happy to participate in Turkish unity.

In honor of the Turkish environment ministry's decision, I'd like to propose a few other modifications to scientific nomenclature, to reflect national cultural preoccupations :

- The bos bison (American bison) shall henceforth be rewritten as Boss bison, because the whole world knows The Boss was Born in the USA.

- Canis familiaris (dog) shall become Canis manus bestus friendicus.

- Talpa europaea (mole) shall be called Talpa ungratefulea socialistica.

- Castor fiber (beaver) - Cleaver leavitofibericus.

- Rupicapra rupicapra (chamois) shall be referred to as Rupicapra cute-furry-deer-thing-with-a-funny-name-ica rupicapra. (That final rupicapra really appears just because it's fun to say.)

- Rattus rattus (rat) - rattus rattus rattus. Not because it's unclear as is, but because as the roe deer shows us, more is better.

- Ursus arctos (polar bear) - Ursus scoldupnorthicos.

- Mustela putorius (polecat) - no change.

Re-Education.

Stand with your back to the wall. Your lower back must touch the wall. Your shoulders must touch the wall. The back of your head must touch the wall. Place your hands at shoulder lever, elbows bent, palms out toward the room. Now lift your arms.

Last spring I went running every day, 4 or 5 miles a day, and it made me feel invincible. Joyous and bright as a filament of glass in a sunflare, like something bright at the center of myself was stretching and crystallizing, day after day after day. My legs moved in time with the music in my headphones, my arms moved in time with my legs, my heart pumped blood and oxygen through my body, to the extremity of each limb and through, by extension, the whole city as I moved through it, up and down its quais, in time with its languidly sparkling river.

In May I saw my father in the hospital, just after he'd been pierced by a long needle through his back. The needle's hollow tip hit a bone - the shuddering twinge of pain - before it was skilfully redirected into the base of a lung, where it drank the sample it had gone in for and came back out. (The image still turns my stomach : the snake's tooth needle, puncturing a lung like an egg to suck the liquid out.) My father, pale in the papery gown, lay weak and smiling when the nurse called me once the procedure had finished. He was on his back, and had just been biopsied, yet he bragged about me to the nurse. Oh, you live in France! Wow. Pahr-lay voo frahn-see? (A self-conscious laugh.) I guess you do. (Then silence.) I saw my father, and rushed to hold his hand, because he looked so small in his wheelable hospital bed and faded-white gown, and it seemed if I could hold his hand then this could be nothing. Even if it was nothing already, even if there was nothing about which to say "it turned out to be nothing," it was imperative that I hold his hand. Through the hours he had to wait before getting dressed and leaving the Outpatient ward, we held hands and willed it - this fearsome IT we'd held off naming for months - to be nothing.

Ernie.
Yes, Bert?
Why do you have a banana in your ear?
What, Bert?
I said, why do you have a banana in your ear?
Bert, I can't hear you : I have a banana in my ear!
Ernie.
Yes, Bert.
WHY do you have a banana in your ear??
To keep the alligators away!
But there ARE no alligators on Sesame Street.
See - it's working!

It worked. The needle biopsy left a hole, a small prick finer than a hoop earring in diameter. The bandage had to stay on for 8 days. Now my father's back sports a tiny round scar. You wouldn't see it, unless you knew to look. The day after his operation I went running, through the neighborhood where I grew up. In time with the music, legs and arms pumping. But it wasn't the same.

*

I moved back from France after a month of lifting and carrying that, unsurprisingly perhaps, left me with a set of stress injuries and minor fractures. Up five flights of stairs. Down flive flights of stairs. Fill a box and donate, ship, or dump it. Back up the stairs. Rolling books around the city in a suitcase, in 5-kg parcels to send from the post office, knowing I would receive them at my - as-yet-unseen - office sometime near November. The first day I woke up in my new apartment, opened my eyes to the late-summer green-leafy light specific to underground rooms with high windows and white walls, I found I could not turn over. Could not sit up. Could not get out of bed. It took me twenty-five minutes, during which I sobbed in pain and frustration, to position my legs so that I could swing them gently over the side of the bed and curl myself slowly to the floor. Twenty-five minutes. And when I say "swing my legs" I mean drop them inch by gasping inch until they made contact with a hardwood runner. Every inch, every centimeter, of the process was an inch, a centimeter of pain I thought I couldn't bear for another second. And there were one thousand five hundred seconds to bear. I shrieked at one point mon Dieu mon Dieu je vous PRIE, begging God for whatever He wanted to give me that would end this - mercy, or strength, or else patience. He gave me stubbornness, and I had to settle for it and get out of bed.

I went to the E.R. and had x-rays and shots of muscle-relaxants. I got some excellent pills and a nice picture of the curvature of my spine, and started physical therapy, and became very aware of my body. Did you know that in order to press the small of your back to a wall, you need to "suck in" both your abdominal and gluteal muscles? That's sucking in in two different directions, on totally opposite sides of your body. I leave physical therapy carrying a handful of papers with clip-art drawings of various exercises. Some of them involve lengths of rubber band or tubing in various colors. Yellow is "mild." Black is "super-ultra-extra firm." I spent the first three weeks pressing the small of my back impossibly into a wall, or a mattress, and weeping at the difficulty of pulling a yellow band open in front of my chest. Yes, that's me, Miss Invincible, able to prevent lung cancer with the touch of her hand, crying because she can't pull a flimsy piece of rubber 20 centimenters apart. I couldn't go running for six weeks. Vincible. Very, very vincible.

*

Sheryl frowns every time I walk in for my Physical Therapy appointment. Hello to you too, a sarcastic voice gripes in my head, but I smile at her anyway. Posture, she scolds me as I walk, and in my head I become Ellen Tebbits, practicing for ballet class with a heavy book balanced on my head. That backpack is too heavy, she admonishes, and I roll my eyes and explain I am carrying three senior theses that need to be corrected by Tuesday, plus three versions of an article with various suggestions and corrections in the margins, plus the indoor shoes I carry to and from work so I can tromp through snowdrifts and freezing puddles and make it to my bus. You have student shoulders, she informs me, and I laugh monosyllabically : DUH. You work at a computer? You spend too much time there. But of course. She reminds me over and over again to keep my head back, ears in line with my shoulders. She tells me I'm doing it all wrong, makes me start over until I'm grinding my teeth and panting, trying to stretch a piece of rubber (I've graduated to red), hands up shoulders down elbows back trapezius tight. Then release, then again. Release. Then again. And breathe! she says, and I laugh angrily. You're so ... demanding, I tell her. Release. Again. Keep your head back. Hands up, shoulders down, elbows back, trapezius tight, no crying. Head back. Breathe.

*

Where's your head?
It's way the hell back here!

*

On a bad day the session makes everything worse, and this is how I know my body absorbs emotional energy, that mind and body are one organism. I am used to ignoring my body. (I feel sick. -What did you eat? -Um, nothing. -You idiot, that's not sick, it's hungry. -Oh.) Running on six ibuprofen and a multivitamin, ignoring the shin splints that radiate down into the third toe on each foot. Staring at an open wound and saying, out loud, alone in my bathtub, it doesn't hurt. Carrying a computer and ten kilos of books around for 5 months on a broken shoulder, a torn rotator cuff. It doesn't hurt. It doesn't hurt. It doesn't hurt.

It doesn't work anymore, the dead nerve endings have come to life, I can't go a day without food, some days while running I get stomach cramps so sharp I have to hit the treadmill's emergency-red STOP button and bend over, fingers pushing into my side. I have been forced to live inside my body, and I am not entirely welcome. One afternoon Sheryl's fingers work their way into a knot along the side of my neck, and : You've got a trauma here, she says. What? You've got a knot. How can my neck have a trauma? Nothing has happened to my neck. My back with its disintegrating disc, my shoulder with its needle-width fissure, the strained and inflamed rotator cuff, my legs with their shin-length bruises just beneath the skin ... but my neck? Tears seep from my eyes, slow and unstoppable. Relax, she says. She explains how it works, using her headless legless skeleton of a spine and shoulders. It's all connected, she says. And when you hunch over your computer like that, ALL DAY LONG, she emphasizes, your muscles here - a twinge - and here - a shudder - react like this.

Am I making you cry? she asks, an afterthought.

No, I say.

It hurts. It hurts. It hurts.

*

This afternoon she positions me. I am not quite on the floor. I am lying on a hard foam roll, three feet long, rocking slowly back and forth, and Sheryl sits with her back against the wall, hands clasped around her knees. I can't quite see her, even if I turn my head, and I feel awkward staring at the grey-yellow water spots on the acoustic ceiling, so I close my eyes. It makes me think of a slumber-party game, a fifth-grade game where you are "supposed" to separate yourself, let your soul leave your body long enough to levitate. Light as a feather, light as a feather, light as a feather ... The small of my back, the length of my spine, the nubs of my neck, the base of my skull, are all touching the foam roll, and something in the front of my chest creaks. Sheryl looks at me over her glasses. OK in there? she says, as if I am inside something with a thick and muffling exterior - and in a way, I am. My body. The position makes my jaw clack oddly against itself. You are stiff as a board, she says, and my eyes fly open. In fifth grade, that would mean I came crashing back down to the floor. Ouch. My limbs regather, check with each other. You OK? -We're all OK. I am not used to paying so much attention to the parts of myself, my bones so independently defined beneath my skin.

When I leave I am sore in places that surprise me, and pensive. I feel myself leaning back on purpose - Normal people actually walk this way? How do they keep from falling over? - and considering the backpack Sheryl has been nagging me about, the one with the strap around the waist. The small of my back bows inward of its own accord and I feel my muscles above and below it tightening as I wind through the icy brick streets to the bus stop. Stomach in. Fesses tucked under, like in yoga class from years ago. Small of the back flat - imagine you're against a wall. Shoulders back. Ribcage up. Stomach in. Breathe. Head back. Step carefully, not too much on the outsides of the feet. Breathe.

On the bus I am paying so much attention to my posture that I miss the chance to get a seat. Will I have to hold my book straight up before my face in order to read without damaging the structure of my spine? How long have I been doing this - standing, walking, sitting, breathing, reading - this way, which is wrong? How much of my identity lies in the line of my spine, the angle of my neck? The rhythm of my muscles, the way they alternate flexion and contraction? Once in France I ran up the stairs of my priests' house, and my godmother, cleaning a table at the landing, said without turning around Bonjour, Rose-mah-REE : she recognized my step. How many people know me by my step? If the way I carry my body changes, will they know me still? Whatever my body is, whatever this physical shape is, is part of what I mean whenever I say I am. Can it change without the change changing my identity? There is so much to remember. How do people do it all? How can I imagine I have what it takes to teach at a university when I can't keep my ears in line with my shoulders? Or will it all become second nature, so automatic I no longer think about it, one element at a time? Does there come a point, once you've become aware of the body, your body, where you stop thinking about it, because you no longer need to? If a way of being becomes "second nature," does that make its nature your own?

*

I get home, pick up the cat, peel my winter boots off at the top of the stairs, shrug out of my down jacket and start down into the apartment and its warm white tiled kitchen. I'm hungry. I'm thirsty. I'm craving red wine and cheddar cheese. I take each stair gingerly, because a misstep would come so simply and so fast, and leave bruises that last a week at least, and I don't want to risk it. Tomorrow I have set aside two secret hours, precious time, one hundred and twenty gemstones, with seven thousand two hundred refracting rays of light - to go running.

And Now, For Something Completely Different.

In order to get a Ph.D., you have to take a Latin exam.

In 1998, when I took my qualifying exams, I hadn't (a) had Latin in 6 years, (b) planned on taking the Latin exam the day before my orals, or (c) slept for about 56 hours.

Still, to this day, I get a proud giggle out of "hostile cows." Boves aversos, indeed.

About Hercules and Cacus

Hercules, being of renown, in this place, where thereafter Rome was built, drove - a wonderful sight - cows, there for (he) was restoring them (with) sleep and grass ; and himself near the river Tiber, a worn path, lay outstretched.\\There, from wine and heavy food, sleep had overcome him, (while) a neighbour shepherd, named Cacus, a wild man who had stolen beautiful cows, decided to steal some prey. But, he reflected, if a herd of cows Hercules drove, he will believe the footsteps to be his own ; wherefore he handled some hostile cows by the tail in the cave.//Hercules at the first dawn left sleep, observed how a part of the herd (had) gone astray, (and) asked him(self) the right place to look ; but was misled by traces, and therefore was confused and uncertain, (and) wished to lead away the remaining cows from the dangerous place. (Whoever) (Cacus) had bellowed a certain way, (and) his voice was echoed in the enclosed cave. Hercules went to him, whom Cacus had tried to prevent from attempting this way, dealt (Cacus) a blow, (and Cacus,) in vain calling out for the shepherds' help, lay dead.