Music

What's becoming increasingly common these days, is for Eva to wake up before Kate leaves for work (generally by 7 AM), denying me a comfortable sleep in until about 8 or so. Generally though, when I'm not feeling worn out (like this morning), I like getting up around 6:30, early enough to make our coffee and peruse some news--though most doesn't post until 7-7:30--before I hit the books and then help Eva through her morning.

But today the little girl was upnatom early, and she even shared breakfast with Kate and me, so now she's wandering around in her trundler with nothing specific to do (no, I don't play with her every instant of the day), especially since I warned her not to follow the cat everywhere.

Eva loves Jasper. Loves him not quite to death, but certainly to the point of scaring him and frequently bugging the crap out of him. There aren't many spots outside of the basement--which is generally cold--where the little guy can remain out of her reach. (Our bed is the one that comes to mind right now.) If he's curled up on a chair, or under a chair, or in some nook on the carpet somewhere, or like right now, on the corner of the couch by the window, it's seldom more than ten minutes before Eva routs him out. She's just too fascinated.

Before Eva was born, I mentioned the presence of a cat in the household to Kate's aunts one Sunday, and they responded with many dark and urgent warnings that the cat would smother the baby, if not out of jealousy, then at least out of being oblivious to the presence of a small child. Nothing could have been further from reality. Jasper is, as my friend Martha (who introduced me to him), a lover not a fighter. (Just yesterday I saw a neighbor's cat rolling happily in the dirt by our driveway, while Jasper cowered five feet away beneath the side-door stairs).

I've never seen an animal more deferent and gentle in the presence of a human infant. Jasper really avoided contact with Eva for several months, and only two or three times (maybe more, I suppose, since Kate was usually home) did we have to rout him out of the bassinet (with Eva not in it, of course). The cat seemed to realize clearly that Eva was a living creature and gave her a very wide berth, particularly in her sleeping spot. There was never a problem.

Fast-forward to now, when Eva's an increasingly speedy and grabby toddler, full of affection and curiosity and, at her small size, unaware of her strength when it comes to things still smaller. Read: the cat. She can really whack the stuffing out of him when she winds up to deliver a love tap. Fortunately she rarely gets a second whack, but she's also grabbed him by the tail and hauled on several occasions, leading to at least one episode of the poor cat wailing from the kitchen as she dragged him across the linoleum.

By and large he offers no resistance. Unless, of course, he has a defensive position, like on an arm of the couch or in Kate's desk chair. Then, if Eva just quietly bugs him enough, Jasper's liable to extend a single claw and catch the baby by one sleeve, and hold on while she turns to me or Kate and whines. "That's what you get for bugging him," we'll say. He's never taken a full-out swipe at her--I'd have no choice but to punish him if he did--and I think that's due to two things.

First, Jasper is too gentle by nature. Even when he and I roughhouse--and nobody else does with him--he'll eventually get pretty feral and deliver a good hard bite. Almost immediately he'll stop, as if in shame, and begin licking the spot he just bit. It's pretty funny. But second, and on top of that, Eva is too gentle. She's not abusive or cruel by nature (unlike me as a young boy, who showed an unfortunate talent for willfully abusing our family cat Simon, another tuxedo like Jasper).

Eva doesn't do anything, by and large, worthy of really fierce retaliation, like throwing or poking him. Yes, a big whack to the ribs every once in a while isn't nice, but no cat's sticking around for more of that, mean or not. (And Simon was part Siamese, the breed developed to guard the temples of Siam. It is by design that those cats are loud, obnoxious and somewhat territorial. Jasper's got none of that mean blood in him).

So the cat has a kind of wary tolerance for the little girl, not fleeing on sight, but always alert to her position and ready to move at the first sign of things going bad. He'll allow her to touch him if she's gentle and not grabby, and doesn't poke at his feet or anything. But she's still too young to have developed any sophisticated behaviors toward the cat, like dangling a string for him to play with.

One of Eva's toys is a three-foot segment of gold Christmas tree string beads, cheap plastic glittery things which helped form our holiday decorations this year. I thought she might like them as a kind of necklace-thingy, and for months Eva draped them over her shoulders in just that way. But now she's discovered how the cat likes to chase dangly things, and at least a dozen times a day Eva will drag the golden bead string over to me, hold it out with her insistent "Eh-eh-eh," (she's on her way right now--just took a two-minute bead break), expecting me to lure the cat over by drawing the beads back and forth across the carpet.

It usually works (as it did just now), and the cat is soon on hand, staring at the beads and making ready to spring. Only then, Eva wants back in on the action, and reachs for the string again, so I hand it to her. Only the little girl then flings it up and down as hard as she can, and then goes running at the cat yelling "Kit-teh!" You can imagine how well that ends.

So the little girl has a fair amount to learn, but her heart's in the right place. Helping her along through the morning, sprinkling episodes of playing (and Signing Time videos!) in among my reading and writing, is my typical pattern, however early Eva gets up. Today is a Wednesday, and for the first time in a while I'll be going to RI Civic Chorale rehearsal tonight.

I took the winter off because I missed so much rehearsal time while I was working nights, but this spring, with no job at all and a really grand concert coming up to conclude the year, I wanted to spare no effort to participate. Rehearsal days are always a bit of a two-edged sword. Having taken the last few months off from singing, I've gotten used to not having to leave home for four hours on Wednesday nights.

It's very easy to get used to being home and not having to go. Frequently I have to drag myself to practice, dreading the two-and-a-half hour's work. But I almost always come away refreshed, with more energy, after singing. That alone is a good indication of the good it does me, and by extension, the people around me.

This spring we'll be singing one of my two favorite pieces of music, the Mozart Requiem. (The other is Beethoven's Ninth. In one of those depressing surveys of American highschoolers, the question was asked, "How many symphonies did Beethoven write?" and one kid answered, "Two. The Fifth and the Ninth.") At some point in the future I'll write a post about the Ninth, only because I have a more systematic understanding of it, and I feel it's one of the very greatest works of art on the planet.

I first sang the Requiem in college with the Glee Club, and we barely pulled it off. And I mean barely. We had a full-out dress rehearsal the morning of the performance, and that dress rehearsal was the first time we'd sung the whole thing through. Our conductor, Louis Burkot, apologized to us during that rehearsal for maybe overestimating our ability as a group. (But we had a secret weapon: a kick-ass bass named Rocky as one of our soloists, a guy who'd soloed at the Met. Notwithstanding that he's a guy, his singing is a small but important part of my reason for picking Rocky as Eva's nickname--well, notwithstanding also that Sylvester Stallone is a guy too. But it's the whole crossover cuteness I'm going for here. Anyway...)

And that Tuba Mirum bass solo...it's giving me chills all across my shoulders now. "Tooooooo-baaa meeee-rooom spar-jens soooohhhhhhhhhhh-oooooohhhhhhh-ooohhhhhhhh-oh-oh-ohh-noooooom...." (The piece is about the mythic trumpet which will awake the dead on the day of judgment.)

Safe to say, Rocky made an impression on the whole Glee Club. Even sopranos were singing his solo to themselves. Almost the whole Requiem, like most of them are, is in Latin. The text for a Requiem mass is mostly set, taken from several Christian poems, most especially "Dies Irae" or "Day of Wrath" (a somewhat long poem). Not every composer used the same movements as the others, so sometimes texts will appear in one requiem mass that don't appear in others. It was pretty much up to each individual guy, what he used or not.

"Dies Irae"--not the whole Latin poem, but the part that actually names the Day of Wrath--is one of the commonest parts included in the mass, and it's usually a show-stopper with its energy and urgency. "Confutatis", "The Confounded" (i.e. cursed), is one of the most famous specifically in Mozart's mass for its violence and, by contrast, its subsequent profound fear and humility. I posted some time ago about how Kate and I watched the movie Amadeus, and unwittingly watched Part II before Part I. Eh, it was still a good movie and all the touches of Mozart's music throughout made it worth seeing regardless of the script (which wasn't bad at all).

I'm no expert on Mozart, but I do know enough about his life to realize that the movie creators (of course) took some creative license with Mozart's life for the sake of their plot (such as, I'm not too sure Salieri actively worked to kill him). But in college, Louis told us, as he was introducing us to the piece, about how Mozart composed much of the Requiem on his deathbed, though made it only through the seventh movement, Lacrimosa.

In the course of learning the individual movements, Louis broke down the Confutatis for us, stripping away its surging rhythm and getting down only to basic chords--and it still made an impression. That was, for me, Louis at his best, teaching us about music at the same time that he coached us to sing. Mozart lived from 1756-1791, and was dying as he composed this Requiem. In no small sense, he wrote it for himself.

Every artist worthy of the title bases every part of every work on her or his own experience alone. But Mozart's requiem is urgently so, filled with the intensity of a person about to die. Verdi's requiem might be far bigger, and Brahms' more imposing and dreadful overall, but no requiem mass approaches Mozart's for immediacy, force and delicacy of emotion.

I'm not going through the entire mass. For one thing, after the Lacrimosa, it's not even Mozart's work, and even though it's not bad, it becomes somewhat more dance-hall music until the final movement, when the follow-up composer quoted the opening movement at length. (The version commonly used now was completed by Franz Sussmayr, one of Mozart's contemporaries.) Second, I'm barely a musician, hardly able to read notes. I've raved a bit about the Tuba Mirum movement, and how the bass solo which leads it off is one of my favorite phrases in music.

But now for the Lacrimosa, my favorite movement of the whole piece, and really, the climax and beating heart of his whole Requiem mass. It begins delicately, plaintively with just strings sighing out disconnected chords, as if from so many people lying or sitting on the ground in pain and anticipation. The text runs:

Lacrimosa dies illa

qua resurget ex favilla

iudicandus homo reus.

Huic ergo parce deus

pie Jesu, Jesu domine.

Dona nobis requiem

Amen.

Translation:

Tearful that day

when from the ash will stand up

risen man to be judged.

Therefore spare me God

holy Jesus, Jesus lord.

Give us rest

Amen.

That segment of the poem is about the day of judgment itself, when some will be saved and others will not. The tears are for and from the cursed, because they have been cursed. Mourning is barely even the beginning of this movement. I think there might not be a movement in all of music (mind you I'm no well-versed musician) with so many densely mixed emotions.

The piece is a farewell to life, full of foreboding and some hope as to what comes after. It begins with the bleakness of waking alone on a cold and desolate morning and slowly swells to a full chorus. Always the sopranos are riding above the other three parts, adding the pity and sense of tragedy which permeate the whole thing. The "huic ergo..." sentence, sung softly, is a last, quiet, desperate prayer for safety, after which the grandeur of the "Dona nobis", sung in a good strong forte, floods in. "Nobis", us, is a prayer for all humans, but of course it includes the individual praying. It could refer to the chorus singing, the orchestra playing, the audience listening, the whole world of people.

You don't need to be a Christian to understand the urgency of that prayer. "Rest" doesn't even need to mean heaven--it could refer to forgetful oblivion, the lack of all consciousness whatsoever. You can think of yourself during the "dona nobis" passage, or you can think of those you mourn. And this life, for all its joys and triumphs and beauty, still ends more often than not in pain, with the dying person alone, mourned by those who will survive him or her. And it is in the memory of the survivors that the pain of death lives on, and that is why prayers for the dead to rest quietly remain so strong.

Mozart was staring his own death in the face. He might really have feared going to hell--I won't try to imagine what was in his mind. He composed the Lacrimosa out of his own hope and overriding dread of death. This translates easily in each of us into mourning for those already gone, and yet to go in the future.

By the time the chorus reaches the "Amen", I'm frequently in tears, and the only thing which keeps me going through it is to keep breathing. When your voice starts to falter during a song, return to your breathing. Breathing is the engine that drives you through all trouble.

Goulash II

My last goulash post was well over a year ago, but since I don't want to repeat myself too often, I'll just make this second in a series. (A random series of nothing in particular, but we've all watched TV, haven't we?)

It's a cloudless, breezy, and none-too-warm (43 deg. at 11:30 AM) Sunday, and Kate and I are preparing for a park/supermarket expedition before Eva chows down for lunch and drops off for her afternoon nap. (To say nothing of Kate, who hauled herself groggily out of bed today around quarter of ten...though she did make a kick-ass breakfast, and was sadly gracious when I told her that I dislike the cheddar she loves adding to scrambled eggs. So she responded by saying that she despises the olive oil which I love in scrambled eggs. Ah, married life...)

Anyhow, this post will span the midday shopping trip for Eva's exercise and the family's basic food (and again, the Crock-Pot has become our salvation. Easy, energy-efficient, tasty and complete meals...this is not an advertisement--it's more of a gloat). But as I type Kate's nearly ready to head out the door.

As I wait out the unemployment, having applied to dozens of jobs for which I'm marginally qualified (being more of an offshore geologist, not onshore), I'm letting my spirit sing by delving into the literature I've neglected for a long time. And the list of things I want to read is still long. Homer in the original (not translated). Dante in the original (made it through the Inferno a few years ago). The Aeneid in the original. But right now I've devoted myself, in addition to a little math, to two of the most hard-core writings in the west: Joyce's Finnegans Wake, as I've been posting about for a week or so now, and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.

The Wake is all about dreams, about the things which emerge in our minds when consciousness, filled with light, bounded by rules and littered with goals, is absent. The unconscious, at its most primitive and paranoid, rules the nighttime of sleep. No human can verify--as Joyce himself realized--that Finnegans Wake is an accurate reproduction of a complete cycle of sleep. Most likely it isn't. However, the fragmented and repetitive aesthetic and the timeless, funhouse-mirror versions of events are based on the brain's activity during sleep. As the title of one prominent commentary states, the Wake is Joyce's book of the dark.

Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher who lived from 1724 to 1804. He was an intellectual giant of his age who wrote about philosophy, astronomy (he discovered that the earth's rotation is gradually slowing down) and history. He is most remembered now for his theory of transcendental ideas, or you might even say fundamental ideas: aspects of perception which exist in the human mind before all experience begins. Neuroscience and prenatal research didn't exist when Kant wrote, so we have much more to say now about the development of the human brain, but Kant's two transcendental ideas within the brain are time and space. Without an inherent awareness of these two things, all experience, including everything we learn, would be impossible for us.

So Kant was into metaphysics. Metaphysics through the centuries has referred to many things. In Aristotle's time, metaphysics basically meant astronomy. In the time of Aquinas it meant theology. Nearer to Kant's own time, and later, it referred to psychology. But Kant himself stepped outside psychology, avoiding the mechanics of how the brain apprehends, remembers and imagines things, and explored how it is that humans can apprehend and imagine things at all. By thinking along those lines he developed his theory of transcendental ideas.

Thoreau and his buddies--Emerson and others--were known as Transcendentalists, for their devotion to Kant and to the very active reality that ideas play in our daily lives. In writing Walden, Thoreau was trying to make a transcendental, idea-driven life as actual as possible. Devotion to ideas, in Thoreau's mind, meant simplifying his life and living as much in harmony with nature as he could, while not ignoring human society.

I find it intriguing that while Thoreau discusses many works of fiction and at least Hindu philosophy, he never overtly discusses Kant anywhere in his published works. Writers don't always disclose their models. It's commonly thought that Dante received the idea of writing about a journey through hell from at least two Muslim works, the Isra and the Mirage. Especially worthy of notice here is that the lowest circle of Dante's hell, the ninth (where Satan is a prisoner), is frozen. Ice doesn't occur in writings about Christian hell until Dante; but it was not unknown in Muslim writing. And you can sure bet that Dante wouldn't concede an Islamic source for his supremely Christian work.

Not that Thoreau feared charges of apostasy or heresy, or even of being a hypocrite, by admitting that he admired the writing of Immanuel Kant. I think it more likely that he so thoroughly incorporated Kant's thinking into his own, that to discuss Kant would be beside the point, as if he were merely cataloguing his own bones and muscles: better to use the bones and muscles to go on a walk, and talk about the things seen, heard and smelled, than to dwell on his bones and muscles. He simply treated the philosophical structure as a given and spent his time on other topics.

I respect that, and it makes me all the more eager to read Kant for myself and understand what he wrote about. The little I've written above is from the first chapter, the bare introduction. Things get complicated quickly after that.

But another thing appeals to me in deciding to tackle this book of philosophy now: the contrast with Joyce. Kant wrote in the mid- to late 1700's, before much of anything was known about what we'd now call psychology. (The 1800's saw many writers exploring the human mind, like Blake, and finding many different, warring aspects within each of us. Much later, Joseph Campbell wrote about how 20th century psychology merely stamped the "QED" ("Quod Erat Demonstrandum", or "We've proven what we set out to prove") on 19th century literature.) But Kant wrote in a time when most still thought dreams to be divine, prophetic gifts, and not products of our own brains.

And he wasn't concerned with any of that. Kant wrote about the fully wakeful, highly rational mind, and how it can perceive things. Reducing his philosophy to a simplified cartoon, Kant wrote about the day, while Joyce wrote about the night.

So that's what I'm doing now: reading and trying to understand the daylightiest and darknightiest works from our civilization.

Hey, it's a way to cope with unemployment!

Spring is nominally here, and it's certainly warmer, but the three of us went to the park this morning and within about ten minutes Kate's and my fingers were pretty cold. Eva, whose fingers are smaller, had red hands, but she was oblivious. It's still not all that clear how aware she is of her different body parts. She's futher along than she was, say, four months ago, when she was closing a toy plastic phone on her thumb, and crying about the pain at the same time. She now has the sense to remove her thumb. But she doesn't have the language skill right now to tell us that a specific body part is, for example, cold. If she hits her hand, she will often hold it out as she cries. So the awareness is dawning, but with anything other than sharp, immediate pain, it still seems to Kate and me that we need to be pretty vigilant on Eva's behalf.

This is the case especially now with physical accidents. As Eva grows more mobile and her inquisitiveness has longer legs and longer arms, she has a vastly increased ability to get herself hurt. She reaches for drawers now, including the ones with sharp knives. Other than closing the drawers again and firmly warning her away from them, Kate and I have yet to take any action on these (like putting in smaller versions of the plastic safety latches we have on several cupboards). But most worriesome right now is Eva's tendency to approach an open door from behind, peek through the open crack at the hinges, and sneak her fingers through.

Since Kate and I commonly keep Eva away from the open side of the refrigerator door when we're getting something, this is her way of still getting a peek at things. Even more worrisome is when she does the same thing at the pantry. If Eva were to sneak her fingers through the crack in hinge side of the refrigerator door, at least the rubber molding would cusion the pressure on her hand and prevent serious injury. But the other night Eva got behind the pantry door and snuck a hand through while I was getting dinner fixings. I didn't see her and if Kate hadn't yelled I'd've shut the door firmly on my little girl's right hand, and I would've broken or possibly severed all four of her fingers. Needless to say I never would have forgiven myself and the thought that I very nearly maimed my own daughter still gives me chills.

Wow, are kids their own worst enemies at times! (I was my own especially in college, but that's not worth dwelling on now. Or maybe ever.)

So Eva has survived past her eighteenth month. Every time Kate and I look at her early ultrasounds, where her spine and teeth within the jaw are visible, it seems always more and more miraculous.

Deeper and Deeper

Kate and I just celebrated our second anniversary, not the first day of spring this year (well, the first complete day maybe, but the earth actually moved into its springtime orbit Sunday night). We were limited by budget, as we are in most all other respects these days, so our celebration was cards given to each other and a big pot roast dinner (featuring cauliflower instead of potatoes since I'm now back on the diet).

My erratic work history since early January (when Triton's roof caved in from snow), including about four days of cab driving, along with difficulty securing another cycle of unemployment payments, has badly damaged our already feeble budget. We have telephone, internet and TV service right now largely by the graces of the service provider, since we're about two months behind on our bill. But now that Kate's through her winter cycle of vacations and snow days, and now that I'm at least receiving steady unemployment aid, I do see our situation remaining modest but stable.

So while I apply for work and stay at home minding Eva, I have lots of time to engage in other things.

I wasn't particuarly literate as a teenager. I was nerdy, imaginative and solitary, and I loved singing, but I wasn't really a serious student of anything at all (except maybe Saturday morning cartoons). I still remember how, when I was in 6th grade, my cousin Monie (who was going to Dartmouth at the time) gave me a book as a present and told me that she knew I loved to read.

Really, I loved to read? Honestly, it was news to me. I had no idea at that age that I loved to read.

I remember how, in third grade, one of those book fairs came to my elementary school, with all the tables spread throughout the library. It was thrilling to see so many colorful books in one place, and of course I wished I could buy them all, but that was really a pretty shallow kind of interest. My best friend bought The Hobbit, and I resolved to buy a thicker book, so I bought The Return of the King.

In fifth grade I tried reading it, made it about a paragraph in, got confused and bored, and set it down until eighth grade.

But back to Monie's gift: A Wind in the Door, by Madeleine L'Engle. I'd never heard of her, and though the back of the book described it as being the second part of a trilogy (1: A Wrinkle in Time; 2: A Wind in the Door; 3: A Swiftly Tilting Planet), I gave it a go. It was very entertaining, and I quickly read the other two. And still, when I think of cherubim, the lower angels, I still tend to think of a whirling mass of wings and eyes, like in L'Engle's book. (As an aside, when I learned that the original concept of seraphim was winged cobras, I was very, very impressed. I mean, that's worthy of Calvin & Hobbes. Ain't nobody messing with a legion of them.)

So, maybe Monie did kind of get me on the love-to-read thing, but it's not like I became some super-literary prodigy in high school. I just did my homework, generally found it pretty easy, and got into college. It was really that simple. By the time I got there, I'd read perhaps two Shakespeare plays (Julius Caesar and maybe Romeo and Cleopatra), and I know I'd heard of James Joyce and Dante, but I do know I'd never read a thing by either. Heck, among American A-listers, by college I'd read Huckleberry Finn by Twain and maybe four or five short stories by Poe. I've still yet to read my first book by Hemingway. I wasn't much of an aficionado, at all.

Among the many other causes for my complete spinout and utter failure at Dartmouth (yes, I had a B average, but you could almost get that by showing up), not realizing in high school what hard work really is, is probably a part. But I had four years at Dartmouth to figure out just exactly what hard work is, and I didn't, so my results are all on me.

Fortunately, I've had two big occasions in the past year to cool my heels for weeks or months at a time: severe colitis last spring, and unemployment this winter. Among other things--like spending lots of time raising and getting to know my daughter--I can devote several hours a day to reading, like I haven't in many years. (Reading science and studying math aren't literature, so I'm not counting time spent doing that.)

And all over again I'm feeling regret for the opportunity I blew in college to spend time doing nothing but this--reading and exploring ideas. I have no idea what direction my study might have taken had I deferred for one year between high school and college (my original idea), and gained a bit of social maturity before heading in. Would I have stuck with literature or tried something else completely? I don't know.

But I can say that this winter, moving from Thoreau to Homer to Joyce has been one of the bright lights during a season that at times has been very dark. I've posted a few times about Finnegans Wake, and won't go into great length here. I have my commentaries and annotations and I'm delving into the book itself now--still in Part 1 chapter 1, having skimmed it once and now going through with a finer comb to get at least a working sense of some of the puns (stay us wherefore in our search for tighteousness, O Sustainer, what time we rise and when we take up to toothmick and before we lump down upon our leatherbed and in the night and at the fading of the stars!). It's slow going, as you might imagine.

Not without its reward, however--you might liken it to climbing a very tall mountain with no clear path, only a jumble of rocks to keep clambering over. Or there's Joyce's own analogy, that the Wake was him burrowing into a mountain from several different sides. The book's incoherence is a result of being about the dream state, when the mind's unconscious thoughts and desires are manifest, and the elements of myth are revealed as the building blocks of our dreams. Religion and mythology are the external product of our sleeping neuroses.

Now the book is much more than that. Joyce, like most expatriates, remained deeply concerned with his home country, and the plots of his books were all located in Dublin. He believed that by understanding Dublin thoroughly, he could understand any city on earth. The all is contained in the particular. So Dublin of Finnegans Wake is used as a prism for all times and places in human history (and prehistory).

But even with all these fragments of history and literature and language scattered within the book's psychological matrix, still a disproportionate number of the fragments refer to Irish heritage, history and culture. And there's plenty of amusement in the references. One series of puns goes: Sobs they sighdid at Fillagain's chrissormiss wake, all the hoolivans of the nation...There was plumbs and grumes and cheriffs and citherers and raiders and cinemen too.

Now to unpack this just a bit. Fillagain's wake = Finnegan's wake. Chrissormiss...hoolivans...plumbs and grumes (etc.) = Mrs. Hooligan's Christmas Cake, another folk ditty.

And that ditty goes:

MRS. HOOLIGAN'S CHRISTMAS CAKE

As I sat in me window last evenin'
A letterman came unto me.
He'd a nice little neat invitation
Sayin' "Won't you come over to tea?"
I knew it was Hooligan sent it
So I went for our friendship's sake
And the first thing he gave me to tackle
Was a slice of Mrs. Hooligan's cake.

REFRAIN:
There were plums and prunes and cherries
There were raisins, currants and cinnamon too.
There were nuts and cloves and berries
but the crust it was stuck on with glue.
There were caraway seeds in abundance,
It would give yer a fine stomach ache
'Twould kill any man twice to be eatin'
A slice of Mrs Hooligan's Christmas cake.

Now Bridie Mulligan wanted to taste it,
Ah but sure it was all of no use.
Though she worked at it over one hour
Still she could get not any of it loose.
Till Hooligan went for the hatchet,
And Kelly came in with the saw
That cake was enough, by the power,
To paralyse any man's jaw.

(REFRAIN)

Now Mrs. Hooligan proud as a peacock,
she was smilin' and blinkin' away
Till she tripped over Flanigan's brogans
and spill'd the whole brewins of tay.
Mrs Hooly, she cried: "You're not eatin'.
Won't you try a bit more for my sake."
"I've a roof to repair, Misses Hoolie,
so I'd like the recipe for that cake."

(REFRAIN)

I'm not even going into the history or the dream interpretation stuff. One really thrilling aspect about this book (about any good book, really, each in its own way): it's an education in itself.

More Eva

As it gets warmer Eva grows more insistent on being outside. That's not a real problem (though she can't go out as much as she'd like), except that it's becoming difficult to get her into the car. Every time we leave home she expects to start running around the yard, and she rebels noisily when we try to fit her into the car. Eva's gained enough strength, enough body control, and enough twistiness that she can put up a pretty effective fight when she doesn't want to be placed in something like a safety seat or a shopping cart. This afternoon at the supermarket it took concerted work by Kate and me to push the little imp into the cart seat. And she didn't go quietly, I can assure you that.

But an event the other day, while Kate was at work, got me to thinking about one of my less proud moments from my own early childhood. See, Eva and I were heading home from the park--it had been a nice morning and she ran all over the place--and I stopped in at the store to pick up a few odds and ends. The store had special kids' carts with built-in cars in front, so the child could sit in a seat (buckled, of course) facing forward and with a small steering wheel to play with while the adult pushes the cart around.

Several months ago Kate and I put Eva in one of these, and the little girl flipped out because (we surmised) she couldn't see us. Eva needed some hard-core reassurance after that one, so we abandoned the thought of using them until last weekend, when Kate tried again. This time Eva reacted with glee, screaming and yelping and laughing the whole time. The only moment she fell silent was when I rammed a display case in a full head-on collision. (In my defense, those plastic mock cars stick out a good foot or so beyond the cart, and it's easy to forget how far out they are. It's like not knowing where the bumpers and corners on your own car are, I realize, but this was my first time handling one of those things! Anyway...) So Eva loved the car-styled cart the second time around.

So this Tuesday I stuck her in one, did my bit of shopping, and headed toward the cashiers. I guess the belt was kind of loose, because Eva was all over the cab of the car, twisting around backwards, standing up, generally behaving imprudently. I figured we were nearly done so I let it go. We went through the line, I paid for my food, and out to the car we went.

When I leaned over to remove Eva from the front of the cart, I saw a Snickers bar in her hands.

Plainly she'd reached out and grabbed one while waiting in the cashier line, and nobody had noticed. Who looks down for a shoplifting baby? Plus, the cashier at that counter couldn't see so far down over the edge of the counter anyway, so unless someone in front saw the baby with the candy, it would be the perfect crime. And the perfect crime it was.

At first I was morally indignant that Eva would do such a thing, then I remembered that she's a baby and she grabs everything that's not fastened down. Then I thought that I should return the candy bar, since it was stolen. Then I thought that it would be a hassle to bring the baby and the candy bar back in, and I was eager to get home after spending most of the morning out. Then I thought that I hadn't had a Snickers bar in a long, long time. So I kept it.

Eva made no protest when I took it from her hands, set her in the carseat, and buckled her in. I tossed the Snickers bar onto the front seat, put my bag of groceries in the rear seat, and got in. When I opened the wrapper, however, is when Eva piped up. And pipe up she did. That little thief yelled and cried and screamed for a good five minutes as I drove home, eating the candy bar in resentful silence. Not only did I have the crime of eating a shoplifted candy bar on my conscience (and Eva to blame for it), but she had to make me pay even further by screaming because I'd stolen it from her.

(And of course, I'll be checking her hands every time through that she sits in one of those forward-facing carts from now on, you can believe that.)

When I was a twerp, maybe three or four (I don't recall exactly, but I was sitting in a forward-facing booster in the middle of the back seat), I'd get hauled along to the supermarket once or twice a week, and I had to tolerate the interminable boredom. (Only clothes shopping for Lisa and Julie was worse.) Only this time was different. Around then--early to mid-70's--there was a brand of gum called Fruit Stripe or something like that, with a multicolored zebra on the packet.

I dug the colors and I adored anything sweet, so I made up my mind to get me some of that gum. Only I knew Mom would never approve--her list of legal sugary foods for me was very, VERY short, and furthermore candy was a useless luxury--so I just swiped it. And like Eva, I got away clean, right out to the car with nobody noticing. Only I wasn't a baby innocently grabbing things, I was a theiving little boy with a plan, albeit a bad one.

See, I'd gotten out of the store easily, but the next part of my plan was pretty much off the charts for stupidity. I was too impatient to wait until I got home to start eating the gum, so I started eating it right in the car, in my booster chair, in the middle of the back seat. Only I thought I'd be furtive about it, so I leaned way over to one side and chewed while looking down and to the rear.

Of course my mother noticed this in about five seconds, pulled over and extracted the truth from me. That done, we turned around and drove back, walked into to the store again, and she made me return the pack of gum in person to the store manager and apologize for stealing it.

My mother knew how to punish effectively, though it doesn't seem to have stuck into adulthood.

Today (no more stealing) we went to the park again, and it was an even warmer day. Eva did me proud, and put her education from a recent rainy day to work. She stomped right through four puddles in the dirt parking lot and soaked her shoes, socks and the lower part of her pants. Then we walked over to the sand-filled playground with its jungle gyms and swings. In between a few bouts on the swings, and a couple of trips down the slide, Eva just rolled around in the sand, and tossed handfuls up in the air, all over herself.

I was extremely proud. That's the child of a Dartmouth man, develping a real appreciation for mother earth.

Emendation

Homestead's full this morning. Kate felt lousy yesterday--she asked me to come rescue her from work at noon--and with no co-op students to coach today, she called in sick. Kate is thankfully feeling better, but it's thrown off my normal routine of scudding out to the gym and then being home in time for lunch.

Add that it's raining steadily, so that not even I would encourage Eva to go out (I believe getting wet and dirty on a regular basis are indispensable to childhood).

But Eva's trapped inside with her mother and me, no YMCA day care for an hour (when I say "We're going to the YMCA," she answers, "See-ay,") to distract her. She's doing the early toddler version of going stir-crazy, digging through the recycling bin (her auxiliary toy chest), scrabbling for items off her mother's and my bureaus (Kate's watch is a frequent theft), scattering her possessions in every room and verbally announcing her discontentment the whole while.

She's driving Kate and me a little bit nuts (to say nothing of an increasingly harried and persecuted cat).

Everyone's heard the old saw, "Ain't mama happy, ain't nobody happy." And in any family that's certainly true. It really describes the centrality of the mother to the homestead, because the woman has traditionally been the person most consistently taking care of it and the other family members. So the mother's state of mind has a larger effect on everyone else than any other family member's would. That's much less true now with the fragmentation of the American home, due to two working parents and many other causes. But even so, to a large extent the old saying is still very true, and to paraphrase my favorite B-poet Robert Service, ain't mama happy, she makes it spread misere.

But really, if anyone's unhappy, the rest feel it. There's no doubt that I've dragged Kate's state of mind farther down this winter by being the scowling lump of doldrum that I've been, looking unsuccessfully for work and despairing over bringing in any money at all. And my lack of gitup'n'go rubs off on Eva, whom I've often left to her own whining devices while I just funk out in front of the TV or reading more bad news from Daily Kos.

So, in every family unit, everybody affects everybody. It's a smaller version of the earth, really, or the universe. And it's obviously much more visible on such a small scale, but it's none the less true.

So the "ain't mama..." thing is cute, and funny, but less than the whole story.

Which brings us to the baby.

When this trundling little tyke with the 10-second attention span and an increasingly long arm's reach gets bored and ornery, things happen around the house, and generally not to the good. My first memory is of nearly electrocuting myself by sticking a key in a socket at 14 months. Eva loves to play with keys, so that's another thing to make sure are never within her reach. Without policing her every motion it's impossible to keep her out of the proximity of electrical outlets, so of course our main task is to make nothing available she might be able to stick in one. And so on down the line--child-proofing a dwelling is an entirely different level of safety from baby-proofing. As Kate and I are learning.

But for right now, we might as well rewrite the old saw: "Ain't baby happy, ain't nobody happy."

What Sound Does a Bird Make?

Wading gradually into Finnegans Wake, supplied by several commentaries with some concepts. and in the absence of money to buy the book of annotations (because virtually every word in the Wake is a pun, often several, and frequently in two or more languages--like I said last time, this book is complicated), an online annotation which helps unravel the puns and the many languages and layers.

Joyce being Joyce, there is humor in every word and every pun. Joyce views the human tragedy of life and the many kinds of violence humans execute on one another through the lens of all humans being psychologically the same. Therefore we humans do violence only on ourselves, and this violent, tragic life becomes a rough comedy, a hurly-burly. The violence humans perform on themselves is a necessary part of pent-up energy being released and helping to create more life. Humans are humans like, for Red Sox fans of the aughts, Manny was Manny. Self-destructive behavior is not universally destructive but is, rather, the means toward more life (or, in Manny's case, more clutch baseball).

So the book is filled with references to sex, whether between husband and wife, or adulterous, or cross-generational, or incestuous, and every reference is humorous and tinged with a sense of nature, of inevitability (like how hurricanes are statistically inevitable in the Gulf of Mexico). The sexual humor is wry and incessant. From the online commentary I'm relying on comes a note concerning a Japanese element ("kaminari", thunder) in the text: 'Joyce asked me "Aren't there 4 terrible things in Japan, 'Kaminari' being one of them?" I counted for him: Jishin (earthquake), kaminari (thunder), kaji (fire), oyaji (paternity)." And he laughed - Takaoki Katta, 15 juillet, 1926.'

That snippet is a' propos of nothing except that I found it funny. Even from the land of zen and dour samurai we have paternity jokes. I suppose we humans are alike after all.

I'm posting more now because my spirits have risen considerably over the past week or so. In no small part this is because I'm finally on a regular income (though small) of unemployment payments. I'm not proud of that except that it enables us to pay our bills, which had been piling up unpaid for nearly two months. Add to this that spring is definitely approaching--not even another blizzard or two will undo the thaw we've had--and today was (Surprise!) daylight savings day. I woke to our automatic clock, which reads the time through the power grid, telling me that it was nearly nine.

So much for an early start to the day, eh?

But now it's nearly seven and twilight still hangs in the air. And that's good. Trees are now filled with twittering birds so that Eva constantly points them out when she can hear them from inside the house. Morning and evening she points toward the window and says, "Bud-dy."

The return of birds and the noise they make makes me think of when I first moved away from New Hampshire, down to Boston to live and work with my cousin Drew. We lived on P Street in South Boston, still the Irish end of town then (nearly 20 years ago), and one block from Columbia Park which looks onto the bay and the old revolutionary fort which guards Boston Harbor. The tip of Southie, which sticks like a thumb out into the harbor, is a mile or two across the water from Logan Airport, and when the wind is out of the southwest, we were under its takeoff pattern. This made for noisy evenings.

(A side note: commercial airports double as gigantic weathervanes. When I saw eight planes stacked up on their landing approach to the south, I knew that the wind was out of the north-northwest, and we were in for good weather for a while. Anyhow...)

So Southie was loud, between the family upstairs (and the father, falsely claiming medical disability like half the other people I met in that neighborhood), the caterwauling tomcats all night outside, the passersby in the street, and the planes overhead. And no birds.

Oh, there were some seagulls, and perhaps a crow or two, but certainly no songbirds. Nothing you'd want to open up a window, sit down with a cup of coffee, and listen to. Just city toughs getting along, like all the other animals (including humans and insects) there.

I moved down in February, in the midst of a very snowy winter (and I learned just how territorial and irrational these folks could be when it came to claiming and defending parking spots). I didn't visit my parents in Moultonboro, on the northern tip of Lake Winnipesaukee, in New Hampshire until mid-June. I drove up one Friday evening, opened my bedroom window open because it was really hot, hopped in bed and went to sleep.







The following morning, around 5:30 AM, I was awoken by a screaming clatter like I'd never heard in Boston. "EEAAHWRAAKKEEII-NAKAAWEEEIIKKIEEAAWRAAAAEEIIKIIEE!" and on and on and on.











The birds.









It was as if 10,000 birds were sitting outside my window, and suddenly on cue, began screaming at maximum volume in one deafening chorus.

(Calvin and Hobbes has long been my favorite cartoon strip, occasionally displaced by Doonesbury and The Far Side. But Snoopy is unassailably my favorite character. Can't touch Joe Cool. He's as elemental as anyone in the Wake.)


Back to the startlingly loud birds. I jumped out of bed, pretty scared, until I realized about five seconds later what the noise was. Of course I had a good chuckle at myself but there was no way I could go back to sleep so I just went downstairs and joined Mom for a cup of coffee.

Fast-forward to today. That story about the screaming is one of the ones I've told Kate three or four dozen times. On account of the sudden influx of songbirds, and the (still leafless) treetops filled with chattering flocks in the twilight, tonight was one more. And I added the sound effect, "WRAAAAEEEAAAGHH!"

Kate, generally more attuned to these things than I am, commented, "You're startling Eva."

So I turned to Eva. "Birds," I said, "go WRAAA." and bugged my eyes out. Eva reacted with her startled, fearful laugh, and her answer said it all: "Bankie." (Whenever she's dismayed or scared her first thought is for her blankie.)

Kate, not pleased, objected. "Birds go tweet-tweet-tweet." And she made the ASL sign for a bird, thumb and forefinger opening and shutting in front of the lips.

I made the same sign and insisted, "Birds go WRAAA."

Eva wasn't sure who to pay attention to, but she was showing signs of maybe wanting to start crying, so I backed off.

But later on, as Kate read her a story before bed, the story mentioned a crow.

"Wraa," the baby said, and looked at me.

Hyah!

Gusto

Kate and I try to avoid having too many "What bills can we pay this week?", and "Well, that payment bounced, we'll try it again next month" conversations. Yes, we keep only loose track of our money, but it's not like I go out gambling and drinking, and we don't like antagonizing ourselves or each other with the obvious. We're not poor, but we're not rich.

If you look at life economically, in terms of a person's earning potential, then I'm still not really worried. My line of work is transferable internationally, with the right licenses and a bit of language brushup. So if the economy ever unfreezes enough for a galoot with a few years' experience to slip his way through a door again, then I have reason to feel good about the years to come.

Of course, like an ancient Irish poem says about spring: it's pretty, but there's no food. Hope isn't dinner.

About fifteen years ago, while I was drunkenly schlepping my way through my 20's, a beggar in Boston asked me for money. I walked past, and thought, I have quite a bit of credit card debt right now that I can't pay off. Total all my assets and liabilities up--books versus debts--and I'm in the negative. I'm worth less than that beggar! It left me thinking that I should go back and demand money from him.

That's nonsense, of course, because I have an education and had the prospects of receiving money from a reasonably well-off family. In other words, I had support and the potential to earn that the beggar most likely didn't. (Although some beggars might have suprising personal histories. One slovenly drunk I knew was a black-sheep castoff of a Boston Brahmin clan.)

Anyhow, my main point here is that there is no mystery in the presence or absence of money in a person's life. Unless one wants to live off the grid (the little bengal's floated it once or twice), money is an essential tool. So Kate and I try to avoid wrangling too often over it, when our general situation is pretty obvious to both of us.

In the meantime, while Kate works, I've mentioned studying math and geodetics (the science of locating things geometrically on planet Earth), but I'm also taking the opportunity, like last year in the hospital and afterward, to dig into some literature I've been neglecting for some time. Like last year, it started with Thoreau.

(Well, last year it started with Shakespeare and Chaucer, but once I got to Thoreau, I realized I'd found a writer I could understand instinctively. So in that sense it started with Thoreau.)

Thoreau, during his discourses, mentions many old writers. Walden is a modern Confessions, a sincere psychological self-profile by a mature adult male. In the Confessions Augustine describes his conversion to Christianity, and in Walden Thoreau describes his two-year experiment to simplify his life so as to eliminate all unnecessary things, or in his own words, "all that was not life." Both discuss the writers which influenced them--Augustine famously writing that he fell in love with Vergil's heroine Dido, and Thoreau spreading his affections a bit more widely.

Time in Walden is somewhat kaleidoscopic, with many different moments of time merged within one picture. The book moves generally through the four seasons, but with two years' experience compressed into the apparent passage of one single year, and even then, sometimes Thoreau will range across several months, or even years, to find another memory which illustrates a point. And during the course of this not-quite-passage of time, he describes several books, or even classes of literature, which have especially formed his thinking.

Oddly enough Thoreau never mentions Kant, whose philosophy was the basis of the label given later to Thoreau and his friends: the Transcendentalists. Perhaps Kant was as intimidating and as feared a writer then as he is among undergraduates now, and Thoreau didn't want to scare off his readers. In any event, Thoreau never mentions him.

He does, however, discuss Homer at length, and Hindu philosophy in general, at even greater length. In "A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers" time passes even more vaguely--where a few weeks seem to encompass the passage of spring to fall, as well as several extended forays into memories from years past--and the discourses on literature are longer, and nearly as fascinating. (I'm ashamed to admit that in one of his essays, Thoreau lavishes praise on the Scottish poet Ossian, supposed author of several Gaelic epics. Unfortunately, by Thoreau's time Ossian had long been revealed to be the fraudulent creation of the Scottish poet James McPherson, who had taken actual ancient Gaelic fragments and incorporated them into several English works of his own invention. The incomparable Samuel Johnson, who almost immediately detected the counterfeit, wrote that the books of the nonexistent Ossian were as "gross an imposition as ever the world was troubled with." And nearly a century later, my intellectual hero fell for it. Ah well.)

In Walden, Thoreau celebrates the heroism less of the characters than of the poet, whose work is a joyful affirmation of piratic and warlike life in bronze age Greece. And all Homer's heroism is overwhelmed by a tiny moment's experience in his own life: "I was as much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour through my apartment in earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door and windows open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang fame. It was Homer's requiem; itself an Iliad and the Odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath and wanderings. There was something cosmical about it; a standing advertisement, till forbidden, of the everlasting fertility and vigor of the world."

Literature speaks very much to writers of literature. However, life speaks to everyone, and literature might at best describe outlines or echoes of what we live every day. But these outlines and echoes can be valuable clues by themselves for living. To the literary woman or man, however, not only the content but the aesthetic is the lesson. What matters to me is not only the experience and thought compressed into Thoreau's words, but the arrangement of words themselves. When he blends time together imperceptibly, turning his Walden calendar into a delicate fiction, I am charmed and intrigued. When two weeks become nearly one full year on the river, spanning from spring to the onset of winter, I'm inspired to find the more rapid seasons within my own life.

So I wanted to take Thoreau's advice: go back to the source. Every source has its source, of course, and when the person we call Homer was composing poetry, the stories he (or she? I subscribe to the idea that a woman composed the Odyssey) was telling in verse might well have been ancient beyond memory. (This is Thomas Mann's time coulisse, the endless dive into human memory. "Very deep is the well of time. Shall we not call it bottomless?" he wrote.) Unfortunately, Homer is our earliest coherent source for these Greek stories, and fortunately they are told so magnificently that they along with the Bible have formed the unmovable foundation for European and American literature.

The Iliad is all about war, and shines with soldiers' joy in their work. Death is more than a necessary evil--it is a tool for gaining fame. Mankind's spirituality was still in its childhood, with godly male and female characters displaying our species' psychology on a cosmic stage. Whether acting unseen by the mortals within the poem, or planting suggestions within the humans' brains, the gods and goddesses perform psychologically valid acts. They are part of the framework for displaying the humans in the poem.

The role of gods and goddesses--mainly Poseidon and Athena--in the Odyssey is the same as in the Iliad. The main character is Odysseus, a man; Poseidon, also male, is the principle divine antagonist, and Zeus, another male, remains the high arbiter of the gods. However, Odysseus and his son Telemachus live in a world of settled homesteads, where the heroic culture is counterproductive at best (think Ivanhoe). The Odyssey occurs largely in a world dominated by women, where Penelope is the focus of over a hundred brawling and blasphemous suitors. Athena, the crafty goddess of wisdom and battle, quietly guides both Odysseus and his son through a series of desperate adventures, none greater than ridding the palace of the mob of suitors.

Helen, adulterous cause of the Trojan War, is beyond reproach and beyond analysis in this story. She so thoroughly dominates her (apparently rather stupid) husband King Menelaus of Sparta, that he can adoringly tell the story of how, when he, Odysseus and others were crouched within the Trojan Horse, Helen walked round it, with her (second! After Paris had been killed) Trojan husband, calling the names of the principal Greeks--imitating their wives' voices. Menelaus' tale comes just a few lines after Helen had condemned herself as a prostitute, and said that her mind had changed at Troy, and she wanted only to return to Menelaus and the Greeks.

The point that defies analysis: if Helen told the truth about wanting to forsake Troy, why try to flush the Greeks out of the horse? (And the sequence of time is clear: Helen mentioned wanting to leave Troy behind before the horse was ever brought in.) But if her self-accusation was a lie, why bother to tell it when it's so unbelievable? In no small part because Menelaus was gullible enough to believe her. And this is just the beginning of the mystery that is Helen, and the theme she so grandly introduces, of duplicity. Whether calculated, or subconscious, or simply to cover up a monstrous crime, the poem is a nearly unbroken series of deceptions.

Helen's physical beauty is undeniable. Her magic, on display more than once, is almost terrifying. Her motives in using it, inscrutable. She is both greater and less than Penelope--faithless follower of her own advantage, and capable of steering the minds of anyone she is with. Penelope, unspeakably faithful, is clever but not magical and is held almost prisoner by her illegitimate suitors.

Odysseus, the lone adult male profiled at any length in the poem, exists almost in isolation. Even his son Telemachus, introduced earlier, is constantly described as just exiting adolescence and entering adulthood--so he is hardly comparable to his father. It is the several female characters--Penelope, Helen, Circe, Calypso, Nausicaa, even Athena--who can be compared to each other, and who at various times (except for Helen) hold Odysseus' fate in their hands. Rejection by any one of these would mean death (or, in Penelope's case, worse) to the poem's namesake.

This is not to become a dissertation on my favorite book. I just wanted to explore a few themes which I've been considering since re-reading it. Like the Iliad, and I'll agree with Thoreau here, joy suffuses the poem, in the acuity of description, the detail which validates the story as a whole, and in the overall affirmation of the lives of its characters.

So I want to keep taking Thoreau's advice in Walden, "Read the best books first, or you may never have the chance to read them at all." So I'm moving from translated Homer, as my warmup, to possibly the most intimidating book in Western literature: Finnegans Wake.

Joyce took the title from a 19th-century Irish folk song about the wake of Tim Finnegan, a mason (well, a hod carrier: the guy who brought bricks and mortar up to the bricklayers) who fell off a ladder and died. At his wake there was a fight, and someone accidentally splashed whiskey on his face as he lay in the open casket. Finnegan awoke and joined in the party.

There's a bit of etymology behind the name "Finnegan": the name comes from "Finn-again", as in, a reincarnated version of the hero from Irish myth, Finn MacCool. That's precisely the kind of trick that Joyce adores, so who am I to deny it? (Joyce is the one who wrote, "God is dog spelled backwards.") So with the death and reincarnation of Finnegan, Joyce is dealing with the process of sin, guilt and redemption. And that's just the itsy-bitsiest kernel of things.

I can't really even describe what that book's about, except to say that it's about everybody, and everything. Since all humans share the same basic psychology, we all play out similar psychological dramas in our lives. Based on this, Joyce's book is full of male and female characters which are all ultimately lesser parts of, and distorted expressions of, the two main characters: HCE (Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, or Here Comes Everybody), and his wife ALP (Anna Livia Plurabelle).

Their two sons Shem and Shaun are utterly opposite in nature, and constantly fight. They are the source of all wars in history (with a generous assist from their sister the temptress). The daughter Isabel is the object of all the males' attentions (not least her brothers and father). Within these five characters is the grounds for Joyce to display and explore all human history. Finnegans Wake is the fantastically complicated journey of exploration. (And that point I made earlier, about meaning plus aesthetic...well, let's just say, I really don't want to get too far into that topic right now.)

"riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and environs."

That's how the book begins.

"Coming, far! End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousends thee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the"

That's how the book ends. Note how you can go right back to the beginning from the end. And that's one of the main points of the book: the story never ends, and it's the same thing over and over. (And it's worth mentioning that the title, "Finnegans Wake", has no apostrophe indicating the possessive. It's really a statement that all we Finnegans must wake up from our guilt-imposed psychological self-abuse: our own death, in a manner of speaking. And in another sense, Finnegan wakes in the form of children who grow up and take their parents' place in the world.)

The book is too complex, and I have too much to learn about it, to waste anyone's time blathering about it now. But I intend to learn. And I'm getting ready to write my own, but you might say I'm taking a good stiff draft of excellent literature to prepare my own spirit for the act of writing.

* * *

A version of the Irish ballad "Finnegan's Wake" I picked up from the internet:

Tim Finnegan lived in Walkin' Street,
A gentleman Irish mighty odd;
He had a brogue both rich and sweet,
And to rise in the world he carried a hod.
Now Tim had a sort of a tipplin' way,
With a love of the whiskey he was born,
And to help him on with his work each day,
He'd a drop of the craythur every morn.

Chorus:
Whack fol the dah O, dance to your partner,
Welt the floor, your trotters shake;
Wasn't it the truth I told you,
Lots of fun at Finnegan's wake!

One mornin' Tim was feelin' full,
His head was heavy which made him shake;
He fell from the ladder and broke his skull,
And they carried him home his corpse to wake.
They rolled him up in a nice clean sheet,
And laid him out upon the bed,
A gallon of whiskey at his feet,
And a barrel of porter at his head.

Chorus

His friends assembled at the wake,
And Mrs. Finnegan called for lunch,
First they brought in tay and cake,
Then pipes, tobacco and whiskey punch.
Biddy O'Brien began to bawl,
"Such a nice clean corpse, did you ever see?
"O Tim, mavourneen, why did you die?"
"Arragh, hold your gob," said Paddy McGhee!

Chorus

Then Maggie O'Connor took up the job,
"O Biddy," says she, "You're wrong, I'm sure",
Biddy she gave her a belt in the gob,
And left her sprawlin' on the floor.
And then the war did soon engage,
'Twas woman to woman and man to man,
Shillelagh law was all the rage,
And a row and a ruction soon began.

Chorus

Then Mickey Maloney ducked his head,
When a noggin of whiskey flew at him,
It missed, and falling on the bed,
The liquor scattered over Tim!
The corpse revives! See how he raises!
Timothy rising from the bed,Says,
"Whirl your whiskey around like blazes,
Thanum an Dhoul! Do you think I'm dead?"

Chorus

Strawberry Milk and Bounced Checks

Since Kate seems to have lost the ability to type, and posting a sign video would use too much bandwidth, and only a few folks could understand it anyway, it looks like I'm going to be doing all the posting for the foreseeable future. And my glacial posting rate assures that we've lost the few readers we ever had, so I suppose I'm writing now pretty much for myself, Kate, and maybe Eva if she ever chooses to read this.

Oh, well.

I've honestly felt like there's little to post this winter, as the family struggles through a period of scarce money and half employment. Kate's borne up valiantly with her job, when she's told me many times that she'd rather be home with Eva. And I'd love to give her that freedom--I hope to still, in years to come. Despite the steady erosion of America's middle class, I hope to earn enough that Kate can be a full-time mother. I grew up with one of those, and despite the times she kind of aggravated me by asking tons of questions when I didn't feel like talking (which was actually kind of rare, that I wouldn't feel like talking), it was pretty good having a mother around all the time.

On the other hand, I did grow up pretty sheltered and dependent, so there are consequences to everything. But hey, as a race we have to roll with the psychology we're born with, so I won't be listing complaints.

And that gets to the seed of why I haven't posted much lately. This is a theme I've mentioned a few times already, but I feel the need to discuss it again now, if only due to the persistence of my shame and frustration with the trouble we've been having lately. I've backed myself into an industry segment--offshore geology and geophysics--which is strongly seasonal. On top of that, I've had some significant debts--mostly the condominium, but also some credit cards--to dig out from beneath. Kate of course had nothing to do with creating these problems, but she's had to suffer through the period of solving them. And no small part of that has been my anger and self-isolation resulting from ongoing lack of money, and knowing that my choices have led directly to this.

There aren't many nights when I don't dig through old memories, mostly from college, and accuse myself of the laziness and indifference which led to me as a 40-year-old struggling to establish a career in marine science. When I went to Dartmouth I had no intention of becoming a professor, and I gravitated toward Greek and Latin only because I had an excellent Latin teacher in high school (thank you again, Mrs. Moser!). But at Dartmouth I never took the prospect of academic achievement seriously, for many tangled reasons, and not until my late 20's did that attitude change. Since then I've struggled to narrow down and specify what I want to do, and how.

Meanwhile investment bankers ruined the world economy and I'm left holding a very empty bag of vague aspirations, and hoping that I haven't doomed myself and my family. I don't always feel so bleakly, but it's an impossible thought to escape completely. Buddha I'm not.

My days don't really have a routine, except what centers around Eva: breakfast between 8 and 9 (depending on when she wakes up), shower while she watches a Signing Time video, lunch around noon, 30-40 minutes of her running around outside, followed by her afternoon nap, when I'm free to do what I like around the house. Generally this is my time to work on math, since I have a bunch of loose sheets of paper and a couple of pencils lying around, normally things (especially the pencils) I don't want her getting her hands on.

I'm proceeding right now in the hope that I will get into UNH, working on a few types of math which I'll need as an ocean mapper. And even if I don't get in, I'll be disappointed but I'll carry on learning this and apply it in my private career. I'm not about to give up, despite my rage and embarassment throughout this winter. Kate has suffered through this extended mental darkness of mine, and we've had some bright moments but she's usually found slight comfort in me.

Eva remains a smiling, dancing, and increasingly talkative baby. In my dour moods, while I'm reading at the computer, she'll trundle up with her blankie (the red one is becoming her favorite, and I'm not surprised) and ask to sit on my lap. Once there she'll lean on my ribcage and suck away on her blanket. I don't like her to retreat into her blanket for very long stretches outside of her naps, so I'll generally do something with her after a few minutes. But she breaks through even my desk meditations.

I still drop the occasional inappropriate word in her presence, and she's given to repeating the last word she heard, so I've been momentarily humiliated on a number of occasions by my own foul mouth.

Eva loves to go outside, and she's learning to love splashing through mud and puddles of water. Last fall she learned to love grabbing dirt from the half-barrel in the driveway and flinging it over her shoulder. The dirt in the barrel is still mostly frozen (not for long, though!), so she can't do that yet. But she does love to pick things up and hand them to me--leaves, tufts of grass, pebbles--though fortunately no deer scat (and there are piles of it all over the yard).

I've resumed singing drills in the morning, after my shower, and Eva has resumed her somewhat uncertain relationship with my singing, alternately intrigued, or milling around somewhat indifferently, or standing in the doorway with her blankie and managing the occasional sob as she looks at me. She's probably angling for attention, but I do sit down with her on my lap afterwards and show her the keyboard. (That baby will know the notes A-G, as well as what an octave, a third and a fifth are before she's three. Maybe before she's two...then we'll work on chords.)

So Eva's delightful, hardly my only joy, but certainly one of the major joys in my life. My little bengal, though she's often feeling as much or more stress than I am, is another. And carrying on with intellectual work even while unemployed is another.

But some things Eva isn't quite so wonderful at--drinking milk is one. It's nearly impossible to get her to drink any. It's gotten to the point that she expects it at dinner, and if we use a sippy cup she doesn't normally use (like one you can't see through), she'll inspect it carefully and try to see any drops of milk on it. Then she'll try the drink, and if it's milk, her face will wrinkle slightly and she won't touch it again.

We tried chocolate, but Kate's mom says that the chocolate binds up the calcium in the milk, effectively canceling out its main benefit. But I haven't seen anything like that written about strawberry flavor, so I've given it a try on little Rocky these past few nights, with marginal success at best. Kate and I give Eva two spoonfuls of calcium supplement every night, but Eva's still too young to understand language to the point of bargaining--such as, "Drink your milk or you won't leave the table." I see plenty of standoffs like that in years to come. And though Eva's revealed herself to have a temper like mine, those aren't standoffs I intend to lose. As Bill Cosby once said, "You don't mess with Dad. That's the old gunfighter, jack."

As for the other part of this title--bounced checks--well, yeah, we bounce a few every month. Neither of us has mastered, or even tried to learn, the lost art of balancing a checkbook. And I suppose our week-to-week budgeting skills are pretty meager too. But some embarrassments and bank fees aside, we've survived so far, and I think we'll continue to do just that.