Cursive

ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS
D'Nealian Script, a cursive alphabet — lower case and upper case.

"I've always believed that there was a certain age
after which I would be all well and I'd stop feeling
as if I'd been abandoned here on earth with no explanation.
When I was little, the magic number was 6 --
the first - graders had maturity, secret information
(like gnostics), and lunch boxes. Then 13, 18, 21 . . ."
~ Anne Lamott ~
from Grace Eventually (p 243)
When I read these words a few years ago, I identified at once with Lamott's first - grade faith that all would be well and her misconception that the bigger kids had all the answers. Her gradual deflation expresses precisely the dismay that I felt back in grade school when I learned the truth about cursive writing -- that it was a sham, a trick, a false lead. My first real disillusion, way worse than finding out about Santa Claus!

I shared my cursive writing story recently with epigrammatist, writer and artist Michael Lipsey when he posted a similar sentiment on facebook:

"The biggest misconceptions of youth are that
somehow things will fall into place as you get older,
that there will be answers to the larger questions,
that you will attain maturity, and certainties,
and self-confidence. Perhaps this is true
if you have a talent for self-deception.
But eventually you figure out
that there won’t be any of these things --
that you will just have to muddle through
as best you can until the end."

[Previous thoughts from Michael Lipsey on my blog:
"A Little Crazier" ~ "Parallax" ~ "First Friday"
And future thoughts: "My Times" & "Winnow the Dreams"]
The words of Lamott and Lipsey brought to mind something that my wise eldest brother wrote to me back in 2002, following an introspective late summer conversation beside the pool:

Dave wrote: "In 1996, I truly thought that going back to school would be a turning point. I guess it was one more door that I thought had a magic chalice or a secret code word behind it. As a kid growing up I was always convinced that sooner or later I would turn a corner and all the concealed things of the adult and/or bigger world would be revealed. First I thought it was puberty but that just brought the usual frustrations and problems. Then I was convinced that it was being a teenager but that also was more frustration. Somehow I just knew that when I turned 16, Dad would take me aside and clear everything up.

"I was also sure that the Marine Corps [1965] would be a lease on a whole new life which, in a way, it was but not in the way I anticipated. When I was in Chicago and turning 21, I knew intellectually that it meant nothing but still had a secret hope that there was a missing block of knowledge that I would be privy too. After that I quit looking for magic doors but still held the inner kid hope that something would turn up. Hell I even joined the Masons when I was 42. There are no magical turning points. No epiphanies. No blinding lights. Just the slow process of living and doing and trying to make the pieces connect as you roll along [emphasis added].

"I have finally come to the conclusion that it isn't what you do but where your head is at when you do it. That's why old men can fish where there are no fish, talk when there are no listeners and write when there are no readers. They don't require the other side of the equation to feel complete, albeit a bit melancholy at times."
~ from Dave the Brummbaer

[Previous posts from Dave Carriker on my blog:
"Up & Down" ~ "It's Magic" ~ "Porsche"]
My brother's description of waiting for the big moment when all would be revealed to him by Dad or God or the Marine Corps or whomever reminded me of that disappointing day that I have never forgotten when I came home from grade school, having made the big leap from printing to cursive writing. I had been looking forward to this milestone for a long time (or so it seemed in my short life), starting back in first grade when I could only print, anticipating the secret joy of cursive writing to be learned in second grade.

I was kind of like giddy Gilderoy Lockhart (former Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher) who childishly brags when offering autographed copies of his photographs: "I can do joined - up writing now, you know!" (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, p 509).

The long summer between first and second grade came to an end, and I received my cursive writing workbook and soon mastered the task of joining the letters. Somehow, though, it was not quite as exciting as I had expected. In fact, after the big build - up, it did not really seem that much different than printing after all. Maybe the real fun was yet to come, in a more advanced step that would follow the mere connection of letter to letter.

So I asked my older sister Peg: "How long before we start connecting the words?" Imagine my dismay when she informed me that this would not be happening! Of course, the difficulty of deciphering "joined - up" words had never even crossed my mind. As far as I was concerned, that was just another one of those as-yet-to-be-revealed skills. I can still remember the "you-funny-little-kid" expression on Peg's face as she prepared me for the big let down: "You don't ever connect the words; those gaps are always there! What? This was it? No answers to the larger questions? I had arrived . . . already? Was I ever astonished!

It was supposed to be like those tender lines from Neil Young's beautiful song, "Philadelphia: City of Brotherly Love":

"And when I see the light
I know I'll be all right.
I've got my friends in the world,
I had my friends
When we were boys and girls
And the secrets came unfurled."
But no. There was no unfurling.

This was no doubt my first inkling that the Platonic vision of complete perfection might never become available to me here on earth. I guess we have to wait until the afterlife to see all the words connected -- and all the worlds. For the time being, we write through a glass darkly, filled with gaps, searching for connections.

Leonardo da Vinci's Mysterious Mirror Writing

SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Tuesday, August 28th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT ~ Earl's Birthday ~
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

Love Is Not All

AN ENCHANTED GARDEN
WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

APPLE BLOSSOMS ~ JOHN EVERETT MILLAIS

"WE . . . HAVE BECOME EXTRAORDINARY: WE ARE NOT SIMPLY EATING; WE ARE PAUSING IN THE MARCH TO PERFORM AN ACT TOGETHER; WE ARE IN LOVE AND THE MEAL OFFERED AND RECEIVED IS A SACRAMENT WHICH SAYS: I KNOW YOU WILL DIE; I AM SHARING FOOD WITH YOU; IT IS ALL I CAN DO, AND IT IS EVERYTHING."

~ ANDRE DUBUS ~

The Enchanted Garden *". . . a rose can only smell so achingly sweet
to those who know that someday they will die to that smell,
to it and to every other joy and sorrow." ~ Kathryn Harrison
My last post, "Love You Can't Imagine" ~ in celebration of Valentine's Day (click or scroll down) ~ drew to a close before I was able to incorporate all of the great selections that I was hoping to connect. So I have assembled today's post out of that remaindered material, including a couple of somber sonnets by Edna St. Vincent Millay, and a few sobering thoughts from Anne Lamott. As my father used to say when we had inadvertently left something behind -- a garment for dry cleaning, an overdue library book, a stack of newspapers on trash day -- "Well it's alright to save some over for seed." Over for seed. We weren't even farmers, but how I grew to love my dad's rustic way of saying, "I meant to do that!"

Another little intentional error ~ as in, "I meant to do that" ~ was saving this post, scheduled for the 28th, until today, Wednesday, February 29th! Since the opportunities for celebrating Leap Day are relatively rare and complicated, it would be a shame to let the chance pass by unobserved. Many of the customs and traditions of this every - four - yearly occasion are romantic in nature, providing a most fitting coda to Valentine's Day.

You might recall that, previously, I included Kathryn Harrison's observation, from her article "Connubial Abyss", that love must necessarily acknowledge the reality of death and loss: "Marriage is made, from the start, between two people who are willing to contemplate death together -- to have and to hold, until death do them part. Such contemplation is possible only for those who understand and embrace the boundaries of a life, both temporal and existential."

In her book Grace Eventually, Anne Lamott writes of her struggle to embrace these same boundaries, to come to grips with the sad inevitability "that every person you've loved will die -- many badly, and too young . . . the unbearable truth that all the people you love most will die, maybe in painful circumstances." Thinking of her son, she is filled with anguish but also acceptance: "I knew deep down that life can be a wretched business, and no one, not even Sam, gets out alive" (59, 162, 193).

A Tale from the Decameron ** painting here & above by English Pre-Raphaelite,
John William Waterhouse (1849 - 1917)
[See also: "To See A Fine Picture"]
Like Harrison and Lamott, Edna St. Vincent Millay blends romance and cynicism. She knows what love is and what it isn't. "It is not meat nor drink," but it is enough to hold death at arm's length. It is the memory of sharing with another, a memory worth more to the poet than food or peace:

Love is not all: It is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain,
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
and rise and sink and rise and sink again.
Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
even as I speak, for lack of love alone.

It well may be that in a difficult hour,
pinned down by pain and moaning for release
or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It may well be. I do not think I would.
~ from Fatal Interview

Detail from Primavera by Sandro Botticelli, 1445 - 1510
As in Botticelli's allegory of spring, Love is often painted blind. In the following sonnet, however, it is the lover deprived of love who travels blindly. Rather than a plump little blind - folded cupid, Love is described by Millay as "the eyes of day," "charity," "a lamp," a candle with a wick. The narrator testifies that she would never be the one to put out the eyes of Love or abandon him along the roadside. She is too well aware that human endeavor is dependent upon the light of love, that even "the torn ray / Of the least kind" is better than no love at all.

The poet is the champion of love, "however brief," however distressed, ill - timed, or "ill - trimmed." Without the light of love, it is the Poet, not Love, who is rendered blind, scuffling "in utter dark" tapping the way before her . . .

When did I ever deny, though this was fleeting,
That this was love? When did I ever, I say,
With iron thumb put out the eyes of day
In this cold world where charity lies bleating
Under a thorn, and none to give him greeting,
And all that lights endeavor on its way
Is the teased lamp of loving, the torn ray
Of the least kind, the most clandestine meeting?

As God's my judge, I do cry holy, holy,
Upon the name of love however brief,
For want of whose ill-trimmed, aspiring wick
More days than one I have gone forward slowly
In utter dark, scuffling the drifted leaf,
Tapping the road before me with a stick.
~ from Huntsman, What Quarry?

Cupid & Psycheby Antonio Canova, 1757 - 1822

"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind;
And therefore is wing'd Cupid painted blind."
~A Midsummer Night's Dream~
Act I, scene i
SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Wednesday, March 14th {or thereabouts}

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com