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Mondays With Muddy

23 Monday Jan 2017

Posted by emilypageart in Uncategorized

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Beatrice Allen Page, Beatrice Page, future, journaling, Landscape with Figures, Mondays with Muddy, unpublished manuscript, writing

Here is the second to last excerpt from Beatrice Allen Page’s unpublished manuscript, Landscape With Figures:

“People are beginning to pack up and get ready to leave right after Labor Day. The Rosenblums have already gone. Three or four other people said goodbye to me on the beach this afternoon. In another few days I shall be virtually alone again. This is where I came in – but with what a difference! I shall miss the friends I’ve made but I find I no longer dread being alone.

It seems that without quite knowing when or how it came about, I have decided to stay, at least for the time being. And after that? After that all I can say is what I heard someone say quite seriously on the radio a few nights ago: ‘The future lies ahead.’

Indubitably!”

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Mondays With Muddy

16 Monday Jan 2017

Posted by emilypageart in MOndays with Muddy, Uncategorized

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Beatrice Allen Page, Beatrice Page, constellations, journaling, Landscape with Figures, Mondays with Muddy, stars, unpublished manuscript, writing

We’re nearing the end of my grandmother’s unpublished manuscript. I’m still figuring out what comes next, though I did stumble across some more of her writing that I may choose to post once I’ve had a chance to review it. For now though, here is the next installment from Beatrice Allen Page’s Landscape With Figures:

“The stars are usually still shining – at lest some of them – when I wake up in the early morning now. The sun doesn’t come up until after six o’clock.

I used to wonder how the Greeks decided which particular stars to pick out and arrange in constellations. Now I think I understand; they did it either early in the evening or just before dawn when only the brightest stars were visible to choose from. Orion, for instance, stands out vividly about the time I’m sitting up in bed to drink my coffee.

I have made another observation: the coming of the day does not diminish the brightness of the stars, it diminishes their size. They don’t gradually fade out of sight, they gradually grow smaller as if they were withdrawing into their greater remoteness, until they disappear beyond the range of sight.”

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Mondays With Muddy

09 Monday Jan 2017

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Beatrice Allen Page, Beatrice Page, crickets, journaling, Landscape with Figures, Mondays with Muddy, unpublished manuscript, writing

This is the next excerpt from Beatrice Allen Page’s unpublished manuscript, Landscape With Figures:

“Some time in the small hours of the night I woke up from a deep sleep. Through the windows, which I always leave with the shades up, I could see a star-filled sky. On an impulse I got up, flung on a robe and slippers and walked down to the middle of the field, where I could get an unobstructed view. It was one of those nights when the stars are exceptionally bright, and there was no sound except the gentle swash of waves on the shore, a whisper of wind, and the incessant fiddling of the field crickets.

I thought of the Psalmist, wakeful at night, burdened with the cares of a kingdom, weary from battle, stepping out of his tent, looking up at the sky, and suddenly released and awed: ‘When I consider thy heavens…the moon and the stars…’ I thought of the Babylonians studying the stars to learn their destiny, and the ancient Greeks immortalizing their mythological heroes in them. I thought of the Mayans keeping watch in their observatories to make their extraordinary calculations. I thought of all the unknown millions of men and women who have stood even as I, down through the centuries, gazing at the panorama of stars, listening to the thundering silence beyond the stars, and feeling a mingling of exaltation and fear. And I was glad of those lowly little crickets whose chirping kept the silence and infinitude from being overwhelming.

It was on just such a night of brilliant stars that I used to imagine the word of the Lord coming unto the prophets. I visualized them standing alone in a boundless open space, on top of a mountain or by the sea or most often in the middle of a vast plain, and out of that silent immensity came the revelation. It began perhaps with a shiver down the spine, then visions and words welling up in their minds, and lastly a compelling urge toward utterance.

Last night I wondered if in those awesome moments they, too, were not grateful for the small, humble, down-to-earth crickets making a joyful noise unto the Lord.”

 

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Mondays With Muddy

02 Monday Jan 2017

Posted by emilypageart in MOndays with Muddy, Uncategorized

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Beatrice Allen Page, Beatrice Page, journaling, Mondays with Muddy, the beyond, writing

Here is the next installment of Beatrice Allen Page’s unpublished manuscript, Landscape With Figures:

“I stood on the beach at the edge of the incoming tide, looking out toward the horizon. It was late morning and an onshore wind was just beginning to whip up. The whole ocean came rushing at me in a succession of waves, not threateningly but with the exhilaration of children racing for the fun of it. Each wave, gathering speed and fullness as it rolled nearer the shore, mounted to its culminating incurve and crashed in a shatter of white spray like a burst of laughter. Then as it flung itself upon the sand, it was magically transformed into a lace mantilla. But only for a moment. It was immediately drawn back into the water, leaving just a wavering, foamy fringe that was promptly covered and absorbed by the next wave completing its course.

As always, the multiplicity of rhythms fascinated me. There was a rhythm in the making and breaking of each individual wave. There was a rhythm in the relationship of the waves to one another in their long rush from the horizon, and also in the sidelong border they made along the beach, not breaking simultaneously but in a successive movement, a kind of arpeggio. And underneath it all was the long, slow pulsation of the incoming tide. I began to feel permeated with all the rhythms as if they were inside me as well as outside.

Then for a second, perhaps only a fraction of a second, there came over me once again that haunting sensation that the scene I was looking at was true but it was not the whole truth, that only an invisible veil separated the two and I could almost…almost…see through it. On the other side of it something stirred as imperceptibly as a bird’s intake of breath before the outpouring of song. Once more I stood on figurative tiptoe, holding myself utterly still, fearful that even the beating of my heart might break the spell.

The moment passed, the nebulous glimpse vanished. The actual scene before my eyes seemed even more beautiful than before but the vision of something ‘other’ had eluded me once again by a hair’s breadth, and once again I was left with a feeling of mingled loss and joy, of wordless wonder which gradually faded as subtly as the color fades out of the sky at sundown. Only the memory of the joy I had felt, not the joy itself, was left.

Now as I write this in the evening, I find that I am left with something more than a memory; I am left with a conviction. I no longer feel I must try to explain away those few fleeting ineffable moments in my life as some kind of psychological illusion. I trust these hints and implications of ‘beyonding’ or a ‘within-ness,’ of a Reality beyond reality that cannot be reached by reason or greater knowledge, not be a more-ness of what we already have and are, but only by a moreoever-ness, a quantum jump (to borrow the phrase again) to another orbit of awareness or being.

I could believe that when Thoreau made his famous remark about the person who keeps pace to the beat of a different drum than his companions hear, he was referring not just to a difference in individual temperament or goals, but to that other orbit or dimension, of which most of us, most of the time, are quite unconscious.”

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Mondays With Muddy

05 Monday Sep 2016

Posted by emilypageart in dance, humor, kindness, music, Uncategorized

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Beatrice Allen Page, Beatrice Page, crushes, growing up, journaling, Landscape with Figures, Mondays with Muddy, summer love, unpublished manuscript

This is the next installment of Beatrice Allen Page’s unpublished manuscript, Landscape With Figures. I know this one is longer than normal, but it’s my favorite excerpt from the book. It’s poignant and funny and sweet and sad and glorious, all at once. Enjoy:

At the Prescotts’ cocktail party yesterday their young daughter Tina helped serve the hors d’oeuvres. She is about twelve or thirteen, childhood virtually outgrown but with traces of ‘little-girl-ness’ still lingering in the budding figure and the small, rather triangular face with its slightly tiptilted blue eyes.

I was talking with a good-looking young college student I’d just met, when she approached us. Approached him, I should say, because it was clear that she had no interest in me beyond politely offering me a canape. They obviously knew each other. He greeted her as if he were truly glad to see her, without any adult-to-child condescension; he told her he liked the way she was wearing her hair, and when she moved off toward the next knot of guests he called after her, ‘Don’t disappear till we get a chance to talk, Tina.’

She turned back toward him with a shy smile that seemed to hint at a secret between them, and lifted those kitten-blue eyes to his face for just a second. The expression in them was kittenlike, too – both guileless and sensuous.

The twinkle in the young man’s eyes as he faced me again showed that he had known all along what I had just discovered in the fleeting glance Tina had given him: that she was naively and passionately in love with him. I had seen and felt it with a little shock of recognition; it had reopened a chapter of my own life, long closed and almost forgotten. The sudden uprush of recollections was so vivid that it seemed to me that I could read Tina’s future for the next few months or years on the basis of them. I knew all the exaltation and sweet suffering, the hours of revery and yearning that lay in store for her, and the inbreak of reality that would eventually and inevitably wake her from the lovely and disquieting dream. I knew the confusion that would follow, the groping and growing before she reached some equipoise between the forces tugging at her from different sides. I knew because I, too, had fallen passionately in love with an ‘older man,’ i.e., a young man in his mid-twenties, when I was about Tina’s age. I would happily have died for him – provided, of course, that he was on hand to witness my sacrifice and hold me in his arms as I drew my last quivering breath.

It’s no doubt a common pattern for adolescent girls. Calf love, puppy love, a crush, we call it from a vantage of adulthood and smile indulgently. How can we so easily forget our first ‘serious’ love with all its heights and depths of feeling? Of course we don’t really. We just let it sink out of sight until something like that glance of Tina’s I intercepted pulls it unexpectedly up to the surface again.

There was that summer in my own life when I fell in love with Gavin McCaig. Until then I had never wanted to grown up. I remember wishing on my ninth birthday when I blew out the candles that I could stay that age forever. It seemed to me I had learned a great deal since my eighth birthday and so I was glad to be nine. Beyond that, however, I saw no need to grow; at nine I knew enough. Not in the sense of bookish knowledge, but in the wisdom that comes simply from having lived. Or, to express what I felt a little more accurately perhaps, it was as if I had not been fully awake at eight years old but at nine I was. Then when I reached ten, it seemed to me I had not been fully awake at nine, but now at ten I certainly was, and I wanted to stop right there.

I hated the idea of being an adult because I felt, without being able to put it into words clearly, that grown-ups had to carry heavy responsibilities which literally weighted them down like a physical burden. They could no longer run, skip, play hopscotch, jump rope or even lie down on a grassy bank and roll to the bottom. In addition, they were constrained by all manner of senseless rules and customs. They had to keep their hands and faces clean and their clothes neat all the time. They couldn’t walk along the street singing or eating a peanut butter sandwich. They couldn’t go up to someone on the beach they’d never met and say, ‘What’s your name?’ They had to wait to be introduced and then they had to make polite conversation instead of asking things they really wanted to know such as: ‘How’d you get that little scar over your eyebrow?’ or ‘Have you ever seen kittens being born?’ or ‘What would you do if you woke up and found a burglar in your room?’

There was one great disadvantage to being a child and that, of course, was having to obey and conform to the irksome dictates of parents. Meals had to be eaten at the same time every day even if you weren’t hungry or wanted to go on readying a book. You had to go to bed at the same time every night even though you weren’t sleepy. The only advantage I could see to growing up was that I would be free of all these parental restrictions. Yet I was afraid that as a grown-up I, too, might get caught in a routine similar to theirs, hemmed in on all sides by responsibilities and the established way of doing things. It was preferable to hang on to childhood as long as possible.

I was still trying to hang on, although knowing I was waging a losing battle, when Gavin McCaig began to play a part in my life, or in my imagination at least. Then suddenly I couldn’t wait to grow up. Instead of looking upon my developing figure with dismay, I wondered impatiently how long it would take before adults would accept me as a grown-up woman.

Gavin bore little resemblance to his mother, of whom I was so fond, either mentally or temperamentally. He was a squarish, solid-looking young man – the epitome of masculine strength it seemed to me – whose principal interests were sports and jazz. He was ‘taking the summer off,’ ‘deciding what he wanted to do.’ He may have been something of  a ne’er-do-well but he had more than his share of what would be called ‘charisma’ today.

He was a friend of my parents, like his mother, but the difference in our ages seemed to me no barrier to romance. He was the first man who ever stood up when I entered the room, and when he shook hands it was with a firm handclasp, a warm smile and a direct look which I chose to interpret as having special significance for me. When he dropped in on my parents I was certain he had really come to see me. I imagined he was secretly in love with me but could not speak of it because I was admittedly young for marriage and one did have to observe the conventions. I was sure, however, that he was just biding his time and I fabricated endless daydreams of the momentous day or night when he would declare himself.

He certainly must have known I was in love with him. I conveyed it to him quite intentionally by meaningful glances, by letting my hand linger in his when we shook hands (which I saw to it we did not only on every occasion of our meeting but of our parting as well), by ‘accidental’ brushing of my shoulder against his arm. Be it forever to his credit that he never betrayed his amusement to me or as far as I know to anyone else.

I continued to go on bird walks with his mother. Being friends with her gave me a good excuse to drop in a the McCaig house on the pretext of having come to see her. Sometimes I was lucky and found Gavin there but the house was too full of people for us every to be alone. I assumed this disappointed him as much as it did me.

One evening toward the end of summer my parents went to see friends next door. I was up in my room ostensibly reading but actually scrutinizing my face in the mirror in the hope of finding I looked older than I had at the beginning of the summer. On my bureau was a vase of snapdragons from Mrs. McCaig’s garden, which she had given me, and the faint breeze coming in the open windows would waft up the scent of them in little tufts. It is a fragrance that will forever associated in my mind with Mrs. McCaig, but more with her son Gavin (because I pretended that he had given them to me) and the bliss of my newfound love – and with a certain sadness, too, because before that evening was over I was to take my first tentative step out of the wold of childhood and would never be able to enter it wholeheartedly again.

I had never gone to the McCaig’s house in the evening. It suddenly occurred to me I could slip over there and back before my parents got home. It was already dark but still early. I could pretend I had come to borrow a bird book from Mrs. McCaig. As I approached the house I could hear someone – and I knew it w as Gavin – pounding out ‘Limehouse Blues’ on the old upright piano. Laughter and singing and chatter floated out on the soft air. Gavin hardly paused between pieces. Jazz has three predominant moods: sensual, melancholy and exuberant. Though I could not have named them then, I was tossed from one to another as I stood listening under the willow tree for several minutes before I could muster up my courage to enter the house.

When I finally did go in and stand just inside the door tentatively, Gavin looked up with his cordial smile, his eyes squinting from the smoke floating up from the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, and waved me a welcome. All Mrs. McCaig’s children radiated hospitality, even to a child, and someone indicated a chair and invited me to sit down. I did, shyly, half hiding in the shadows.

The music went on. Gavin played by ear and ‘could play anything.’ My feet began to tap on the floor; he cause my eye with an understanding look that urged me on, and suddenly I flung off my self-consciousness and was out in the middle of the room, dancing with wholehearted abandon, imitating dances I’d sen in the movies and throwing in a few innovations of my own. For perhaps a minute and a half I was the center of all eyes. It was a taste of glory I had never before experienced. I heard one of Gavin’s brothers say, ‘The kid can really dance!’ and my idol nodded in agreement. My cup was too full to contain. I turned and darted out the door with the applause still sounding in my ears. My heart was pounding not with exertion but with excitement. I was elated, distracted, miserable altogether and I could not have said whether what I felt was closer to anguish or joy.

Weaving a little dizzily I wandered around to the other side of the house. Here the sound of the music and voices was muted, and the night filled with the sound of crickets and katydids. Instead of the smell of cigarette smoke and whisky, the soft scents of the garden hung on the air, and overhead millions of stars floated in a dark bowl. Mrs. McCaig was sitting on a stone bench in the garden. She did not speak but I knew she had seen me and was silently inviting me to join her. I sat down beside her and for just a moment she laid her hand upon mine in what I took to be a gesture of greeting but which I suspect ow was a gesture of farewell because she sensed I was no longer the same child who had tagged along on her nature walks.

We sat in silence for awhile, and the night and her quiet presence began to calm me down, to fill me with a sadness and a longing which I could not then have explained. After awhile she began pointing out various constellations to me: Cassiopeia, Cygnus, the Pleiades. Paradoxically, while she usually had a somewhat detached, impersonal attitude toward people and things close at hand, she had a familiar attitude toward the distant. It was as if she could hold out her hand and say, ‘Come,’ and a star would drop into it and nestle there.

I felt as if I were being torn apart. I wanted on the one hand to linger as long as possible in the realm of the simple, sensuous delight in nature, of freedom from adult responsibility, in the domain which Mrs. McCaig shared with me; on the other, to step forward into a new world of parties and romantic excitement, of music and dancing, of moonlight sails with my true love, or driving around in a convertible with my hair blowing in the wind – Gavin’s world. I could not bear to give up the one I’d explored with Mrs. McCaig; neither could I bear to let go the one I’d just briefly set foot in.

Perhaps we really never make decisions. They are made for us – by events, by time, by obscure motives and processes within ourselves. Summer came to an end and we went our separate ways, back to the cities where we lived in the winter. As the weeks passed, it was not the nature walks with Mrs. McCaig which I missed. It was Gavin I longed for. Once he called my parents long-distance. They were out and I enjoyed the bliss of having him all to myself on the telephone. Small wonder I imagined that I was the one he really wanted to talk with, because with his usual kindness, and no doubt secret amusement, he let me keep him on the phone for almost ten minutes.

I could not sleep all night for joy. I went over every word of our conversation, injecting cryptic meanings into the most obvious remarks. I was more certain then ever that my love was reciprocated and that he was just biding his time until I was old enough so that my parents would accept the situation. So strongly did his image possess my mind that one winter evening when a car drew up in our driveway and a man got out and Mother wondered who it could be, I, looking out the window and nearly suffocating with rapture said, trying to sound casual, ‘Why, it looks like Gavin McCaig.’

But it wasn’t. Suddenly I was frightened. If my mind could play such tricks on my that I could mistake a man who bore no resemblance whatsoever to the one I loved…I sensed danger. I felt a need to right myself, to shake myself out of the dream world which had become so real to me. And with that effort there came with devastating clarity the realization of the truth: I was still a little girl in Gavin’s eyes, he was not in love with me and never had been, and I was a victim of my own deluded wishes.

When we came back to Stoneleigh the following summer, the McCaigs had not arrived. I found myself suddenly caught up in the social activities of my contemporaries. I sailed; I went to the well-chaperoned Yacth Club dances; I had hot, hushed conversations about boys with my girlfriends.

The days passed and the McCaigs did not return. I was secretly relieved and at the same time inexplicably a little sad when I heard their house was up for sale. I never saw any of them again.”

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Mondays With Muddy

22 Monday Aug 2016

Posted by emilypageart in MOndays with Muddy, Uncategorized, writing

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Beatrice Allen Page, Beatrice Page, environment, journaling, Landscape with Figures, Mondays with Muddy, unpublished manuscript

This is the next installment of Beatrice Allen Page’s unpublished manuscript, Landscape With Figures:

“Unable to throw off a mood of inexplicable sadness all morning. I kept feeling as if someone I loved had just died. Not until early this afternoon when I was sitting down on the ledges did I realize it was the anniversary of Father’s death. Curious how you remember year after year in some buried layer of your mind certain anniversaries which the top of you mind has forgotten.

Then I recalled that at the time of his death, when I had returned here for a few days, I had gone by myself for an hour and had sat in that selfsame spot on the ledges. And I remembered how I had found a measure of tranquility and a consolation of sorts in thinking how long that rocky coats had endured. It was essentially the same as when the last glacier receded from it tens of thousands of years ago: a little erosion by the waves, a little chipping off by winter’s frost, but basically unchanged. It seemed to me it would endure for as long or longer in the future, a background against which untold numbers of individuals might appear briefly even as I, until the universe came to a natural end in fire or ice at some inconceivably remote date. That day I had felt one could almost (but not quite) learn to accept death as the end of the individual without undue agony of mind since the miracle of life itself in all its manifestations would go on virtually forever.

This morning as I sat gazing out over the calm sea, I tried to recapture that pensive mood but instead I became incensed as my thoughts turned toward what we are doing to our world. Even if we don’t bring it to an abrupt and violent end my bombs, we may do it just as effectively by gradual devastation: polluting our rivers and lakes with chemicals and waste materials, poisoning the air we breathe with noxious fumes, contaminating our food either directly or indirectly with pesticides, cutting down forests and draining swamps that support much of our wildlife in order to build shopping centers and airstrips, bludgeoning baby seals to make high-fashion coats out of their skins…

The list goes on and one, as everybody knows, and thank God more and more voices have been raised in warning and outrage during the past few years. At long last it’s being realized that the relationship between humankind and the environment is a matter of health and therefore of life or death. At least some effort is being made to halt the destruction.

But there are those who warn that without a greater effort it will soon be too late. There are those who say it is already too late.

What a paradox that we are all looking for more abundant life in one way or another and at the same time seemingly doing our level best to destroy what life we have.

I came back to the house in a rage and wrote another batch of protest letters to various powers that be.”

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Mondays With Muddy

15 Monday Aug 2016

Posted by emilypageart in MOndays with Muddy, music, Uncategorized

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Beatrice Allen Page, Beatrice Page, crickets, journaling, Landscape with Figures, Mondays with Muddy, unpublished manuscript, writing

For anyone new to the blog, every Monday, I post an excerpt from a manuscript that my grandmother, who I called Muddy, left me when she died. She was a published author and poet, but was unable to get this manuscript published because it wasn’t “commercial enough.” I’ve been posting a bit of it each week so that it can finally be out there for the world to read. So, here is the next installment of Beatrice Allen Page’s unpublished manuscript, Landscape with Figures:

“Walked up to the top of the hill overlooking the harbor early this morning. The cumbersome dredger, squat and ugly as a sculpin, that has been deepening the harbor was being ignominiously towed away by a little boat not even half its size, like a dead moth being dragged off by an ant.

The little sailboats swung gently at their moorings and the sun sent dazzling streaks of light gliding up and down their varnished masts. Made me think of those toys we used to have: little monkeys that shinnied up sticks and slid down again.

So many of these August days begin this way in almost utter calm with the ocean smooth and shiny as pale blue satin. I’ve learned, though, that these serene mornings usually develop a predictable pattern. After awhile you notice the water is no longer sleek but has become slightly wimpled and there is a mild stirring and rustling in the trees. The breeze will gradually develop more confidence in its own strength until by mid-afternoon it will be teasing the pines, playfully stroking their needles the wrong way so that you almost expect to see sparks fly out. It will rough up the sea with whitecaps, and when the boats come past the Point, their sails will be laid slantwise.

If you walk along the harbor road facing into the sun and with the wind behind you, the long green ribbons of beach grass become disembodied: all you can see are millions of slivers of light rippling off into the distance.

The wind usually dies down about the same time the sun goes down, and the night becomes tranquil with hardly more than the hint of a breeze. Last evening I walked up the road a little way before going to bed. The crickets were fiddling away to a fare-thee-well on either side of the road. They sounded as if they were all playing together, perfectly synchronized in a trochaic meter like Pe-ter-Pe-ter-Pump-kin-eat-er.

There was one exception, however, who just couldn’t get with it. He never quite got the beat. After several attempts he gave up and fell silent. He was not a member of either group; he was along, somewhere very close to where I was standing. Had he been ostracized for ruining the ensemble, I wonder? Or had he chosen to remain aloof, perhaps in his pride looking upon himself as a soloist, and then to his humiliation found out he wasn’t that good? And had he then come to the resentful decision that if he couldn’t fiddle better and louder than anyone, he wouldn’t fiddle at all?”

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Mondays With Muddy

08 Monday Aug 2016

Posted by emilypageart in MOndays with Muddy, music, Uncategorized

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Beatrice Allen Page, Beatrice Page, cello, journaling, Landscape with Figures, music, unpublished manuscript, writing

This is the next excerpt from Beatrice Allen Page’s unpublished manuscript, Landscape With Figures:

“I hear that the doctor from St. Louis – Rosenblum is his name – is himself the one who plays the cello. It must be more than a casual avocation with him because he takes it so seriously. I can set my clock by him. He begins his practicing promptly at eight o’clock and continues until ten o’clock. He works another two hours from three to five.

I find myself listening eagerly for those first tentative strokes of the bow across the strings as if he were apprehensive of releasing disharmony, as perhaps he is. Once the instrument is tuned and the danger is past, there follows a moment of silence which makes me think of the brief, suspenseful pause after the conductor raises his baton, a focusing of every ounce of energy and attention. Then the first note sounds as he beings his technical exercises, slowly at first and it seems to me cautiously (but not timidly) and tenderly like a man beginning to make love to a very shy girl. Tempo and confidence increase, however, as the ‘girl’ becomes more responsive.

After an hour spent on technique, he begins working on repertoire. Not being knowledgeable about music, I seldom recognize the composer, let alone the composition, but that doesn’t detract from the cello’s eloquence. Sometimes the notes tumble forth with a bubbling vivacity as if the instrument were laughing. Sometimes they are torn out in anguish, deep and somber, as if it were trying to restrain sobs. It protests, it rages, it rejoices, it consoles. And occasionally it sounds full of self-doubts and questionings without hope of ever finding the answers.

Even when he plays the same phrase over and over in an effort to get it just right, it never gets on my nerves. I like that striving for perfection that characterizes the real artists – the way, for instance, a conductor rehearses his men over and over on one passage until he has ‘moulded’ it to his complete satisfaction.

I suddenly recall that lovely young harpist (I wonder why harpists are usually women and almost always beautiful) from the Indianapolis Symphony years ago telling me how she could not get the exact nuance the conductor wanted in one phrase, and how she went home and thought about it and thought about it until she could hear and feel inside herself the precise way it was meant to be. When she played it at the performance – and here, in telling me about it, she made a very delicate semicircular motion with one hand, a motion that carried through her shoulders and neck and head with a barely perceptible undulation – when she played it at the performance, she and the conductor exchanged  fleeting glance that said: ‘That was it.’

…Later. Had my first glimpse of the doctor half an hour ago over in the fish market. I heard someone say ‘Dr. Rosenblum’ and I looked up quickly. He was just leaving and I had only a glimpse of a rather short, stocky man with an abundance of iron-gray hair and brown eyes magnified behind thick lenses.”

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Mondays With Muddy

01 Monday Aug 2016

Posted by emilypageart in MOndays with Muddy, Uncategorized

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Beatrice Allen Page, Beatrice Page, journaling, Landscape with Figures, unpublished manuscript, writing

This is the next installment from Beatrice Allen Page’s unpublished manuscript, Landscape With Figures:

“Miscellaneous reflections on people’s attitudes toward one another:

  • If you respect and stand somewhat in awe of science, you describe the scientist as brilliant, dedicated, self-disciplined, amusingly absentminded about mundane affairs, a major hope of our civilization. If you mistrust science, you describe the scientist as coldly intellectual, ruthless, irritatingly absentminded about practical affairs, and a threat to civilization.
  • If you admire and stand somewhat in awe of art, you describe the artist as sensitive, passionate, agonized, spontaneous, original, amoral, appealingly childlike. If you have no interest in art, you describe the artist as touchy, lecherous, self-pitying, irresponsible, eccentric, immoral, and childish.
  • People long for saints. The public wants the doctor, for instance, to conform to an image they have created of the selfless physician going about on his errands of healing, a fumble servant of mankind, utterly indifferent to money, comfort, or any aspect of his own personal life. I suspect this is the basic reason the medical profession has come in for some much criticism in the past few years: it hasn’t conformed to the false image.
  • Most of us don’t make an objective appraisal of a person and then react to him or her emotionally on the basis of that appraisal. We react first and then find reasons to support or explain our reaction. Take falling in love; we don’t tally up all the items that please us and then decide to fall in love – we fall in love and then find all the reasons for it, e.g., he is so understanding, has such a marvelous sense of humor, so much integrity, etc.
  • Similarly, we interpret a person’s actions according to how we feel about him. If we love him, we put the best possible interpretations on everything he says and does. If we don’t like him or trust him, we see cause for censure in everything he says or does.
  • Theoretically, to understand is to forgive. In my experience it doesn’t always work. I think of S., a man with wonderful qualities of mind and heart but one who became at times scathingly sarcastic, inflicting deep wounds in others. I admired him for his good points and tried to forgive his lapses into cruelty by understanding him. I knew the story of his life and that he himself had been subjected to cruel treatment. But try as hard as I could to feel genuine compassion for him, I could never get over my animosity. Then one day I realized my antipathy had little to do with his sarcasm. It was all based on a little gesture of his: in conversation when he thought he had scored a brilliant point or stated something unusually well, he pursed his lips like a child expecting a kiss. It was this incongruous expression on the face of a grown man which I could not bear.
  • I’ve often noticed that people divorce their mates for the very reason they married them. I think of A., who liked to date actresses. He was drawn to what he called ‘dramatic personalities.’ Finally he married one. After a year he asked for a divorce, accusing her of being ‘theatrical.’ I think of M., who married a girl twenty years younger than he and spoke proudly of his ‘child bride.’ It was primarily her dewy-eyed naivete that he found appealing. After awhile her ‘childishness’ got on his nerves. Then there was my friend C., who was attracted to a man for his ‘boyish charm,’ only to find out later she was stuck with being a mother to him. And T., who married a man who ‘had more sex appeal than any man she’d ever met in her life’ – and soon discovered he was not averse to exercising that sex appeal on other women. For her second husband she chose a man for his ‘solid, dependable qualities,’ but somehow after awhile his solidity turned into stolidity.
  • I sometimes think everyone should throw away his first three marriages as simply practice exercises. Perhaps by the time both partners got to the fourth, they’d have learned how to create a really good union. On the other hand, watching many a couple break up, I’ve often wondered if both partners had really thrown themselves wholeheartedly into trying to solve the problems, the marriage might not have been richer in the long run for the difficulties surmounted. I’t’s something like writing a story, I suppose. You have to decide whether the story (or the marriage) is a hopeless failure and should be discarded or whether it’s still in the stage of being a rough draft and can be revised into something worth keeping.”

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Mondays With Muddy

25 Monday Jul 2016

Posted by emilypageart in MOndays with Muddy, Uncategorized

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Beatrice Allen Page, Beatrice Page, journaling, Landscape with Figures, Mondays with Muddy, unpublished manuscript, writing

Here is the next excerpt from my grandmother’s unpublished manuscript. Landscape With Figures by Beatrice Allen Page:

“A full moon last night. I stood on the porch gazing at it and trying to realize that men have actually walked on it. I find it almost impossible to believe that a human being had actually been way up there in the sky on that lifeless planet.

Then I recalled what Jan said once: ‘How can we be so sure there’s no life on the moon? Maybe there’s a form of life outside our range of perception.’

Oddly, I almost find it easier to believe that than to believe human beings like myself ever landed on a planet. From Jan’s far-fetched supposition, its an easy step to believing there may be other forms of life, other beings, on our planet of whom we are unaware because our receiving apparatus can’t be tuned in on a channel that would make them visible.

As I was letting my mind play with these fanciful notions, the stillness of the evening was ever so slightly roughed up by a little rasping sound, something like a soft hiss. It came from the pines beside the house. I turned to look, and there on a bare branch of the dead tree I’ve been meaning to have cut down, sat a small owl silhouetted against the moon as if it were posing for a calendar picture. I don’t know my owls very well but I guessed from its impatient behavior – a restless twisting from side to side as it uttered its persistent, rasping demand – that it was a baby.

A few minutes later, the mother bird, no bigger than her child but with different plumage (much more white in it) flew out of nowhere with that silent glide of owls, and fed him. She sat beside him for awhile, and every so often swooped off into the darkness and returned presently with another tidbit of something for him. I wondered that his irritable demand for food didn’t get on her nerves. If it did, she didn’t show it.

Once she uttered a call vaguely suggestive of a mourning dove but without any inflection, just a monotonous blowing out of one round note after another: too-too-too-too… Presently she flew off and did not return.

After watching her impatient child for awhile longer I went inside, pored over my bird books and tentatively decided it was a saw-whet owl. Then I went out on the porch and turned a flashlight on it, which confirmed my identification: small, without ear-tufts, chocolate brown in color with white ‘eyebrows.’ It stared into the beam of light for a moment or two with an expression of mild surprise but no alarm, then turned its head away in seeming boredom and resumed that odd little sibilant noise.

I waited for some time for the mother to come back. She did not, and I finally went to bed. Before I feel asleep, I could hear her from the distance uttering her too-too-too-too-too… Was it an admonishment to her offspring to be quiet, a promise that food was coming, or just a maternal reassurance? One of my bird books said that saw-whet owls ‘sing’ only in the late winter and early spring. If that is true, that mother owl last night must have had her seasons mixed up.”

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