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Mondays With Muddy

18 Monday Jul 2016

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This is the next installment of Beatrice Allen Page’s unpublished manuscript, Landscape With Figures:

“The outgoing tide left a great abundance of sand dollars strewn on the beach, which happens only occasionally – probably something to do with the storm.

Four little girls, one carrying a small basket, one an empty coffee can, and the others paper bags, were eagerly collecting them.

I met Mr. K giving his dog a run and as we walked on up the beach together, he remarked that he was certain there was a fortune to be made in shells if one could figure out a way to use them in some really practical way, not just some piddling thing like making jewelry.

‘With all the millions of shells lying on beaches all over the world, free for the taking…’ and all the time he was talking, he was playing with one of the sand dollars, tossing it lightly on the palm of his hand as one might a coin. And I saw in his eyes a reflection of what he saw as he looked at the shell: billions and billions of silver dollars. One might have known that Mr. K is a successful businessman.

Later in the day I passed the four little girls sitting on a doorstep busily painting their shells with water colors. There was a line of completed ones lined up on the porch railing. They called me to see them, frankly pleased with their handiwork. They had brought out the petal-lined pattern on the shell by filling in the five ‘petals’ with colors that stood out from the background.

‘Don’t you think they’re artistic?’ one of the asked me, obviously deriving as much delight from her accomplishment as her great-grandmother may have derived from painting china.

I agreed and waited her her to inform me they were for sale. I did all the youngsters an injustice – none of them had any such mercenary motive. Their pleasure was purely aesthetic.

I got to thinking as I walked on about the different attitudes people take to simple, everyday objects like seashells. A scientist would approach a shell, if he’d never seen one before, with great curiosity. He’d want to know what substance it was made of, what was its purpose, what determined it shape, what kind of environment it was found in, where it fitted into the scale of evolution – in short, all the facts that could be known about it. Increase of knowledge would be his principal goal.

The artist, on the contrary, would appreciate the shells simply for the design, the form, the color, the texture. It would not bother him too much to remain in abysmal ignorance, for instance, of what a shell is made of.

The collector would look only for rare and perfect species, the fascination for him lying chiefly in the challenge of the quest.

To the poet, a shell would very likely be a raw material for a metaphor. And similarly a mystic might see a shell as a symbol – as the scallop shell, I believe, is considered a symbol of spiritual pilgrimage, although I have no idea why.

One could go on at some length with examples of how different temperaments look at the world. No wonder individuals and nations have trouble in communicating.”

Mondays With Muddy

11 Monday Jul 2016

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

“When I went to bed last night the sky clouded over and a strong, humid wind had sprung up. It blew harder as the night wore on and by four a.m. had worked itself up to a gale velocity (as I learned from the radio weather report this morning) with occasional gusts that were much higher.

It had a low-pitched, resonant hum, that rose at intervals to a high whine – the kind of sound I always imagined was meant by ‘the singing in the shrouds’ in the days of real sailing vessels. Then would come a sudden independent gust hurling itself against the house with a ferocious roar. And tossed into the medley capriciously was a variety of abrupt shrieks and whistles and occasionally what sounded like a couple of cats making passes at each other.

The hammock on the porch was thumping against the house and I could hear the light chairs sliding around. Regretfully I remembered my blue bowl of roses out there on the small table and dreaded to hear them smashed; but by then a hard, slanting rain was coming down and I had no desire to go out and get soaked. However, when I heard the unmistakable sound of a chair striking against glass, I decided it was better to get wet than have a window broken.

I went down and put on a raincoat, got the front door open and closed again without its being blown off the hinges, tied the hammock to the porch railing, turned over the furniture that hadn’t already been upset, and rescued the bowl of flowers. Before I got through I was almost ready to order the lifeboats lowered. I felt and looked half-drowned.

Shortly after daybreak the rain stopped and the wind tapered off considerably but has continued to blow fairly hard all day under the lowering sky. It goes through the pines in great heaving sighs. That’s another word we need – a word to describe that sound, a soft, porous word that breathes. If ‘soughing’ didn’t sound affectedly poetic and if it were pronounced to rhyme with ‘coughing,’ it would come close. But on checking it, I find that it’s pronounced to rhyme with ‘roughing’ or ‘ploughing,’ so it won’t do at all.

Speaking of words, why has ‘tempest’ fallen into desuetude except in the metaphorical sense of emotional tumult? We have storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, cyclones, typhoons, blizzards and other upheavals in weather, but tempests occur only in teapots and Shakespeare.”

Mondays With Muddy

04 Monday Jul 2016

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

“When I opened my eyes this morning a softly glowing red sun had apparently just been hung in the pine trees like a Japanese lantern. It appeared to get caught in a gentle updraft, however, that floated it slowly up through the trees and kindled the glow to ever greater intensity until it burst into flame and I had to turn my eyes away.

Since I’ve been here and have fallen into the habit of waking up early without any compulsion to get going, I find I think in a different way. I’ve discovered that it’s as much a mistake when you first wake up to shift your mind directly into high speed as it is to try to shift directly from neutral into third in a car with a manual gear shift. It’s better to let the mind idle for a moment or two, then back slowly out of your dreams with a glance at them to see if there’s anything you should take with you, then turn onto the road and get going gradually. The thing that’s so nice about starting out so early is that there’s no traffic at that hour.

To drop the analogy, perhaps it would be more accurate to say not that I think in a different way but that instead of thinking, I feel as if my mind were being thought through, as ears are heard through. There is no effort involved, no scowling concentration. It i s definitely not a passive daydreaming, however, in which you abandon yourself to undirected mind-drifting. To try another analogy, it’s more like sitting very still, relaxed but attentive in a deep forest, waiting and hoping to hear a hermit thrush.

Daydreaming takes place on a superficial layer of consciousness. The kind of spontaneous thoughts I’m talking about well up from a much deeper level, which explains why they surprise you: you didn’t suspect they were there. I’d like to appropriate George Fox’s word and call them ‘opening’ but that would sound pretentious. His openings were on a deeply spiritual level, glimpses of impersonal truth, relevant to humankind as a whole. I can’t claim that the ideas and perceptions that come to my mind are either momentous or original. They may be quite simple, even banal to other people, but they have given me certain insights about myself (usually not flattering ones) and about life in general which have meaning and impact for me. The fact that they would not stand up under critical evaluation does not bother me as it would have once. I’m not looking for an intellectual argument or trying to prove anything. It’s pleasant just casually to turn over in my mind whatever I happen to find there. Even though it may be as unexceptional as a periwinkle in a tide pool, it seems to have a vividness, a freshness, that makes me feel more deeply rooted in living, which is not true of the thoughts I squeeze out by force.

There are specific reasons, I’ve decided, why early morning is the ideal time for this kind of activity – or rather, inactivity. In the first place, by getting a head start on the day you escape the sense of haste and pressure and tension that goes with them. And therefore, even though you sacrifice a couple of hours or more of sleep, you feel less tired.

Physical comfort, if not an absolute requisite, is decidedly a help. Comfort means, at least to me, having my feet up and a soft but firm support for the back. So sitting up in bed without being harassed by the thought ‘It’s time to get up’ is conducive to the proper state of mind. (Of course, I could do the same thing at night but I wouldn’t be able to keep awake.)

It’s curious, this relationship between thinking and posture. In a relaxed position and in regard to the kind of thinking I’ve been describing, I feel as if my thoughts were rising slowly up my spinal cord and unfurling like fern fronds inside the base of my skull. (I can’t seem to get away from similes.) If I’m doing something that requires intellectual concentration such as reading a book whose meaning is hard to grasp, I automatically sit at a desk, or not so much sit at it as hunch over it, and it seems to me I can feel my mind throbbing until I sometimes have the uncomfortable sensation that antlers are starting to grow out of my head – and antlers don’t become me as a female.

Not that I think intellectual thinking is an exclusively masculine trait, and intuitive thinking is a strictly feminine one. I believe the type of thinking one prefers is a matter of temperament.

It rather worries me that in our cultural set-up we all feel more or less compelled to drive our minds like automobiles. Some people love to drive, are very skillful drivers and have a good sense of direction. They keep their machines in topnotch condition and never lose control. They get precisely to the place it is important they should get to and by the shortest route. There are, unfortunately, an increasing number of appalling accidents because not everybody is a good driver.

There are some artists who operate this way, who manage to force their work ahead to a specific destination. For them, it is obviously the right method and they utterly scorn ‘waiting for inspiration.’ But it’s too bad that old cliche has come to be used only with belittling intent. From what I have observed of certain dedicated and productive painters and poets and other artists, ‘waiting for inspiration’ is a very difficult discipline. It is preceded by years of hard work and practice in striving to master their medium, and often each new project is preceded by a great deal of more or less laborious brainwork. Yet this is in some ways the easiest phase, I’ve been told by more than a few. The really trying phase comes when they must cease their own  efforts and simply wait for the work to ripen. To force it, they have learned, is to produce a stunted piece of work.

This period of seeming procrastination and shiftlessness has nothing in common with a carefree vacation. It requires a constant receptivity and alertness to catch the moment when it is time to start bringing the work to light, and if the waiting period is long, an almost superhuman patience.

Later. A sailboat just came by the Point, tacking back and forth against a head wind, and I can’t resist one more analogy: there are occasions when the mind should be handled like a sailboat rather than an automobile. You can’t produce a great painting, for instance, without that X factor called inspiration anymore than you can sail a boat without wind. If there is no wind, you are becalmed. You can get out the oars and row, but that is a tedious process and you’ll be exhausted before you get very far; or you can simply wait patiently, hopefully and watchfully for the first stirring of wind. When that moment comes, if you’re not alert, your sail will flap futilely. It is essential to know how to catch the wind in it, to make the most of it while it lasts, and never let it spill out.”

Mondays With Muddy

27 Monday Jun 2016

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

“Unexpected sounds come blowing in my open windows at times. This morning a lively summer wind rising and falling in long streamers carried an intermittent spray of cello notes into the house. They were coming from the Boynton cottage which I hear has been rented to a doctor from St. Louis. I wonder which member of the household plays the cello. Whoever it is has a lovely tone. Not being used to hearing a cello play without accompaniment, and with the wind governing the crescendos and diminuendos and whisking some of the notes out of ear reach, not to mention my musical ignorance, I was not always certain whether he was playing a composition or doing a technical exercise.

At one point it sounds as if he – or the music – were running lightly up a spiral staircase, not all at once but running up several steps, dropping back a few, running up a little higher the next time, dropping back again and so on until he finally reached the top. There was a moment’s pause before he – or it – slid all the way to the bottom on a glissando, if that’s the word. And started over again. It was all done with such ease and buoyancy that I felt as if I, too, were running up and down a spiral staircase on winged feet, and sliding down on an invisible banister.

That was not my only musical experience today. Later, while I was sitting on the porch reading, I heard a chickadee whistle its typical two-note song: a high, clear eighth note followed by a quarter note one tone lower in the scale. He repeated it several times and then suddenly there followed two more notes precisely like the first two except for dropping lower in the scale. Together they fell into the exact rhythm and melody of the first four notes, after the introduction, of Mendelssohn’s Venetian Boat-Song #1, which in times past I used in dance class for body swings.

He sang it over and over and I couldn’t help but feel he was astonished and delighted to hear himself. Then something happened: he somehow lost the knack and could sing only the first pair of notes, which he did repeatedly as if he were trying and hoping to slip into the whole measure again. He never made it and finally he uttered what I interpreted as a twitter of frustration and flew away.

Later the thought occurred to me that perhaps it was not just one bird but two, singing antiphonally. I had never heard of this but searching through the bird books I found one that mentioned the antiphonal singing of chickadees. Odd that I’ve never noticed it before.”

Mondays With Muddy

20 Monday Jun 2016

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

“Dreamed I went shopping and bought a ‘wine-rose’ dress. It was a shade somewhere between the rich ruby of a stained glass window and a rose wine. In accordance with the acceptable illogic of dreams, it seemed perfectly plausible that although the linen-like material was opaque, the color itself was somehow transparent.

While I was waiting for the salesgirl to wrap it up, I began to wonder what had possessed me to buy that dress because apparently I’d had some other color in mind. I looked at the racks of dresses and saw that most of them were that shade. It was obviously the fashionable color.

I began to feel a little resentful that my choice of what I should wear had been determined by the arbitrary decision of the dress designers. Why should they, and interior decorators too, decree what colors should be in vogue at any given season? And why should the public accept their decrees? The more I thought about it, the more unreasonable it seemed. By what law, I asked myself in the dream, should wine-rose be imposed upon the world at this time? The answer flashed into my mind: ‘The world today needs wine-rose.’

Then I woke up and wished I had someone to tell the dream to, because it amused me. I used to keep quiet about what I dreamed because when my generation was growing up, we were given to interpreting dreams according to Freud, not only our own but one another’s – particularly one another’s – accompanied usually by a smirk that conveyed: ‘If you only knew what you’ve revealed about yourself.’

I no longer take the experts, let alone the amateurs, so seriously. I’ve lived long enough to see how theories held as profound and incontrovertible truth – in arts, science, religion, child-rearing and just about every field of thought – change. In the past few years I’ve noticed that even some of Freud’s theories are being rejected or modified by his professional followers. In any case I no longer have any hesitation about revealing my dreams although I do not doubt for a moment that they have meaning, and often one that may easily be interpreted as ‘Freudian,’ meaning usually, sexually.

For instance, over the years I have had a recurring dream that I am trying to identify a bird which I have only glimpsed. I pursue the bird trying to get a clear view. It always just eludes me. I catch a flick of color but am not sure whether it was on a wing or tail; the head emerges clearly from the top of a shrub but by the time I get my binoculars focused, it flies off to a farther tree; I follow after but just as I come within the good viewing range, it drops down out of sight in the tall grass.

Now it is conceivable that this dream shows that I am an unconscious voyeur – or is there a word ‘voyeuse’ for the female? However, when I try to attach that appellation to a sweet, old-fashioned neighbor we once had here, who was still eagerly bird-watching at ninety-four, the theory strikes me as delightfully droll.

Not that I question the sexual symbolism of many dreams. I wonder, though, that the more thought is given to the overtly sexual dream as – at least in some instances – a symbol for something else, much as many of the mystics used the language of passionate love to symbolize their union with God.

Be that as it may, I have gradually developed my own dream vocabulary, limited to be sure, but rooted in actual experience. I have discovered that my bird dream occurs only at times when I am trying to catch hold of and clarify an idea hovering at the back of my mind. In other words, to me a bird represents an idea. (The correlation shows up in language: we speak of a ‘flight of ideas’ or ‘winged thoughts.’) I have also discovered that in my dreams kitten, for instance, usually stand for feelings of affection and tenderness; big cats like lions and tigers represent savagery, wrath or violent emotion of some kind; butterflies, playful or carefree moods.

I think, however, one should tread cautiously in the field of symbols. There is too much tendency to look at something only as a symbol and lose sight of its inherent reality. IT was become a cliche, for instance, to say that a landscape, the ‘good earth,’ is a mother symbol. I’ve no doubt it is. What irritates me mildly is the implication that it is nothing else, and that the desire to live in the country is therefore a ‘regression,’ an unconscious longing for the infantile state of being cosseted by the warm, loving, nourishing, protective mother. If this be so, it then follows that all mature persons prefer to live in a city, having successfully broken their childish ties to ‘Mother.’

One can easily carry this symbolism to the point of travesty. For example, any drilling or ploughing up of the earth is presumably motivated by an unconscious tendency toward incestuous rape.

To get back to last night’s dream. I don’t know where I got the word ‘wine-rose’ or what the word or the color connotes. But as I’ve said before, since I’ve been here I’ve discovered the fun of letting my mind shake loose and play with absurd notions. Therefore, I’ve decided that perhaps the dream meant just what it said: ‘The world today needs wine-rose’ – not only as a symbol (the phrase ‘color of joy’ went through my head as I wrote that) but wine-rose per se. It may be that it, and every other color, has some cryptic significance, like birdsong, in the cosmic scheme of things, which our limited human minds can’t comprehend. It may be that designers and decorators are unknowing channels for these colors to flow through, and when the public goes along with them, we may be conforming not just to fashion but to a natural (or supernatural) law.”

 

Mondays With Muddy

30 Monday May 2016

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

“Walked down to the deserted beach just before dark last evening. It was very quiet. The ocean crept up smoothly as a cat, put a soft paw tentatively on the beach at my feet, and then backed off. I felt as if I were coaxing the tide to come in. Three black-crowned night herons flew silently overhead on their way to their night roost. A couple of lines from Longfellow strayed into my head: ‘The twilight darkens, the curlew calls’ and ‘The little waves with their soft white hands.’ That was all I could remember of the poem except the line that ends each stanza” ‘And the tide rises, the tide falls.’

I never realized before what a wonderful line that is. You feel in it the gradual, inexorable gathering of the tide in its fullness, and then the slow ebb, recurring endlessly through time. How easily the line could have been ruined by the addition or subtraction of just one syllable. Or if Longfellow had taken the ‘And’ that begins the line and inserted it instead between the two clauses, the feeling of the mysterious rise and fall of the tide would have been lost completely in a sort of ball-bouncing chant.

When I got home I pulled the old volume of Longfellow off the shelf, which I hadn’t looked into since my early teens. On the whole I much prefer un-rhymed to rhymed poetry but last night there seemed to me a spontaneity and simplicity about his rhymes that delighted me. And I made an interesting discovery: the phrase ‘reverence for life’ was not originated by Schweitzer. Longfellow said it first in The Poet’s Tale: The Birds of Killingworth, from the Tales of a Wayside Inn. Not that I think Schweitzer consciously appropriated it, but it would be interesting to know whether he thought of it independently or had read it at some time in his life and then forgotten it. For that matter, Longfellow may not have been the first to use it either.

To have an original thought must be even more rare than to make an original phrase. I suspect tat most of us unconsciously plagiarize all the time. We read something that strikes a sympathetic chord, forget it, and then years later it comes back to us as our own idea.”

Mondays With Muddy

09 Monday May 2016

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Welcome to another excerpt from Beatrice Allen Page’s unpublished manuscript, Landscape With Figures:

” The Comptons invited me to go trolling for mackerel with them, a definitely nostalgic experience considering how many times Father used to take us on similar trips.

The sound of a small motorboat idling at the dock, making ready to cast off on a still morning, is one man-made sound I like. I also like its muted, throaty purr while maneuvering slowly out of the quiet harbor among all the boats resting at their moorings above their shimmering upside-down reflections. I even like the sound as we come out into the clear of a couple of brisk snorts like some sea beast getting ready to expend its power, and then the sudden acceleration and the wild, free, exhilarating sensation as we head full charge out to sea and the waves rise up beside the bow in shining arcs and flow back like molten glass with the sun playing through them in tiny lightning flashes.

The ocean was smooth today in the sense that its surface was unbroken but it rolled and billowed gently as if trouble spirits moved restlessly under the water, heaving its smooth surface up into continually shifting knolls. Every once in awhile a particularly restless spirit pushed out of the water and for a second we’d see a hissing line of foam. Once we passed through a school of minnows and the green translucent water was shot through with thousands of tiny silver darts.

It was a delight to relax to the lilt of the boat – the upward rise, the momentary pause and the easy plunge down again into the trough. It becomes a little hypnotic after awhile, of course. You fit yourself to the motion of the boat, which fits itself to the motion of the sea, and eventually you and the boat and the sea begin to merge as a single whole.

Trolling is the one form of fishing I care for, and then only if there are no fish biting. I can understand why some people find it a thrill to haul in a big fish after a tough fight that has involved skill, patience and determination, but it isn’t my kind of fishing. To see a beautiful blue and yellow dolphin, for instance, slammed into a boat and its lovely colors fade with its life is sad. (Be it to my shame I must confess that I have eaten such a dolphin within hours of mourning its death, and enjoyed it.) I’d prefer to catch plastic fish, provided the plastic was disposable. Even that isn’t necessary. I am quite content to move slowly over the water, trailing a line which doesn’t have to be baited with live bait, to feel an occasional nibble just by way of greeting, so to speak, but without actually hooking anything. We trolled back and forth for some time this morning before Stan hauled in a fair-sized mackerel. I hated the sound of it slapping its life out in the tin-lined basket. Although the cover was closed, I could see it in my mind’s eye – the white belly, the green and gray and black striped back, the gold ring around the eye, the spot of blood on the torn jaw.

I was relieved when that turned out to be the sum total of the catch, but had sense enough not to say so to the Comptons, who are ardent fishers.”

Mondays With Muddy

25 Monday Apr 2016

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

“Had to take my car over to town this afternoon and leave it for a tune-up. I rattled back to the village on the ancient green bus and got so absorbed in my fellow passengers I almost missed my stop.

I sat on one of the long sideways seats up front. Opposite me was a big woman, not fat but big-boned and solidly fleshed out, who gave me a haughty look when I got on the bus as if I had no right to be there. On further examination, I concluded that her supercilious look was meant to convey that she did not belong on a bus, that she was not accustomed to public transportation. She was expensively dressed in an ice-blue summer suit with matching hat and immaculate white gloves. I decided her chauffeur had left her stranded somewhere, that she had been unable to get a taxi, and had been forced into the humiliation of taking the bus. She couldn’t have been returning from a luncheon or a social gathering of any kind, else someone would have driven her home. She had probably had an appointment with her doctor to have her blood pressure checked. It had been a little high recently and he was keeping an eye on it. I suspected it had probably gone up higher after she’d come out of his office and not found her car waiting. Had the chauffeur gone off to have a couple of beers with the boys and lost track of the time, I wondered, or gone on an errand for her and had an accident, or given in to a sudden overwhelming impulse to take off for Alaska? Whatever it was, there was no doubt in my mind as I looked at that firmly set face across from me, that he would rue the day.

Next to her sat a man and woman who might have been husband and wife or brother and sister. They resembled each other physically: both were short, both had round faces and rather round dark eyes. There the resemblance ended. The woman made me think of an angry Pekingese; she kept speaking to the man in jerky, emphatic little sentences like a series of short, sharp barks, while scowling all the while. Her eyes didn’t actually bulge but it seemed as if they did. She was what Laurence Sterne would have described as ‘a little fume of  a woman.’

Occasionally the man opened his mouth in some apparently non-committal reply while continuing to stare unseeingly out the window behind my shoulder. I had the feeling he had been cut out of dough with a cookie cutter, and what were supposed to be eyes were really raisins, and what passed for a mouth was a dab of pink frosting. He was all ready for baking, and he would be more appealing once that doughy whiteness had been nicely browned.

There were several other people on the bus whom it amused me to watch and speculate about, but the one who has continued to haunt my mind all evening was the old woman sitting beside me. She had undoubtedly always been small, but with age she had shrunk and withered like a dried apple. Her feet couldn’t reach the floor and dangled a few inches above  it like a child’s. She was wearing a coat in spite of its being a very warm day, and where it fell open at the knees it showed a navy blue silk dress with white polka dots, somewhat soiled, probably because she couldn’t see very well and hadn’t noticed it. Everything else was black: the coat, the straw hate perched on top of her head, the stockings and, of all things, the lace mitts on her hands – the kind that were briefly fashionable years ago with long evening gowns. She must have found them at the Salvation Army shop along with the once elegant but now cracked leather handbag she was clutching. Her short gray hair had been professionally set but not in any modern beauty salon – it was an old-fashioned marcel wave. Perhaps she had a sister who had once been a hairdresser.

Where was she going, or where had she been, ‘all dressed up?’ I suppose it was the predominance of black that made me conclude it was a funeral. It couldn’t have been a close relative who had died; surely she would not have been left to ride a bus all alone in that case. So it was a very distant relative, or an old friend whom she hadn’t seen for years perhaps, or possible someone she had once worked for. And why had she gone to the funeral To pay her respects to the dead? Because she was hungry for human companionship and just wanted a chance to mingle with people? Because she felt a kind of wistful envy of the deceased whose trials were over?

It was hard for me to imagine she had ever known any joy in her life, and I found myself hoping out of all proportion (since after all she was a complete stranger to me) that I was wrong. It seemed so terribly unfair that her life should have been nothing but sorrow and struggle and tribulation. Nor could I figure out why I was so convinced of that.

Presently she fell asleep in spite of the bouncing bus. Her head nodded forward on her chest, revealing a deep cleft in the back of her neck from which sprouted a little tuft of soft hair. For some reason it was that cleft and the two little black-mittened paws in her lap that more than anything made her seem so pathetic and vulnerable. I got off at my stop with a feeling of frustration that there was nothing that I could do.”

Mondays With Muddy

18 Monday Apr 2016

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

“Random notions and observations:

  • Ivory towers are sneered at these days. Actually, they not only give you a more panoramic view of the environment but a different and usually clearer perspective on the people in that environment, as well (perhaps) as a clearer view of oneself. Yes, an ivory tower is delightful as long as you know you can leave it at any time and rejoin the crowded world, but how intolerable to get imprisoned in one.
  • At long last someone has explained to me the meaning of ‘Robin Hood’s barn.’ The ‘barn’ was the great outdoors where he kept his horses. So naturally, to go all around Robin Hood’s barn is to take a very devious route toward a goal or a conclusion.
  • The young wife complains that her husband never notices how she looks. The aging wife counts it one of her blessings that he doesn’t.
  • Why do we speak of the ‘opposite’ sex as if male and female were irreconcilable? Why not the ‘complementary’ sex?
  • The few women I’ve known who do not drive a car are all artists of one kind or another. What is the correlation? A mistrust of things mechanical? Male artists may drive but in my experience they are usually poor drivers.
  • Sometimes when I might look through the window at a great open vista of sea and sky, my gaze is caught and riveted to a flyspeck on the glass.
  • Ann A. told me the other day she has been trying to breed her male Scotch terrier without much success. The vet explained to her that pet dogs who have received a lot of affection are usually not very much interested in mating. The good breeder, i.e., the sexually avid dog is one who lives in a kennel and does not receive much affection. I wonder what the ethologists make of that.
  • Etymological finds for the day: the word ‘muscle’ comes from the Latin musculus meaning ‘little mouse’ (diminutive of mus). When I think of the way a muscle moves under the skin, I am delighted with the aptness of the word.
  • Just after I’d closed the dictionary, my eye was caught by a gray blur of squirrel spiraling up a tree trunk so fast I lost sight of it, as if it had vanished into thin air. For the first time I wondered where the word ‘squirrel’ came from. So, back to the dictionary. The word derives from the Greek skia, ‘a shadow,’ and oura, ‘tail.’ A shadow with a tail! What an apt definition for that little animal!
  • Why are most people who are fond of cats either artists or elderly people who live alone?
  • In some instances hating may be a defense against loving. To love is a risky thing – we become vulnerable to hurts and are called upon to make sacrifices.
  • We often criticize people for having little sympathy for the unhappiness of others. Actually, it’s much easier to feel sad with someone in his misfortune than to rejoice with him in his good fortune. Unless we are very fond of another person, we resent someone’s being happier than we are.
  • There should always be a little madness in our methods.
  • I once knew a woman who stored up grudges as women use to store their home-made preserves. She had made them herself and it was a great satisfaction to go into her mental cupboard and look at the rows of them she’d stacked up. It’s curious that we should take pleasure in nursing a grudge (the phrase expresses our tender attitude). I suppose as long as we concentrate on how spitefully we’ve been used, it keeps our minds off our own malice.
  • Over and over again I have found that when some Bright Idea pops into my head, I come upon the same idea (usually expressed far better) within a few days in something I read in a newspaper or magazine or new book. Is it because certain ideas are loose in the air and are caught by several people at once or because we are alert to an idea which we might have passed over without really taking it in when we first came across it? Or have we already absorbed it unconsciously and then mistake it for our own original observation when it floats to the surface of our minds?
  • So much of the time we thrash about in life trying not to sink. If we’d just relax, perhaps life itself would keep us afloat.”

Mondays With Muddy

28 Monday Mar 2016

Posted by in MOndays with Muddy, Uncategorized, writing

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

“We had another night so utterly still it seemed to me if I tuned my hearing a hair’s breadth higher, I could not only hear the secret, delicate burrowing of a mole among the roots of the trees but the infinitesimal sound of growing made by the roots themselves. Which is, of course, absured.

Nevertheless, I lay in the dark, quiet as the night itself, listening, listening – for what I wasn’t sure. It was not fear that kept me awake this time; it was something more elusive.

Then as I lay there in the silent dark there floated into my mind that anonymous little 16th century poem, one of the most poignant, passionate poems in all English literature:

O westron wind, when wilt thou blow

That the small rain down can rain?

Christ, that my love were in my arm

And I in my bed again!

I’ve never been able to make up my mind whether it was written by a man or a woman. It is a cry that might have been wrenched from the throat of Abelard or torn from the anguished heart of Heloise. In fact, I used to let myself imagine the poem was originally written by one of them in Latin and was somehow found and translated into English centuries later.

I hadn’t thought of the poem for a long time and when the words went through my mind, a wave of sadness swept over me and a moment later I realized I was no longer listening for something beyond audible sound but longing for something beyond defining. I could not have said whether it was for a person, a place, or an experience I’d once had and lost forever or one I might have had but failed to find. It was rather like an unassuageable home-sickness for a country I’d never seen, which is a contradiction, of course.

Was it basically, I wondered, sexual desire manifesting itself directly? It seemed to me that if ‘my love were in my arms,’ the longing might have been eased temporarily, but I had the feeling something deeper or other, was involved – something possible like what the psalmist felt when his soul was ‘thirsting’ for God.

Is there in the core of every human being this longing, this essential loneliness, for something we cannot or will not or dare not specify, which is why we so often avoid silence and prefer noise to drown out our thoughts?

I hope the wind blows tonight so I can sleep.”