My Cheese Pig

Sitting right there on my massive cutting board, tail erect, snout truffle-ready, ears extended, is not a marble pig or a soapstone pig or a pig made out of untinted peppermint candy.

What you see there on my cutting board is a cheese pig. Yes, that's right, a pig made out of cheese.

I came to have a cheese pig because my daughter, travelling in Rome with her father, knows that I prefer cheese to just about anything, that I think pigs are among the more adorable creatures in the animal kingdom and that if she wore all her clothes and put all of her travelling souvenirs, among which was said pig, in her suitcase, she could avoid the hefty Ryanair surcharge for extra weight and bring that pig (and a host of other treats) home to me.

It's an interesting phenomenon when we make edible things look like animate or inanimate objects in order to eat them. One thinks of the various erotic bakeries and their tasty, anatomically-correct cakes or the astounding candy and gingerbread houses that pop up like McMansions around the holiday season.

When I was in seminary I took it into my head to go all Paul McCartney/Michael Jackson/“Ebony and Ivory” inclusive and make cookies using dark brown dough and a lighter dough. I thought that a hand cookie cutter and a foot cookie cutter would be, I don’t know, politically correct and humanitarian. But after hours of rolling and baking and a few glasses of Chardonnay, I looked down and saw a table of disembodied hands and feet. It looked barbaric. I felt like Mr. Kurtz.

But my cheese pig is in a class by itself. I've given some thought to naming him. (Wilbur, maybe?)  And I've given some thought to eating him. Either way, I will treasure him.

Candy Castle at the Red Lion Inn, Stockbridge, Massachusetts

One Must Have a Mind of Winter

A few years back, in some crazy attempt at reconciling myself to my most-hated season, I bought a book of poems call A Mind of Winter: Poems for a Snowy Season. Oh, you know, it had an introduction by Donald Hall and pretty little woodcuts by Thomas Nason, but I began to doubt this tiny tome would ever help me make peace with the extreme cold as soon as I walked in my back door and took it out of the shopping bag. The house was too chilled for the slow-going process of reading poetry. And it was too dark to read at all, meaning why not just pour a glass of Cabernet and watch TV? Except that I've never really known how to turn on my TV. Without Netflix I would be completely pop-culture illiterate.

But as it happens, the next film up in my Netflix queue is "Winter Light." Don't know "Winter Light"? It's a brooding, black-and-white Bergman film from 1963 about a pastor who is a) very cold, b) undergoing a vocational crisis and c) having to deal with parishioners. Why did I put this in my Netflix queue when, apart from the gender of the pastor, I have pretty much lived out this scenario a few times over? I dunno. Because I love Bergman. Because I can't shake the church. Because I've seen the movie before and I can't resist repetition. And because...well, because I think I might have a mind of winter.

Not that I want one. And in case you don't know where the phrase comes from, it's a quote from Wallace Stevens--along with Bergman, another happy-making artist of a man (oh, and I'm being sarcastic about the "happy-making") whose poetry tends to make me think about self-piercing my own ear again (having already done that in my early twenties) or trying to re-read Kierkegaard. If you read Stevens' poem, "The Snow Man," from which the line comes, you do best to ignore the three-line, five stanza structure and read it as it simply should have been written (and would have been, no doubt, if Stevens had written it out-of-doors and in the winter).

Read that way, here's what you get:
        One must have a mind of winter.....
        and have been cold a long time.....
        not to think of any misery in the sound of the wind......
        which is the sound.....for the listener, who listens in the snow,
        And, nothing himself, beholds
        Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

See how much I've shaved off? A full nine lines! But it works completely! It's still depressing. It's still utterly Stevens-esque. But it's shorter.

And so I've decided that's what it means to have a mind of winter. Let's shorten this damn season ("Winter Light" is one of Bergman's shorter films) and move on toward mud season, the early arrival of the Easter bunny and the end of having to pretend that we truly and earnestly do like kale.

Let spring come!

The Pleasure Principle

Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances.
                                               --Robert Hass 


I sat in candlelight at my kitchen island eating dinner tonight, awash with guilt and pleasure. Guilt because of all the "shouldn'ts" I was violating by the very act of eating: I was consuming too many calories, meat was involved (more on that in a moment), wine was involed, carbs were ingested. Never mind the fact that I had just come from a vigorous yoga class where I had held side crane for longer than ever (still not very long, by the by). But in fact it was because I was coming from a yoga class that I felt even worse about the meat (not that I eat much  of it at all).

The pleasure part? Well, I'd made tiny, succulent lamb keftas and tucked them carefully into pita bread with a nice yogurt, garlic and mint sauce. With ample greens to absorb and hold the sauce and a Saint-saens piano concerto in the background I felt a distinct sense of pleasure. Make that a capital "P."

Pleasure, I thought? Is this the whole of it for the evening? Eating something wildly tasty is, indeed, a great pleasure.

But no, I thought, I do get satisfaction from other things, as do other people, though I'm not sure our pleasures are predictable. Or reliable. So often we return to the singular pleasures when love or sex or family life disappoints us or abandons us and we are thrown back on our own meager, self-generated satisfactions. I have to admit I enjoy knowing I have paid my monthly bills, even if the process (I've forgotten the damn online password for the umpteenth time) is galling. I'm still a techno-peasant so every successful new blog post is a tiny, mental chocolate-covered cherry. And even the endless re-editing of the two completed manuscripts I have as yet failed to publish gives me a sense of having got something done.

(I remember, back when I used to sew, having to rip out poorly-put-together seams. That was nothing but anguish and self-condemnation. When I edit my prose I tend to feel a smug sense that I haven't simply corrected it, but even improved it, as if it hadn't been so faulty to begin with, unlike my sewing. After all, maybe the agent or agent's assistant reading it had simply been blind to its salutary qualities. Or maybe just blind. And now, of course, it shines!) 

I don't know. Pleasure is hard to track but hard to live without. In the United States I think we've been without a collective sense of pleasure since before the 2012 campaign. Newtown went a long way toward bankrupting our pleasure-caches.

Maybe we need those private moments--a pita filled with lamb-kefta, an hour in the study, tampering with syntax--to remind us that someday it will all come together with each other, or another person, once again. And that even if it doesn't, some kind of strange and solitary pleasure may abide. As we see, below, in Robert Hass' poem: (All hail blackberries!)

Meditation at Lagunitas

All the new thinking is about loss.

In this it resembles all the old thinking.

The idea, for example, that each particular erases

the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-

faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk

of that black birch is, by his presence,

some tragic falling off from a first world

of undivided light. Or the other notion that,

because there is in this world no one thing

to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,

a word is elegy to what it signifies.

We talked about it late last night and in the voice

of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone

almost querulous. After a while I understood that,

talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,

pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman

I made love to and I remembered how, holding

her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,

I felt a violent wonder at her presence

like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river

with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,

muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish

called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.

Longing, we say, because desire is full

of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.

But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,

the thing her father said that hurt her, what

she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous

as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.

Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,

saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

From the memoir, Going Out

First Class Christians: Musings from Election Day, 2006, flying into Washington, DC with Charles Colson

At the airport newsstand I pick up a bottle of water and a copy of Newsweek. There’s US flag-wrapped cross on its cover and articles on politics and Christianity inside.

November 2006

            I bring them to the counter for the casher to ring up.

            “You sure that’s all you want?” he asks me with a playful smile.

            Just what I need today—some wise-ass.

“Yeah,” I say, “You got the water, right?”

            “Yeah,” he says, “But--you sure that’s all you want?”

            “Yeah.”

            “So you’re really ready to have me ring you up?”

            “Yeah,” I smile a little, since he doesn’t seem like a creep. But I don’t get what’s going on.

            “O-kay!” he pushes a button and the total, $6.66, appears on the LED screen, “You owe me six-six-six!” he says and chuckles, “The mark of the Beast!”

            Glad he has a sense of humor, I think. That beats a self-proclaimed, end-times prophet by a damn sight. I hand him a twenty.

“And I owe you…..thirteen dollars and thirty-four cents,” he hands me my change.

            “Great,” I say, chuckling with him.

            “Hey, don’t worry,” he says, “I’m only playing around. After all, you’re only  going to fly in a plane on Election Day!”

            He’s a guileless goofball and I laugh with him.

“Take care!” he calls out as I head back to the gate for boarding.

            My partner makes this trip often in order to take care of his elderly mother. Because of that, we got a first-class upgrade on the way down—my first time in first-class--and now again on the way home.

During my maiden voyage among the privileged I discovered the real reason to like first-class flying. It’s not the roomier seats or the pillow and blankets. It’s not even the tasty snacks, although I ate more than my share of high-end potato chips on the way down. It’s the wine. They let you have a glass before take-off. And just before that sexy/scary moment when the plane rattles down the runway so fast you think you’ll either have an orgasm or a panic attack, they come and take away your empty plastic cup so nothing will fly around and stain your business suits.

Then a few minutes later, right after you’ve finished saying your frantic prayers—please God, let us not crash on take-off—and the plane has reached cruising altitude, those angels of mercy return. Chardonnay, wasn’t it? Yes, thank you. Thanks so

much. It’s snacks and wine the whole way, which is a very fine thing for a fearful flyer like me.

            Boarding begins. We file into the plane, stow our carry-ons, and glance around at the other travelers. Don’s looking for celebrities. I’m looking for terrorists.

            “Look who’s right ahead of us,” he whispers to me.

            “Who?” I whisper back.

            “Look. You’ll recognize him.”

            The man is speaking to one of the flight attendants in a resonant voice. He’s tall and she is smiling up at him. His wife is tall, too. White-haired, bulky. She wears a bright red jacket and on the lapel, a large pin of the American flag.

            “I don’t know who it is,” I whisper.

            “He’s a pastor. Just like you. Only not Lutheran,” Don says.

“That narrows it down a lot. Not Desmond Tutu in whiteface?"

            “No, this man is very, very American--.”

“Who is it?”

“Charles Colson.”

It takes me a minute, but then I remember:

“Chuck Colson? Nixon’s Chuck Colson?

            Don nods and peers through the crevice between the seats.

            “It looks as though he’s reading over the text of some prepared remarks he’s going to be making.”

            “Well, it is Election Day.” I say, “And we’re flying into Washington.” 
            “Right,” he says. Then he sits back and opens the New York Times. That’s my cue to shut up for a little bit. I ignore it.

            “Wow!” I whisper, “You must feel really safe, traveling with two men of God--me and Mr. Colson.”

            He raises his eyebrows. I wave the cover of Newsweek at him.

            “And look—see? See what’s on the cover?”

            He nods. He points to a newspaper article about whether or not the right to choose one’s gender would become a legal option in New York state.

            “I don’t think he’d support that,” I say, pointing my finger through the paper at the seat ahead of me.

            “Go ask him. Go introduce yourself to him.”

            “Right.”

            “No, I’m serious. You should do it.”

            “Yeah. And maybe I could have a talk with him about Jesus. And politics.”

The flight attendant starts down the aisle with a basket of snacks.

“Do you want a glass of wine?” Don asks.

            “No,” I say, then pause, “Only if you do.”

            But when she offers us beverages, he orders a seltzer and I begin repeating to myself my standard airplane prayer: Please keep us safe, God, and please keep me calm. Please keep us safe, God, and please keep me calm.

            Soon we’re rumbling and bumping down the runway, my heart pumping along with the speed of it all. Then the landing gear thuds into place and we’re off the ground and climbing. I don’t like the climbing part. I rifle through articles in Newsweek, but mostly focus on the pictures. At the bottom of one of the pages is a spectrum showing the relative conservatism or liberalism of American Evangelical leaders. Lo and behold, Chuck Colson’s smiling face is on the spectrum, far to the right on the right-hand page.

            I’m thinking about his face in Newsweek, about his presence in the seat ahead of me. He thinks he loves Jesus. I think I love Jesus, too. Only we don’t love him in the same way. Which way is better?

Just then the plane gives a serious jolt and even Don raises his eyes from the newspaper.

“That’s okay, isn’t it?” I ask.
            “Yeah, it’s always choppy getting through the clouds.”
            “I thought we were through them by now.”

            “There are a lot of clouds today,” he says, pointing out the window. I don’t look.

            The plane keeps bumping along, even though we have leveled off. The pilot, a woman (can women fly planes?) comes over the loudspeaker giving us details about the weather here and at our destination. She tells us it will be a pretty bumpy ride for most of the flight. There are storms along the coastline all the way to Washington.

            Now that I am supplied with that information I don’t hesitate when the flight attendant comes by at cruising altitude. I order some white wine. White wine midday seems less of a commitment to alcoholic degeneration than red wine does.

Tchaikovsky and Women

The more I think about Tchaikovsky--and I already do, a lot--the more I come to believe he had an entirely preternatural understanding of both genders, and perhaps the wide, sliding spectrum between the two. More on this in a minute.
 
In brief biographic sketches, Tchaikovsky is often, variously and unfairly defined as a depressive, a closeted 19th-century Russian homosexual, a sensitive youth traumatized by having to leave his mother and go to boarding school. Though true to one degree or another, this labeling also makes him seem soft, unfit for the rigors of life. But that's not true. Through his letters and the testimony of friends and family--his brother, Modest, a particularly strong witness to his character--a more well-rounded picture emerges. Tchaikovsky was prolific both as a letter writer and a composer. He had a sharp wit. And as conflicted as he may have been about his sexuality, he also embodied it with vigor. (According to Modest, Tchaikovsky and Saint-Saens performed an impromptu ballet on the Moscow Conservatory stage--a private performance, unfortunately).

Tchaikovsky faced hardships, as we all do, with about as much grace as could be expected of anybody. He simply was not your garden variety Tormented Artist. As much as I am a fan of biography, I feel as though Tchaikovsky writes his own autobiography with his music.

For example, just as you think it can't get any longer or more technically demanding, he brings the first movement of the violin concerto in D to a close only to follow it with two stunning shorter movements, the last one a mad dash to a particularly speedy trepak that ends the piece. Hardly the writing of a depressive.

For all its bombast and as much as Tchaikovsky himself claims to have written it "without warmth and without love" (though he did conduct it at the dedicatory concert of Carnegie Hall), there's nothing limp-wristed about the 1812 Overture. In fact it has, for me, more genuine verve (okay, and camp, too--are those strings ever, ever going to wind down before we get to the cathedral bells?) than what feels like the manufactured merriment at the end of his fourth symphony. That movement makes me think a little bit of Shostokovich forcing Communist Party spirit into his own compositions half a century later. So maybe we glimpse the depressive Tchaikovsky there, doing his damn-est to be happy.

Yet of his Symphony No. 5 (like Beethoven's fifth, based on a "fate" motive, beginning darkly and ending in a triumphant major key), some have likened the last movement to an acceptance of his sexual identity. It's hard to imagine programmatic music addressing sexual identity..... In any case, we get to the end of the fifth, knowing Tchaikovsky has already gone through his "rash act" of marriage and subsequent depression, and what we hear is a man with a baton on the podium in charge of the work he has written. (Okay, he hated conducting; he thought it would make his head fall off. He really did. Still, I see him there, on the podium after the false cadence that makes you think the whole shebang is over and there he is, just marching the orchestra--egging on the brass--through those last couple of minutes, not in the least concerned about losing his head.)

This is all Tchaikovsky's Big and Tall Man music. And it's masculine. It's deft and loud and exuberant and I love it. But he goes farther in other works. He goes feminine. And by that I do not mean weak, insipid, sentimental or sugary. When he goes feminine, he goes wise, knowing, keen. In fact, other than when George Balanchine switched out the first movement of Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings in C to make it the last movement in his ballet, I'm not sure there is a composer, choreographer or writer who gets the feminine more than Tchaikovsky does.

Which is how, in this roundabout post, we get to "Nutcracker." Ah, "Nutcracker," that feel-good holiday classic. Guess what? I don't think so. "Nutcracker" is a sad story, a fearsome story about a girl growing into the knowledge of her limitations. Of course it's filled with captivating music and spell-binding dancing. And it all starts with a big Christmas party (and a tree that grows). But in the party scene where Clara is given the gift of her nutcracker, she is alternately mesmerized by the I-wouldn't-leave-my-kid-alone-with Uncle Drosselmeyer and bullied by her obnoxious brother who ends up breaking the nutcracker.

After that, of course, the magic begins: Clara (asleep? enchanted?) is transported to the Kingdom of Sweets, treated like a Make-a-Wish kid and entertained by all manner of ethnic dance interpreters.  Tchaikovsky's very good at this. Don't we hear the castanets clacking away in the Spanish dance, see the sultry gyrations of the Arabian dance, and the heel-kicking hi-jinx of the Russian trepak (we already know that Tchaikovsky put the "tre" in "trepak").

After many more such souffles of music and dance comes the pas de deux, the one to end all pas des deux. It's between the Sugar Plum Fairy and her Cavalier. And what's so awful about it, so very awful, is that it is beautiful. And entirely unreal. It is entirely outside the realm of plausibility. For one thing, the Sugar Plum Fairy is never going to end up with her Cavalier. That's because he isn't real. Nor is she real. They have both been conjured by Uncle Drosselmeyer. Or if not Drosselmeyer, then by the sleeping drugs Clara's mom gave her to help her after such an exhilarating party. After all, Christmas can be stressful!

But far worse than the truth of the matter--that the Sugar Plum Fairy and her Cavalier aren't real and thus, can't live happily ever after since they don't live at all--is the second truth of the matter: Clara can never be the Sugar Plum Fairy. No woman ever can be. That momentous idea--ethereal/embodied, weightless/grounded--of feminine perfection is about as real as the Sugar Plum Fairy. Which is to say that no woman can ever be that woman. But who would want to be anything less?

You don't believe me? You think it's all just fun dances and hummable tunes? Well, then, listen. Listen. (This is the ballet company of the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, Russa, with Larissa Lezhnina as the Sugar Plum Fairy.)

The first five minutes of the pas de deux that is the penultimate scene in "Nutcracker" is one of great poignancy and loss. Coming as it does right before the end, a joyous end, it seems out of place, ill-conceived. And yet Tchaikovsky's sister died not long before he composed the piece. It seems to me a mournful, though powerful, homage to what life requires that we leave behind--so many dreams and so many loved ones. In its way this is a particularly feminine realization, or perhaps just one realized earlier on in life for women than for men.