For some reason I took Ariel Dorfman’s autobiography “Rumbo al Sur, Deseando El Norte" to the hospital with me when I went into labour. There it sat by my hospital bed. As if I would be putting my feet up and reading in-between contractions. I knew though, that some labours can take a long time to get underway so thought I’d have it with me just in case. Anyway, no reading was done in hospital. But by coincidence when I did finally open the book up again when we got home it happened to be at the start of chapter two when Dorfman’s mother gives birth to him, in Buenos Aires. She had been given a pain relief gas so was drugged up when he was born. In her delirious state she had the sensation that he was falling. “Doctor, se cae el nene, se cae el nene,” (the baby’s falling), were the first words he heard her say, though of course he couldn’t understand them. Dorfman sees that as a metaphor for what happens to all newborns. “Yo caía hacia la soledad y la nada, de cabeza hacia la muerte,” I was falling towards loneliness and nothing, headfirst towards death.
Another birth story popped up when M, who was here helping for two weeks after JNH’s arrival, read me a passage from Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s autobiography that she had brought with her, Infidel. It describes the birth of Hirsi Ali’s mother in Somalia. “My mother, Asha, was born sometime in the early 1940’s, along with her identical twin sister, Halimo. My grandmother gave birth to them alone, under a tree. They were her third and fourth children; she was about eighteen, leading her goats and sheep to pasture when she felt the pains. She lay down and bore forth; then she cut the umbilical cords with her knife. A few hours later, she gathered together the goats and the sheep and managed to bring the herd home safely before dark, carrying her newborn twins. Nobody was impressed by the exploit; she was bringing home two more girls.”
Each birth story is different. JNH’s wasn’t as dramatic as either of those but was momentous in the way that any mother experiences the birth of her first child as momentous. My water broke, or half-broke, before I had any contractions, at home following a bowl of pasta and an afternoon snooze. C and I gathered up our bags and went to the 30th Ave subway station where a bunch of black cabs hang out under the tracks. The first driver had no idea where New York Downtown Hospital was. I said it was by Brooklyn Bridge, and he replied, “Ah yes, in Brooklyn…”(it’s on the Manhattan side, near Chinatown). Much consulting of maps and gesticulating later, all the while me concerned the rest of my water would break and contractions would kick in, and envisaging one of those New York births-in-a-taxi that only happen in films, another driver finally showed up who knew the way. More water falling just as we were about to get out of the cab and soon after, on a hospital bed and plugged into various monitors, labouring got underway. I used the monitors to vent my anger as the contractions intensified, “get me off these f***ing things”, as if roaming around the room would necessarily make the pain - which was all in my back - less intense.
I could easily have been in a dazed state like Dorfman’s mum when JNH was born. I’d wanted to give birth as naturally and drug-free as possible. But just as I was about to give in after 8 hours or so of contractions and have some IVF pain medication, I felt something change. “I think he’s coming,” I said. The doctor, who’d been elsewhere tending to more complicated patients than me checked where things were at and said yes, are you up to pushing? I pushed (accompanied by plenty of operatics – all those classes re calm breathing right out of the window), and an hour later there he was.
A tiny creature splayed on my chest like a shipwrecked sailor clinging to a life-raft.
*******************************************************
Current mission is getting JNH to sleep properly. He loves the subway, just as C did as a child, when his mother took him for rides on the graffiti-covered A train from Washington Heights for fun, C gazing out of its windows at the dark tunnel walls. So we’ve considered putting JNH on board the N at 30th Ave in his car seat, headed to Coney Island, with a note saying “Please leave me on this train till it’s back in Astoria where my parents will collect me.”
Saturday, June 19, 2010
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
New York missive no 71 - Fragile sleep
Everything is so fragile, including sleep. His sleep and ours, we never know how long it will last.
The little señor JNH came into the world early in the morning on Saturday 15 May 2010 at New York Downtown Hospital. There should be a verb for “born”. “Was born” is much too passive.
He opened his eyes just a few hours later. Bewildered, awed, he took in what he could make of his surroundings, slowly opening and closing his mouth at the same time. At that point his surroundings were only whatever was within 12 inches of his face. Over the next few months and years, that radius will reach further and further away.
I’m now savouring the moments of wonder and immersed in a milk production effort. More to come...
The little señor JNH came into the world early in the morning on Saturday 15 May 2010 at New York Downtown Hospital. There should be a verb for “born”. “Was born” is much too passive.
He opened his eyes just a few hours later. Bewildered, awed, he took in what he could make of his surroundings, slowly opening and closing his mouth at the same time. At that point his surroundings were only whatever was within 12 inches of his face. Over the next few months and years, that radius will reach further and further away.
I’m now savouring the moments of wonder and immersed in a milk production effort. More to come...
Friday, May 14, 2010
New York missive no 70 - The Italian guerilla gardener
There’s a strip of gardens behind our house. Renting the third floor apartment means we don’t strictly have access to ours, though I’m sure we will be invited to invade from time to time by P and P who live downstairs. In the mornings the gardens fill with a mix of birdsongs that come through our window and call us out of sleep. But the gardens are surrounded by construction work. Every spare inch of Astoria, every foreclosed home, is soon colonized by a new identikit apartment block stretching as tall as permitted or a little bit taller and confronting the world with rows upon row of square eyes. So this morning, like many recent mornings, the birdsong was drowned at regular intervals by the growling of drills and thump of hammers. Tweet, tweet, peacefulness, grrrrrrr. Tweet, tweet chirrup. Grrrrrrrrr. Bang bang. Etc.
An elderly Italian man plants things in the garden. He’s not “a gardener” as such. Several years ago when P’s Dad, who owns the house, was living here, the man appeared on the doorstep and somehow they reached an agreement – despite P’s Greek Dad not speaking Italian and the man not speaking any Greek or English – that he could come and plant things, use part of the produce himself and leave the rest for the occupants of the house. He disappears in Winter but reappears most Summers to put in vegetables and tend to the fig tree. No-one who currently lives here knows his name - I’m looking forward to getting into the garden one day when he’s there to say hello.
It seems a dispute could be afoot though. P asked me the other day if I spoke Italian (I don’t), because of a potential misunderstanding with the garden man. P’s wife (also P) had planted some cucumbers, under little mounds. A few days later, she could swear the mounds had been meddled with. Sabotage? Then I had a dream. In it, I opened the blind in the morning to see a new fence dividing the garden length-wise in two, woman-P gardening on one side and garden-man on the other.
An elderly Italian man plants things in the garden. He’s not “a gardener” as such. Several years ago when P’s Dad, who owns the house, was living here, the man appeared on the doorstep and somehow they reached an agreement – despite P’s Greek Dad not speaking Italian and the man not speaking any Greek or English – that he could come and plant things, use part of the produce himself and leave the rest for the occupants of the house. He disappears in Winter but reappears most Summers to put in vegetables and tend to the fig tree. No-one who currently lives here knows his name - I’m looking forward to getting into the garden one day when he’s there to say hello.
It seems a dispute could be afoot though. P asked me the other day if I spoke Italian (I don’t), because of a potential misunderstanding with the garden man. P’s wife (also P) had planted some cucumbers, under little mounds. A few days later, she could swear the mounds had been meddled with. Sabotage? Then I had a dream. In it, I opened the blind in the morning to see a new fence dividing the garden length-wise in two, woman-P gardening on one side and garden-man on the other.
Saturday, May 8, 2010
New York missive no 69 - What language to write about New York?
Pregnant women here have so many sonograms that by the end of a pregnancy you have a sporadic visual history of the baby’s development in the womb. But it’s still a pretty sketchy history. The images are blotchy and blurry with dark undefined areas, let alone the dark areas between each sonogram, when who knows what’s going on in there. A hidden cauldron where a life is being made. Thankfully large amounts of mystery are retained.
As for the sonograms, you can compare them to works by different artists .
My first, at 8 weeks, was a Magritte. A simple schwoosh against a grey background. “Ceci est un poisson. Main non! C’est un embryon. À huit semaines.” Or just simply, “Ceci n’est pas un poisson.”
Then there was a Chagall, a swirly figure surrounded by floating bits.
At twenty weeks, a 3D sonogram that looked like an illustration from Grimms Fairy Tales. A cheeky, rather distorted-looking face peering out of a shadowy forest.
Then a “growth scan” last week that was a Picasso. This time he was hiding his face in his hands and the detail was hard to make out, so what we saw were bits of body at jaunty angles: ribs, a femur, a hand.
Anytime from now to three week’s time he’ll be making his entrance. He’ll shake off those paintings and become rather more real.
********************************************************
At Coney Island the other day I took a picture of a mural that says, “There are over 200 languages spoken in New York City, making it the most diverse city on Earth.” A wonderful New York Times article recently said there are many more – up to 800. Many are “endangered” languages spoken by only a handful of people in the world and that may not be known by any in a few generations’ time. The article describes how the Endangered Language Alliance is seeking out and recording them, using field techniques “usually employed in exotic and remote foreign locales as it starts its research in the city’s vibrant ethnic enclaves.” Among them are Vlashki, a variant of Istro-Romanian, Garifuna, Mamuju, Aramaic, Chaldic, Bukhari, Chamorro and Irish Gaelic.
The evening that article came out, C, L and I went to “New York Stories,” four authors talking at Morgan Library about writing about New York City as part of the PEN World Voices festival. The most refreshing voice there was the Catalán writer Quim Monzó. There was a strange sense of déjà vu or repetition among what the other writers said about the city. Perhaps because they were talking about writers - as well as their own writing – who had a somewhat privileged perspective on the city (even if not all their characters did). Colm Tóibín (who we’d heard reading from his fabulous novel "Brooklyn" a few weeks back in the rather different setting of the Poisson Rouge in Bleeker Street) spoke about Henry James. Roxana Robinson about Edith Wharton. And Darryl Pinckney about Elizabeth Hardwick. Maybe it was also because they were writers in English talking about other writers in English. Monzó writes in Catalán. His refreshing perspective included a challenge to "street-name fetishism". Why, he wondered, do New York novels obsess that such-and-such event happened on "Fifth Avenue" or "the corner of 14th and Greenwich," as if to infuse the event with stolen geographical gravitas?
It made me think too much writing about New York repeats the same themes. There is the potential for a kaleidoscopic diversity of perspectives that is unrealized when the dominant writing on New York is in English. Someone with time on their hands could create a literary map of the city linking to works about it in its hundreds of languages (with English translations?!).
The following Sunday the language theme came up again at an interview with Ariel Dorfman – also a PEN World Voices event, this time down at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Battery Park. Dorfman is completely bi-lingual in Spanish and English. He gave the example of the first sentence of his autobiography "Heading South, Looking North" to illustrate the ways in which languages express life in unique ways. What you can say in one simply can’t be said, or can’t be said via the same route, in another. He wrote the memoir in English first. In English, the first sentence reads, “"I should not be here to tell this story." Meaning that had he chosen, as he initially intended to do, to stay in Chile after Pinochet’s coup rather than become an exile, he would have been killed along with fellow members of Allende’s government. When it came to translating the autobiography into Spanish he grappled for several weeks with that one opening sentence. And he realized that in Spanish, a person, a “someone”, who died in his place had to be present in the sentence. “Si estoy contando esta historia, si la puedo contar, as porque alguien, muchos años atrás en Santiago de Chile, murió en mi lugar."
Some other wonderful nuggets from that dense hour-long conversation, not all directly language-related even though language permeates them:
- The English language is going to have to become more “Latin American”, in the sense of incorporating external influences and not remaining entirely itself.
- The US has many narratives, but you can simplify them into a “dark” and a “light” narrative.
- Dorfman’s wary of questions of identity because they often become questions of exclusivity. True. You could say, “hold on, isn't his whole life and work inevitably grappling with questions of identity?” But instead he has made an entirely conscious decision to embrace a notion of humanity that rises above (or flows below) identity. One that is empowered by human rights.
- During the Q and A, a woman in the audience confessed to having a martini beforehand – surely more than one it seemed. Then she proceeded with a rambling and vulnerably star-struck question about political fiction and her own project to write about Lynndie England, the US soldier now serving time for her role in the atrocities at Abu Ghraib. Dorfman, while encouraging her, said that in fiction characters have to have autonomy. If you have decided in advance what you (narrator) want to say politically then the characters are not free to speak for themselves, and it’s best to avoid literature altogether.
- Dorfman cited Margaret Atwood who disagrees that writing literature “reveals” the author. Instead, she believes, people write to hide.
Back to languages and the city for a moment. The proliferation of languages can be alienating, of course. In a local Queens newspaper a Flushing resident said he wished that the Chinese language signs on the shops were also in English, because he feels disorientated in his neighbourhood. And a recent article in the Village Voice describes the chasm of misunderstanding between Chinese, Dominican and hipster residents in a Delancey building.
***********************************************************
I read Graham Swift’s inspiring short story “Learning to Swim” recently. In it a young boy breaks free from his silently feuding parents’ crushing competition for his love. (I seem to be drawn towards stories with parenting in them at the moment). Then when I was picking my way through tall bunches of blossom stacked outside flower stores on 28th Street on my way to work, I caught a glimpse through a shop window of a first edition of Swift's collection named after that story. Cities, with their densely-layered lives, are webs of echoes like that.
************************************************************
On the crowded 1-2-3 subway platform at 42nd Street an elderly man plucked a black plastic sack out of the bottom of a bin to put his possessions in. A uniformed MTA woman who was going round emptying the bins had a go at him. “Why you stealing all my bags?” she shouted. He protested gently that he hadn’t stolen all of them. We got into the same train carriage as him, where there were lots of nurses in their green scrubs. “Can you tell me why they’re kicking the patients out of all the hospitals?” he asked the nurses. “Every hospital I pass has a sign saying, ‘Out patients’”. The nurses didn’t reply. I thought it was rather funny.
As for the sonograms, you can compare them to works by different artists .
My first, at 8 weeks, was a Magritte. A simple schwoosh against a grey background. “Ceci est un poisson. Main non! C’est un embryon. À huit semaines.” Or just simply, “Ceci n’est pas un poisson.”
Then there was a Chagall, a swirly figure surrounded by floating bits.
At twenty weeks, a 3D sonogram that looked like an illustration from Grimms Fairy Tales. A cheeky, rather distorted-looking face peering out of a shadowy forest.
Then a “growth scan” last week that was a Picasso. This time he was hiding his face in his hands and the detail was hard to make out, so what we saw were bits of body at jaunty angles: ribs, a femur, a hand.
Anytime from now to three week’s time he’ll be making his entrance. He’ll shake off those paintings and become rather more real.
********************************************************
At Coney Island the other day I took a picture of a mural that says, “There are over 200 languages spoken in New York City, making it the most diverse city on Earth.” A wonderful New York Times article recently said there are many more – up to 800. Many are “endangered” languages spoken by only a handful of people in the world and that may not be known by any in a few generations’ time. The article describes how the Endangered Language Alliance is seeking out and recording them, using field techniques “usually employed in exotic and remote foreign locales as it starts its research in the city’s vibrant ethnic enclaves.” Among them are Vlashki, a variant of Istro-Romanian, Garifuna, Mamuju, Aramaic, Chaldic, Bukhari, Chamorro and Irish Gaelic.
The evening that article came out, C, L and I went to “New York Stories,” four authors talking at Morgan Library about writing about New York City as part of the PEN World Voices festival. The most refreshing voice there was the Catalán writer Quim Monzó. There was a strange sense of déjà vu or repetition among what the other writers said about the city. Perhaps because they were talking about writers - as well as their own writing – who had a somewhat privileged perspective on the city (even if not all their characters did). Colm Tóibín (who we’d heard reading from his fabulous novel "Brooklyn" a few weeks back in the rather different setting of the Poisson Rouge in Bleeker Street) spoke about Henry James. Roxana Robinson about Edith Wharton. And Darryl Pinckney about Elizabeth Hardwick. Maybe it was also because they were writers in English talking about other writers in English. Monzó writes in Catalán. His refreshing perspective included a challenge to "street-name fetishism". Why, he wondered, do New York novels obsess that such-and-such event happened on "Fifth Avenue" or "the corner of 14th and Greenwich," as if to infuse the event with stolen geographical gravitas?
It made me think too much writing about New York repeats the same themes. There is the potential for a kaleidoscopic diversity of perspectives that is unrealized when the dominant writing on New York is in English. Someone with time on their hands could create a literary map of the city linking to works about it in its hundreds of languages (with English translations?!).
The following Sunday the language theme came up again at an interview with Ariel Dorfman – also a PEN World Voices event, this time down at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Battery Park. Dorfman is completely bi-lingual in Spanish and English. He gave the example of the first sentence of his autobiography "Heading South, Looking North" to illustrate the ways in which languages express life in unique ways. What you can say in one simply can’t be said, or can’t be said via the same route, in another. He wrote the memoir in English first. In English, the first sentence reads, “"I should not be here to tell this story." Meaning that had he chosen, as he initially intended to do, to stay in Chile after Pinochet’s coup rather than become an exile, he would have been killed along with fellow members of Allende’s government. When it came to translating the autobiography into Spanish he grappled for several weeks with that one opening sentence. And he realized that in Spanish, a person, a “someone”, who died in his place had to be present in the sentence. “Si estoy contando esta historia, si la puedo contar, as porque alguien, muchos años atrás en Santiago de Chile, murió en mi lugar."
Some other wonderful nuggets from that dense hour-long conversation, not all directly language-related even though language permeates them:
- The English language is going to have to become more “Latin American”, in the sense of incorporating external influences and not remaining entirely itself.
- The US has many narratives, but you can simplify them into a “dark” and a “light” narrative.
- Dorfman’s wary of questions of identity because they often become questions of exclusivity. True. You could say, “hold on, isn't his whole life and work inevitably grappling with questions of identity?” But instead he has made an entirely conscious decision to embrace a notion of humanity that rises above (or flows below) identity. One that is empowered by human rights.
- During the Q and A, a woman in the audience confessed to having a martini beforehand – surely more than one it seemed. Then she proceeded with a rambling and vulnerably star-struck question about political fiction and her own project to write about Lynndie England, the US soldier now serving time for her role in the atrocities at Abu Ghraib. Dorfman, while encouraging her, said that in fiction characters have to have autonomy. If you have decided in advance what you (narrator) want to say politically then the characters are not free to speak for themselves, and it’s best to avoid literature altogether.
- Dorfman cited Margaret Atwood who disagrees that writing literature “reveals” the author. Instead, she believes, people write to hide.
Back to languages and the city for a moment. The proliferation of languages can be alienating, of course. In a local Queens newspaper a Flushing resident said he wished that the Chinese language signs on the shops were also in English, because he feels disorientated in his neighbourhood. And a recent article in the Village Voice describes the chasm of misunderstanding between Chinese, Dominican and hipster residents in a Delancey building.
***********************************************************
I read Graham Swift’s inspiring short story “Learning to Swim” recently. In it a young boy breaks free from his silently feuding parents’ crushing competition for his love. (I seem to be drawn towards stories with parenting in them at the moment). Then when I was picking my way through tall bunches of blossom stacked outside flower stores on 28th Street on my way to work, I caught a glimpse through a shop window of a first edition of Swift's collection named after that story. Cities, with their densely-layered lives, are webs of echoes like that.
************************************************************
On the crowded 1-2-3 subway platform at 42nd Street an elderly man plucked a black plastic sack out of the bottom of a bin to put his possessions in. A uniformed MTA woman who was going round emptying the bins had a go at him. “Why you stealing all my bags?” she shouted. He protested gently that he hadn’t stolen all of them. We got into the same train carriage as him, where there were lots of nurses in their green scrubs. “Can you tell me why they’re kicking the patients out of all the hospitals?” he asked the nurses. “Every hospital I pass has a sign saying, ‘Out patients’”. The nurses didn’t reply. I thought it was rather funny.
Sunday, April 18, 2010
New York missive no 69 - When Nietzsche Wept, and a crisis about "stuff"
In the afterword of When Nietzsche Wept, Irvin Yalom says that in an essay describing his process for writing the novel, he quoted André Gide: “History is fiction that did happen. Whereas fiction is history that might have happened.” Yalom goes on, “Fiction is history that might have happened. Perfect! That was precisely the fiction I wanted to write. My novel, When Nietzsche Wept, could have happened.” In other words, even though Dr Breuer and Nietzsche never met so their reciprocal “treatment” described in the novel never took place, they could have met, and the treatment could have happened.
Then in 2003 Yalom was sent a letter in which one of Nietzsche’s friends, the poet Siegfried Lipiner, tries to convince another friend, Heinrich Koselitz, to send Nietzsche to Vienna where he would receive treatment for his mental and physical sickness from Doctor Breuer. In his reply Koselitz advises against the plan. But the letter shows how right Gide was – that fictionalized event was on the verge of happening in reality. And it is a reminder of the dizzying number of possibilities that lie in fiction. If the fiction that is already out there tells of things that could have happened, how many more “could haves” are contained in fiction that has not yet been written?
This apparently infinite number of possibilities seems to contradict Nietzsche’s theory of eternal recurrence that he describes to Breuer (in the book). They are walking through the cemetery where Breuer’s parents are buried. Nietzsche says that because time stretches infinitely backward for all eternity, everything that can happen must have already happened. Therefore every time you choose an action you must be willing to choose it for all eternity, because at some point in the future it will happen again. “What is immortal is this life, this moment…This moment exists forever,” he says. But perhaps this moment, the now, bears so much weight not because it will infinitely repeat itself, but because it may never happen in reality again.
What we actually live is a microscopic fragment of existence. And either way you look it – whether as eternal recurrence or as a never-to-be-repeated combination of life-detail – “this moment” is precious. It may seem fragile, but it is all we have. And given that it is all we have, it is powerful. Just like other microscopic fragments.
****************************************************************
A sign of my addled mind (I like to think pregnancy-induced addledness): in my diary I’d noted “C-boxing” for last night, because there was a boxing match he wanted to watch. Then in the Sunday space, I’d put “1pm – boxing”. It should say “1pm yoga” but I guess I just caught a glimpse of the word boxing in the previous box and copied it. So apparently at 1pm today I’m going to a pre-natal boxing class. I’m picturing lots of pregnant-bellied women hopping around the ring, gloved hands to chests, taking swipes at one another.
****************************************************************
Soon after we moved to Astoria I got home from a fruitless search for a mop and had a bit of an emotional crisis about “stuff”. I’d been looking in the nearby $ shops and suddenly felt overwhelmed by the amount of stuff out there to buy – which is a bit contradictory given that I’d been in the shops because I needed to buy something. “There’s just….there’s just….so much...STUFF. Too much STUFF!” I sobbed.
Recently my concerns about stuff have taken a more practical turn.
There is more and more stuff in the world (conveniently yet inaccurately extricating myself in that phrase from responsibility for generating more demand for stuff ) – and yet it comes from increasingly limited sources. We watched FoodInc recently, a powerful documentary on the extreme concentration of the food industry and the horrendous consequences of that concentration for people’s lives and the environment. I’m immersed in these issues for my work yet reminded myself there’s so much I should be doing to live the change I want to see in the world, and not use living in a megacity as an excuse. So off I’ve been the last two weeks to Union Square farmer’s market to buy real food (beef that has been fed on grass, for example), finding myself forking out a small fortune to pay the real price for that real food. It’s a worthwhile investment though, when you think that the cost you save by buying mass-produced food is still there, but is borne by the workers and land down its supply chain. I’m not going to switch to 100% perfect purchasing (could there ever be such a thing?) overnight but figure that each product I buy carefully, knowing the source, is a step in the right direction. And I know that eating right doesn’t have to cost a fortune either –time to get those vegetable and herb plants planted on our balcony. Start a balcony-to-balcony food revolution in Astoria?...
Then there's a pending deluge of baby stuff. So far we’ve resisted going overboard and haven’t stepped foot in a Buy Buy Baby or Babies R Us. But as with food it can seem that the choices are to buy cheap from a mass-production conglomerate or buy very expensive from niche sources. Or, adopt a balancing act – a combination of investing a few things that matter (one of which was the moses basket for him to sleep in the first few months, I decided), minimizing other things, exploring alternative marketplaces like Etsy, using some things second hand (though I’m not sure whether the nightgowns from the 1800s that Mum found in her attic, passed down over the generations, will survive another wear!), and then accepting stuff, of course, guilt-free, when it’s given us by others...(!)
****************************************************************
Turns out that the tree outside our window is a pear tree. Which I really should have recognized from last Spring – see New York missive no. 49
Then in 2003 Yalom was sent a letter in which one of Nietzsche’s friends, the poet Siegfried Lipiner, tries to convince another friend, Heinrich Koselitz, to send Nietzsche to Vienna where he would receive treatment for his mental and physical sickness from Doctor Breuer. In his reply Koselitz advises against the plan. But the letter shows how right Gide was – that fictionalized event was on the verge of happening in reality. And it is a reminder of the dizzying number of possibilities that lie in fiction. If the fiction that is already out there tells of things that could have happened, how many more “could haves” are contained in fiction that has not yet been written?
This apparently infinite number of possibilities seems to contradict Nietzsche’s theory of eternal recurrence that he describes to Breuer (in the book). They are walking through the cemetery where Breuer’s parents are buried. Nietzsche says that because time stretches infinitely backward for all eternity, everything that can happen must have already happened. Therefore every time you choose an action you must be willing to choose it for all eternity, because at some point in the future it will happen again. “What is immortal is this life, this moment…This moment exists forever,” he says. But perhaps this moment, the now, bears so much weight not because it will infinitely repeat itself, but because it may never happen in reality again.
What we actually live is a microscopic fragment of existence. And either way you look it – whether as eternal recurrence or as a never-to-be-repeated combination of life-detail – “this moment” is precious. It may seem fragile, but it is all we have. And given that it is all we have, it is powerful. Just like other microscopic fragments.
****************************************************************
A sign of my addled mind (I like to think pregnancy-induced addledness): in my diary I’d noted “C-boxing” for last night, because there was a boxing match he wanted to watch. Then in the Sunday space, I’d put “1pm – boxing”. It should say “1pm yoga” but I guess I just caught a glimpse of the word boxing in the previous box and copied it. So apparently at 1pm today I’m going to a pre-natal boxing class. I’m picturing lots of pregnant-bellied women hopping around the ring, gloved hands to chests, taking swipes at one another.
****************************************************************
Soon after we moved to Astoria I got home from a fruitless search for a mop and had a bit of an emotional crisis about “stuff”. I’d been looking in the nearby $ shops and suddenly felt overwhelmed by the amount of stuff out there to buy – which is a bit contradictory given that I’d been in the shops because I needed to buy something. “There’s just….there’s just….so much...STUFF. Too much STUFF!” I sobbed.
Recently my concerns about stuff have taken a more practical turn.
There is more and more stuff in the world (conveniently yet inaccurately extricating myself in that phrase from responsibility for generating more demand for stuff ) – and yet it comes from increasingly limited sources. We watched FoodInc recently, a powerful documentary on the extreme concentration of the food industry and the horrendous consequences of that concentration for people’s lives and the environment. I’m immersed in these issues for my work yet reminded myself there’s so much I should be doing to live the change I want to see in the world, and not use living in a megacity as an excuse. So off I’ve been the last two weeks to Union Square farmer’s market to buy real food (beef that has been fed on grass, for example), finding myself forking out a small fortune to pay the real price for that real food. It’s a worthwhile investment though, when you think that the cost you save by buying mass-produced food is still there, but is borne by the workers and land down its supply chain. I’m not going to switch to 100% perfect purchasing (could there ever be such a thing?) overnight but figure that each product I buy carefully, knowing the source, is a step in the right direction. And I know that eating right doesn’t have to cost a fortune either –time to get those vegetable and herb plants planted on our balcony. Start a balcony-to-balcony food revolution in Astoria?...
Then there's a pending deluge of baby stuff. So far we’ve resisted going overboard and haven’t stepped foot in a Buy Buy Baby or Babies R Us. But as with food it can seem that the choices are to buy cheap from a mass-production conglomerate or buy very expensive from niche sources. Or, adopt a balancing act – a combination of investing a few things that matter (one of which was the moses basket for him to sleep in the first few months, I decided), minimizing other things, exploring alternative marketplaces like Etsy, using some things second hand (though I’m not sure whether the nightgowns from the 1800s that Mum found in her attic, passed down over the generations, will survive another wear!), and then accepting stuff, of course, guilt-free, when it’s given us by others...(!)
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Turns out that the tree outside our window is a pear tree. Which I really should have recognized from last Spring – see New York missive no. 49
Friday, April 9, 2010
New York missive no 69 - Closure of St Vincents Hospital
Last night we were supposed to be going to St Vincents for a free tour of the maternity ward. But the woman running it called in the afternoon to say it’s been cancelled because the hospital is closing – the hospital board announced the closure on Tuesday and it’s happening pretty much right away. So that’s that. 160 years of treating the population of lower Manhattan, and now the buildings will probably be turned into just more expensive apartment buildings. I came home via the hospital to see what was going on and passed a nurses protest – 800 will probably lose their jobs. Their placards summed up the situation well. “Condos don’t save lives," said one.
Round the corner I spotted a plaque on the wall about the poet Edna St Vincent Millay, where I learned that she was named after the hospital:
So our little Dobritican (the word C came up with for Dominican-British-American) will have to come into the world elsewhere. At the moment it’s looking like New York Downtown Hospital in the financial district. The description of its maternity ward sounds a little condo-like itself: “New mothers deliver in the Hospital's beautifully renovated, state-of-the-art Maternity Center, which is equipped with attractive, family-oriented suites for labor and delivery.”
But I won’t pass judgment too quickly. I’m sure all will be well and my obstetrician, who won’t change, will give us all the control we need over how the baby’s born.
Thursday, April 1, 2010
New York missive no 68 - God and the lack of
On Monday the midwife we saw said how relieved she is that the maternity ward at St Vincent’s Hospital is probably staying open. Not only because it means the nurses there will keep their jobs, but because, she said, it’s one of the few remaining obstetrics wards in New York where childbirth is still seen as a natural process, to be celebrated, rather than an encumbrance to be dealt with as quickly as possible with the aid of cesarean deliveries and pain relief methods. Long may it last.
Oh well I spoke too soon. Just after typing that last night we turned on the news to see that the latest deal to save the hospital - with Mt Sinai Hospital - has fallen through.
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Everyone seemed to be reading about God this morning on the W train, while I was reading about Nietzsche. Not about him, exactly, but Irvin Yalom’s novel When Nietzsche Wept. It revolves around Nietzsche's fictitious treatment by the doctor Joseph Breuer in late nineteenth century Vienna, when, as Yalom describes in his note at the end, the “ticking embryo of psychotherapy” was in place. There is much discussion between the two about truth, and some about God, or the lack of. So far those discussions are driven by Nietzsche’s alluringly honest skepticism and Breurer’s battle to counter it. Breurer presents it as debilitating, even though to himself he acknowledges that he shares much of Nietzsche's beliefs and just is not brave enough to wholly embrace them. Or resists embracing them, so he can continue to pursue the semblance of a stable life. “Truth,” says Nietzsche at one point, “is arrived at through disbelief and skepticism, not through a childlike wishing something were so!” And “Surely, you must realize that we created God, and that all of us together now have killed him.” The woman to my right on the train was reading the chapter of Mary Kay Ash's autobiography called “God first, family second, career third.” And the man to my left, a book called “Learning God’s ways.”
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Along the boardwalk at Brighton Beach the other weekend mothers pushed children in strollers and care-givers pushed the elderly in wheelchairs. It seems we start and end life being pushed around on wheels. Or to go even further back and forward, start and end life plugged into life-support machines – dependent.
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Well Spring is in the air but those three entries are not particularly cheery. Time for a snooze.
Oh well I spoke too soon. Just after typing that last night we turned on the news to see that the latest deal to save the hospital - with Mt Sinai Hospital - has fallen through.
**********************************************************
Everyone seemed to be reading about God this morning on the W train, while I was reading about Nietzsche. Not about him, exactly, but Irvin Yalom’s novel When Nietzsche Wept. It revolves around Nietzsche's fictitious treatment by the doctor Joseph Breuer in late nineteenth century Vienna, when, as Yalom describes in his note at the end, the “ticking embryo of psychotherapy” was in place. There is much discussion between the two about truth, and some about God, or the lack of. So far those discussions are driven by Nietzsche’s alluringly honest skepticism and Breurer’s battle to counter it. Breurer presents it as debilitating, even though to himself he acknowledges that he shares much of Nietzsche's beliefs and just is not brave enough to wholly embrace them. Or resists embracing them, so he can continue to pursue the semblance of a stable life. “Truth,” says Nietzsche at one point, “is arrived at through disbelief and skepticism, not through a childlike wishing something were so!” And “Surely, you must realize that we created God, and that all of us together now have killed him.” The woman to my right on the train was reading the chapter of Mary Kay Ash's autobiography called “God first, family second, career third.” And the man to my left, a book called “Learning God’s ways.”
**********************************************************
Along the boardwalk at Brighton Beach the other weekend mothers pushed children in strollers and care-givers pushed the elderly in wheelchairs. It seems we start and end life being pushed around on wheels. Or to go even further back and forward, start and end life plugged into life-support machines – dependent.
**********************************************************
Well Spring is in the air but those three entries are not particularly cheery. Time for a snooze.
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