Edification – Rabbit-holes, music, and tomatoes
Edification – Newsletter #86 – September 5, 2021
Dear Reader,
Happy Sunday!
It’s raining – again, again, forever – this morning as I send out this email. A little after eight and cool enough for a sweater. It’s percolator-coffee weather.
Publication news this week: a very short poem, “The Horses at Herculaneum”, in Halfway Down the Stairs’ fantastic “Skeletons” issue.
This is one of several poems I wrote on about the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, with all its obvious parallels to our present calamity. Some were inspired by my art history classes in college, others by this haunting quotation from Luigi Settembrini, written during excavations in 1863:
“They have been dead for eighteen centuries, but they are human beings seen in their agony. This is not art, it is not imitation; these are their bones, the remains of their flesh and their clothes mixed with plaster, it is the pain of death that takes on body and form.”
I sometimes find fragments like this and ferret them away for later. I don’t always know what I’m going to use my little bits and bobs for, but something about them blows my windchime, you know?
I recently found this banger of a quote in the astronomy blog EarthSky when I was googling physics questions I had about the Earth’s rotation:
“The day-night has carried you around in a grand circle under the stars every day of your life, and yet you don’t feel Earth spinning.”
Bravo, anonymous copywriter. I salute any poet who can top that when it comes to describing the cosmic elegance of the passing of a day.
I find inspiration rambling through Wikipedia and the good old-fashioned dictionary, especially when digging into the etymology of words. This week I discovered a lovely visual history of the development of the letter U.
“During the late Middle Ages, two forms of 'v' developed, which were both used for its ancestor 'u' and modern 'v'. The pointed form 'v' was written at the beginning of a word, while a rounded form 'u' was used in the middle or end, regardless of sound. So whereas 'through' and 'excuse' appeared as in modern printing, 'have' and 'upon' were printed 'haue' and 'vpon', respectively.”
So much hidden in the curves of our letters. Have you ever opened an old dictionary and delved into the history of a word? I find it’s a secret door into the essential human. What is universal is found in the connection of early words and the ways they have traveled.
I’ve been trying to keep my receiver open for wonder. In an effort to ease back into visual art, I drew the tomatoes ripening on my kitchen window sill. At the top is one little sketch.
Maybe it sounds boring to you, but it’s amazing to see a fruit ripen before your eyes. I do recommend it.
This past week has been trying, with flash flooding from Hurricane Ida on top of everything else. We avoided the worst of it, especially compared to populations both south and north of us. Our town did flood in the lower-lying areas closer to the Ohio River; we are uphill from that by a good half-mile and only our basement flooded when the city’s storm drains overflowed. It could certainly have been worse.
In the middle of our deluge, my family was out walking around. I know, I know. It sounds gross to have kids splashing around in floodwater. We do keep them out of the oiliest and street-cruddiest puddles. But let me tell you something – the alternative is keeping them cooped up in the house or out in our buggy yard where the mosquitoes are unstoppable right now. I have waded through puddles still sidewalk-hot all summer, including while I’m wearing sandals. Yeah, it’s gross.
Walking is what we do on a nightly basis to run off energy before the kids’ bedtime. It’s all we can do. It’s adventure. The kids love it. When we’re lucky we find an unoccupied school playground or park fountain.
At the dark end of one park is a bridge under construction. My husband is a civil engineer, so he takes his own interest in seeing how the work is coming along down there past the road closed signs. We often stroll down in the night and the boys get to see the bridge deck coming together.
Nearly every weekend in the park’s rose garden up the hill is a wedding or other gathering. Through the din of tree frogs and crickets we get to hear revelers singing along to the parts they know of songs – “Sweet Caroline” or “Don’t Stop Believin’” – then melt away until the chorus rolls around again. Our youngest boy is a great lover of music. He dances along in the dark, squatting and rocking, just as much a part of this little ecosystem as every other creature out here in the vines.
At home, too, we’ve been antennae-up for music. My husband and I have long talked of finishing the basement and creating a more-or-less soundproofed space for recording and playing music together. Once we get our flood damage cleaned up, we plan to finally do this.
We’ve gotten our acoustic guitars out and started jamming together (after a baby-mandated hiatus) and this week we accomplished something pretty special: we wrote our first song together. We have played together for about a decade, since before we dated. But we mainly stayed in the realm of covering tunes and talking ourselves closer to shared musical tastes.
Maybe this just took a long time of being stuck at home together – with the pandemic and a couple of babies, we have been really, super-duper stuck.
By the way, I was laughing to myself (what?) about how, because of this closeness, when we’re old my husband and I will probably resemble each other. And so of course I went a’googling to read about the science behind that. But guess what?
“A closer look at the literature reveals that while the convergence in physical appearance hypothesis is one of the tenets of current psychological science and has been widely disseminated through textbooks, books, and landmark papers, it has virtually no empirical support.”
I thought you’d want to know that. Pour one out for science!
Talk soon,
Edie
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