Changes and recoveries

A remarkable analysis session today... after feeling stuck for some weeks, rapid inner change and reflection. I walked away thinking of fun house mirrors – how one inevitably looks at oneself and the world through all kinds of distortions; and the power of analysis is the increasing ability to sense the distortions, to become easily skeptical about ideas or feelings that don't seem worth holding on to....

And it is remarkable to have a shadow figure in a dream tease me – intending fun of the kind that should reflect intimacy and trust – and that I would be so enraged, so utterly furious. This is, after all, my usual response: I am always the ruthlessly serious little boy with glasses, looking both utterly stricken and deeply angry when anyone makes fun of him – and no, I will still probably never be good at taking a ribbing of any kind. (Which is slightly unfortunate here in northern England – where, like Australia, Bali, Thailand, and other cultures, making fun of people is the social norm. But, as usual, I'll get along somehow.)

I can't help also connecting this with my current concern: of the four Jung-Institut exams I'll take in a couple of weeks, the one on ethnology, which somehow (?) ended up being about Buddhism and analysis, is by far the least prepared; so, I am reading, frantically. In some ways you can fit the two processes together, in other ways they seem diametrically opposed (especially if you get too concerned about the immediate surface of Zen practice)... but is one supposed to go into the feelings, the past, the experience, mucky as it is, or try to hold oneself above and away from it? Ah well I suppose that's the point of the exam: to untie a few knots, and then to go ahead re-tie a few, and show that I know where they are.

•••

And in other changes, some famous deaths – Dietrich Fischer Dieskau; it was perfect that Alex Ross said he was the "heart" of the great original recording of Britten's War Requiem, because that is absolutely true. The other performers are wonderful, but you end up becoming Dieskau, seeing the whole war through his eyes. Ross quotes a shattering passage from the young Fischer-Dieskau's journal, when he was a teenage soldier in the midst of World War Two – already reflective in the midst of terrible things, the boy writes: "yet there is something stubborn that keeps saying, you are going to live."

I should take something from that, I guess.

•••

And Ray Bradbury. Yes, he wrote a number of books that are famous; yes, the Martian Chronicles and Something Wicked This Way Comes are amazing. But the really important book is Dandelion Wine, and if you haven't read it, you are missing something that you... well, that you need.

And I say that as someone who didn't grow up anywhere near the Midwest, nor in a small town.

The problem of the new lawnmower, John's farewell, the Ladies' Lodge and the ridiculous potion, Mrs. Bentley relearning time, Douglas' terrible fever and Mr. Jonas' rescue, the replacement for Leo's machine... the intense calm of Great-Grandmother's death....

But my huge, huge favorite is always the chapter where Aunt Rose buys Grandma glasses and completely organizes her kitchen, thereby ruining her chaotically magical ability with food. They finally, and comically, rid themselves of Aunt Rose – but Grandma (still wearing those glasses) hasn't gotten her talent back, and runs weeping from the dining room. It's too long to quote the whole chapter, but things aren't really rescued until after midnight:

"Then he began to move. He took the baking powder out of its fine new tin and put it in an old flour sack the way it had always been. He dusted the white flour into an old cookie crock. He removed the sugar from the metal bin marked sugar and sifted it into a familiar series of smaller bins marked spices, cutlery, string. He put the cloves where they had lain for years, littering the bottom of half a dozen drawers. He brought the dishes and the knives and forks and spoons back out on top of the tables.

"He found Grandma's new eyeglasses on the parlor mantel and hid them in the cellar. He kindled a great fire in the old wood-burning stove, using pages from the new cookbook. By one o'clock in the still morning a huge husking roar shot up in the black stovepipe, such a wild roar that the house, if it had ever slept at all, awoke. He heard the rustle of Grandma's slippers down the hall stairs. She stood in the kitchen, blinking at the chaos. Douglas was hidden behind the pantry door.

"At one-thirty in the deep dark summer morning, the cooking odors blew up through the windy corridors of the house. Down the stairs, one by one, came women in curlers, men in bathrobes, to tiptoe and peer into the kitchen – lit only by fitful gusts of red fire from the hissing stove. And there in the black kitchen at two of a warm summer morning, Grandma floated like an apparition, amidst bangings and clatterings, half blind once more, her fingers groping instinctively in the dimness, shaking out spice clouds over bubbling pots and simmering kettles, her face in the firelight red, magical, and enchanted as she seized and stirred and poured the sublime foods.

"Quiet, quiet, the boarders laid the best linens and gleaming silver and lit candles rather than switch on electric lights and snap the spell.

"Grandfather, arriving home from a late evening's work at the printing office, was startled to hear grace being said in the candlelit dining room.

"As for the food? The meats were deviled, the sauces curried, the greens mounded with sweet butter, the biscuits splashed with jeweled honey; everything toothsome, luscious, and so miraculously refreshing that a gentle lowing broke out as from a pasturage of beasts gone wild in clover. One and all cried out their gratitude for their loose-fitting night clothes.

"At three-thirty on Sunday morning, with the house warm with eaten food and friendly spirits, Grandfather pushed back his chair and gestured magnificently. From the library he fetched a copy of Shakespeare. He laid it on a platter, which he presented to his wife.

"'Grandma', he said, 'I ask only that tomorrow night for supper you cook us this very fine volume. I am certain we all agree that by the time it reaches the table tomorrow at twilight it will be delicate, succulent, brown and tender as the breast of the autumn pheasant.'

"Grandma held the book in her hands and cried happily."

•••

I think Ray will sleep deep in Green Town tonight....

Comments

[Liz]

I was honored to correspond with the late great cooking writer MFK Fisher for a while in the 80s, and I sent her this chapter because I love it so much. For several years I had an early summer ritual of re-reading Dandelion Wine. I always get the shivers when Lavinia takes the shortcut through the Ravine. The last line of that chapter is classic Ray B. And I often think of Col. Freeleigh's long distance calls to Mexico. I hope Ray left the same way.

[Paul]

now *that* is huge... Fisher especially (for me it's always The Gastronomical Me). Quite a link there.