Week in Seven Words #549

This covers the week of 7/26/20 - 8/1/20.

ballooned

Before the fast begins, my stomach feels like a water balloon.

evasion

Social distancing is a handy excuse to avoid people whose company is undesirable under normal circumstances.

feathery

Feathery white flowers beside a riverside path. Five geese on a sward by the rocky bank.

grooving

The dancing skaters are back. I love watching their meetup in the park, where anyone with rhythm and a pair of skates can join in (I have one but not the other). Most of them wear masks, and one balances a bottle of water on his head as he flies around in figure eights. 

lightening

A walk transforms profound disquiet into new ideas, and I feel somewhat hopeful.

self-care

The little girl chases her dog across a sunny field. They end up under a tree, in the shade. After catching her breath, she orders the dog to chase her. She runs away from the tree and waves her arms. Her parents urge the dog to run after her. But he's a smart dog. He isn't trading the relief of the shade for the mercilessness of the sunshine.

slurred

Wearing the night guard makes me sound like a boxer (the athlete, not the dog).

Two Very Different Movies Full of Poignant, Painful Hope

Title: Awakenings (1990)
Director: Penny Marshall
Language: English
Rating: PG-13

Based on a memoir by Oliver Sacks (which is on my to-read list), Awakenings tells the story of a treatment administered in the late 1960s to a group of patients who had been stricken decades earlier by encephalitis lethargica. The disease left them in a catatonic state. They stopped moving and talking. They seemed to stare into space all day. They were written off by hospital staff as incurable.

And perhaps there is no permanent cure, but when Dr. Malcolm Sayer (Robin Williams) gets appointed to the psychiatric ward where these patients have been shelved, he notices that they exhibit some responses. For example, catching a pair of glasses that have almost fallen to the floor. They may not be 'dead inside,' which is the received wisdom. It's horrifying to consider that they live with awareness while trapped in their unresponsive bodies.

Sayer experiments with administering L-dopa to these patients. (L-dopa started being used as a treatment for Parkinson's disease, and a possible similarity between Parkinson's and what these patients were suffering was the impetus for trying the treatment.) To people's astonishment, L-dopa has a positive effect, at first. The patients wake up.

A central theme explored in this movie (and captured in the title) is what it means to be awake, alive. One of the patients, Leonard Lowe (Robert De Niro), was struck down by encephalitis lethargica as a boy. His doting mother (played by Ruth Nelson) has stayed by his side throughout his catatonia. He awakens to find himself decades older. As with other patients, his reactions are a mix of wonder, joy, trepidation, sorrow, and frustration. Leonard has a deep thirst for life. There's a beautiful scene, set to "Time of the Season" sung by The Zombies, where he and Sayer leave the hospital and explore the outside world for a bit. Leonard is thrilled. Being alive and awake feels so fantastic, and at one point he says of other people:

"They've forgotten what it is to be alive! The joy of life, the gift of life, the freedom of life, the wonderment of life!"

He also becomes increasingly impatient at not being able to leave the hospital permanently to live on his own. He wants to be a man, an adult, after being long deprived of the opportunity. But he and the other patients need to remain under supervision until it's clear that the drug works. As it turns out, its effects are short-lived.

Sayer, meantime, is discovering a deeper meaning to life. He's a shy, reclusive man. Prior to working in the ward, he conducted experiments on earthworms. Humans seem to bewilder him. At first, he doesn't understand Leonard's thoughts on the joy of life, those beautiful words tossed through a window that's been briefly opened. A window that's sliding shut again in the final part of the film. Sayer's most meaningful human contact, possibly in all of his adult life, is with these people who are grasping at life before the window closes. Leonard becomes his friend, in a relationship that sometimes turns antagonistic. A nurse working on the ward, Eleanor Costello (Julie Kavner), might also become a friend or girlfriend, if given a chance. It's a chance Sayer decides to take, at the end.

This is my favorite Robin Williams role, of the movies of his that I've watched so far. Except for one moment where he comes across as Williams the Entertainer, he fully slips into Sayer's gentle, withdrawn character. De Niro also gives a whole-hearted performance, throwing himself into it physically and emotionally.

What I especially like about Awakenings is the refusal to give in to despair. I'm speaking not just of the characters but of the tone of the movie as a whole. What happened to these patients' lives is horrifying. The movie shows the consequences of missing decades and trying to discover who you now are, even as the treatment keeping you awakened may fail. But there are also scenes of dancing, including a lingering slow dance for Leonard and Paula (Penelope Ann Miller), a woman visiting her father at the hospital. There's delight in music and insight in poetry, as in the scene where a poem by Rilke, "The Panther," strikes Sayer as a window into the minds of his catatonic patients. And there's love and a need for companionship, long denied by Sayer, though by the end he realizes that he needs other people to truly live.

Week in Seven Words #386

clubhouse
The conference room smells like grease, leather, and aftershave. The attendees, mostly men, scarf down pizza and sit on colorful plastic chairs. They're talking about cutting-edge technology, while pretending that they're in a school cafeteria. There are board games stacked on every table.

colossal
The giant seated ballerina looks like a float that broke off from a parade and came to rest among skyscrapers.

future
Ten years ago, did you imagine your life as it is now? (When I ask her this, she shakes her head and frowns.) So that means that ten years from now, your life may also become something you can't currently imagine. Hopefully in a good way. You aren't stuck.

needling
After demanding that he prove his identity, they ask him a bunch of questions about himself. Like, "What's your nickname for string cheese?" He answers each one, but they look skeptical, telling him that they're not sure it's really him. These are the kind of mind games older siblings come up with.

overtures
Building a fragile trust with the baby, who smiles with saliva-bubbly lips and then breaks into a wail.

pause
Sunlight, green leaves, and a pale gray pond in the early morning.

prelude
Balloons float off into a dusky sky as the orchestra warms up.

Week in Seven Words #188

leftovers
Cold chicken, sandwiches, and an easing of tension.

meltdown
It's an episode of self-destruction. Her senses splinter, her mind pursues the dozen sins and slights she thinks are aimed at her. With a single-mindedness, she runs the evening to the ground. Afterwards, her eyes are suspiciously bright, but she can't see that she shares any part of the fault for how badly the evening went.

rawness
The color of the day is burnt umber. That's what I feel in me: low-key anger that crisps and singes and stirs up the ashes. But I'm at peace from time to time as well. The day is one of shocking beauty.

redemption
Most of the notes are breathy and weak. But the last one comes alive and is held to the limit of human breath.

spun sugar
Weaving fragile lies for the children, so that they'll continue to not put a name to what they might suspect.

tenderfoot
He assumes a humble, pious pose and speaks as one who has little experience of the world. Maybe I'm in too cynical a mood to appreciate what he's saying.

waste
Food leaking from aluminum trays. Liquid on the carpet. Little of what matters is salvageable.

Worth Watching: The Station Agent (2003)

Title: The Station Agent
Director: Thomas McCarthy
Language: English
Rating: R (not sure why - probably because of some of the language)

At the heart of it, this movie is about people's hunger for companionship and their adjustment to loss and the passage of time.

Three people form an unlikely friendship in The Station Agent. Finn McBride (Peter Dinklage) is a man with dwarfism who immerses himself in the world of trains: their make, their speed and movement, their history and the routes they've taken. Joe Oramas (Bobby Cannavale) is an outgoing, talkative food vendor, filling in at his family's food truck because his father is ill. And Olivia Harris (Patricia Clarkson) is an artist who could be genuinely calm and joyful if she weren't struggling with a horrible tragedy in her life.


One weakness in this movie is the way the characters keep getting thrown together in coincidental meetings that can feel forced; the filmmakers really want them to be friends. But I didn't mind so much, because I want them to be friends too. The kind of friendship that grows between them, three people who live in different worlds and ordinarily wouldn't connect in life, is beautiful.


And then, even with the movie repeatedly throwing them together, their friendship remains in some ways fragile. It doesn't take much to shut people out of our lives. Sometimes when we need people the most, we push them away. If we're lucky they won't go away forever.

*All images link back to their source (Flixster Community).

Across the street from the WTC

Across the street from the World Trade Center site is St. Paul's Chapel.



The church dates from the American colonial era and is the oldest continuously used public building in NYC. It didn't sustain structural damage on 9/11/01; trees in the churchyard took the brunt of the falling debris as the twin towers collapsed.



On his inauguration day in 1789, George Washington prayed there (NYC was the U.S. capital then) with members of Congress.



Two hundred and twelve years later, St. Paul's Chapel became a base for workers involved in rescue, recovery and clean-up following the attacks on the World Trade Center. In between shifts they could come to the church for food, foot rubs, back massages, conversation, counseling, prayers, comfort, a shoulder to cry on, soothing music, a place to sleep. The church was packed with volunteers, helping out 24/7.

Messages of support also came in from around the U.S. and the world.





If you visit the church these days you'll find 9/11 exhibits and memorials. They're often personal and very moving. The deceased are remembered (including those who died in the act of saving other people or trying to); the exhibits also recount the many acts of love, healing, assistance and selflessness that followed, along with the nightmarish work undertaken by the first responders, recovery and clean-up workers.





I was in Manhattan on 9/11; thankfully many blocks away from Ground Zero. My first sight of the attacks was an enormous mass of smoke against an otherwise lovely blue sky. I have just fragments of memory from the rest of the day: hearing on an elevator that the second tower had collapsed, and spending most of the day going from one place to another looking at TV screens for updates. Also calling and IM'ing family and friends. Thinking back on it I remember how people didn't want to be alone, but were leaving apartments, offices, dorms to gather into groups and try to make sense of what was going on.

My first bus ride down there felt like an approach towards a large, open wound. Last time I was there in late December '09 the feeling wasn't as strong but it was still present.


View of the WTC site from the churchyard of St. Paul's Chapel, December '09.

No matter how extensive the rebuilding and restoration, the place will always feel raw.

I've had many discussions with people about the attacks, their evil and their global and political ramifications. I was a teenager at the time. The attacks, and the discourse surrounding them, markedly shaped my thoughts about the world and how I evaluated other people's worldview.


WTC site, August '08.

What I've kept returning to are memories of how people rose to the occasion in the aftermath, in large and small ways. Thinking about this doesn't solve the bigger problems, it doesn't erase the horror, but it's an antidote to unhealthy pessimism and a reminder of how people can continue to be decent, brave, and unselfish even in an inferno.


WTC site, December '09.

The salvation of man is through love and in love. - Viktor Frankl

Extracts: Purpose and passion (or lack thereof) in life

From Middlemarch:

We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our future selves, and see our own figures led with dull consent into insipid misdoing and shabby achievement. - from Chapter 79, Sunset and Sunrise

But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope. - from Chapter 51, The Dead Hand

It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self – never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardor of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted. - from Chapter 29, Waiting for Death

Week in Seven Words #71

apathy
I get the feeling that we both don't want to be there. He's tuned out, so am I, and mostly we're going through the motions. I try to care but only feel tired.

forelimbs
Silhouetted against a glass door, he offers up a four-armed embrace. Or maybe he's just sweeping his arms open wide as if to say, "Look around! Walk the crazy corridors of my mind." He's asymmetrical; on one side of his body he has one arm, on the other side three. He's also completely nude.

mosaic
Wide-eyed in Isaiah Zagar's Magic Gardens: a small dense maze of mosaic faces, walls of bottles, bicycles, and random statuary, lettered tiles, colored tiles, flowers and lively figurines, stairs that spill down into lemon, pink and emerald grottos. My reflection is a starburst on mirror shards.

murals
It's been recommended to me to take a walking tour of the Philadelphia murals, but so far I've resisted. I like coming across them by chance. Turning a corner I face a small parking lot bound by chain link fencing, and above it blooms a beautiful mural of dancers, magicians, and enchanted flute players.

prose
Long and languid afternoons spent reading.

reflective
Night, lamplight, a text open on my lap.

yearning
For dreams half-tended and hopes half-fed.

Hatikva

Someone sent me this video today:



Violin maker Amnon Weinstein painstakingly collected and restored violins that were used by Holocaust victims, and here they're played at a 2008 concert in Jerusalem; one of the victims was a 12 year old boy who smuggled explosives in his violin case - these explosives were used against German troops in Eastern Europe.

Hatikva ("The Hope") is the Israeli national anthem. The melody is based on a Renaissance era Italian song, La Mantovana - from the Renaissance onwards this melody appeared in a number of different folk songs across Europe from Scotland to Poland; it was also used by the 19th-century composer Smetana in his piece, Vltava or Die Moldau - one of a group of several symphonic poems he wrote in tribute to Bohemia, his homeland (the Vltava is a river that runs through Prague).

Think of the music played on these violins prior to the Holocaust - klezmer and other folk music for instance; their owners might have once played the melody of La Mantovana on them in one form or another (or if they were classical musicians, maybe they performed Vltava in a concert hall). In any case these instruments, which were in pieces (at least one of them found buried in a concentration camp) are whole again, a legacy from the people who owned them and made music on them.

Week in Seven Words #14

cuddle
His voice over the phone feels like a close hug.

hangover
The daffodils had passed the weeks partying, chattering brightly, but they're worn out now; they droop over each other and hang brown and queasy over the borders of their plot.

overtire
The week starts out with a strong assertion of summer - blasts of dry heat, insistent sunshine. On the last couple of days though the heat collapses, and the wind and coolness of early spring ease back in, as if to soothe a fever.

scree
It's as if I'm on a rock-strewn slope; my feet keep slipping and my hands scramble for a stable hold.

solemn
Into the muddle of the everyday comes music from centuries ago, aching and solemn.

suspended
Halfway to the second floor I pause by the window. Out of a tangle of branches a bird swoops out and seems to hang for a few moments motionless, before finally pushing against the wind and continuing on its course.

tiptoe
I wish to tiptoe along on the lightness of the evening. Cool air and cautious joy mingle.