Week in Seven Words #569

This covers the week of 12/13/20 - 12/19/20.

linguistic

An app with a green owl mascot is helping me work on Hebrew writing and French reading comprehension skills.

nurturing

She's painted the walls of her bedroom a dusky pink and hung up drawings of plants, from lianas to roses. The room feels more vital and cozy, as if everything in it is cupped in warm hands.

rebuild

Of the dumb, shattering decisions people make, from which will they recover and to what extent?

silvered

A silver sheen on the lake and leafless trees.

snowing

The park is powdered, the paths slick.

viruses

I'm glad to hear she's feeling better. One virus dominates the headlines these days, but there are still others, like colds, flus, and stomach bugs – miserable, and sometimes very serious. 

warmer

The heat from the candles washes over my hands, and I feel cozier and more content.

Mrs. Dalloway and Monet (an impression from Virginia Woolf's novel)

When I read Mrs. Dalloway, I had the impression of a Monet painting. At a certain distance, the characters are coherent. Close up, they don’t entirely lose their coherence, but you can see them made up of an animated patchwork of sensations, feelings, and unsteady thoughts, and abrupt switches between memories and the present day. They aren’t as solid or clearly defined on closer view, though they still have richness and texture.

(On Googling around to see if Woolf may have wanted to evoke something like an Impressionist painting, I found this essay on “Literary Impressionism” and the general push against 19th-century realism in novels.)

I enjoyed this examination of character. The characters in Mrs. Dalloway are given shape by the shifting contents of their own minds, and also the impressions that others form of them. In seconds, a character can go from being a well-liked companion to a strange, embarrassing figure, avoided in public and perhaps deserted for good.

An old woman knitting on a bench may evoke a mythical figure, because of her posture, or because the light hits her a certain way, who knows:

The grey nurse resumed her knitting as Peter Walsh, on the hot seat beside her, began snoring. In her grey dress, moving her hands indefatigably yet quietly, she seemed like the champion of the rights of sleepers, like one of those spectral presences which rise in twilight in woods made of sky and branches. The solitary traveller, haunter of lanes, disturber of ferns, and devastator of great hemlock plants, looking up, suddenly sees the giant figure at the end of the ride.

A reputable psychiatrist can embody a certain menacing spirit:

Conversion is her name and she feasts on the wills of the weakly, loving to impress, to impose, adoring her own features stamped on the face of the populace. At Hyde Park Corner on a tub she stands preaching; shrouds herself in white and walks penitentially disguised as brotherly love through factories and parliaments; offers help, but desires power; smites out of her way roughly the dissentient, or dissatisfied; bestows her blessing on those who, looking upward, catch submissively from her eyes the light of their own.

The textures of different characters overlap, as they brush up against each other throughout the day. Throughout the novel, the point-of-view slips around, as if a cloud of consciousness is traveling a corner of London and settling over people’s heads, allowing us a quick, intense look at each of their mental landscapes. The characters feel fluid and connected to each other, their lives all part of a living painting.

Week in Seven Words #281

airborne
A dragonfly, a branch and a monarch butterfly, suspended against the blue-white sky in a mosaic.

buzzed
The dip has been sitting out for hours. The chips and crackers have been pawed into crumbs. The guests have had too much wine to notice.

etiolate
She painted the sunflower drooping against a faded wall. The sunflower looks like it's losing color the way people lose blood.

glint
She twirls in a dress made of soda cans and playing cards. Silver streamers run through her hair.

grubby
At the coffee shop, the outdoor seating is a bench encrusted in cigarette butts.

materialize
Walls of sloppy, spiraling graffiti become, just one block down, a series of murals: blue faces, owls, the moon's surface.

unfolding
Depending on the light, the leaves on the tree look like paper sometimes, and other times like moths about to break into flight.

Week in Seven Words #243

collected
I love her look - black jeans, black blouse and vest, a fedora on springy curls of hair. An attitude of cool self-possession.

enticingly
A bright warren of books and tables for two.

seitan
Sometimes it's meat-like and meat-flavored. Other times it's like a rubber ball sliced up and well-seasoned.

spongy
What's left of the plant is brown, sponge-like matter crumbling on a sunny window.

streamers
The paintbrush releases ribbons of color into the water.

trending
She has the look of someone who works in a social media company. Sleek and tan, her nimble fingers dancing across a tablet. Like a creature sprung fully grown from an iPhone.

viscid
Green pulpy whirly gunk in a blender.

Art and Life in The Picture of Dorian Gray

At the start of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dorian is a dazzlingly handsome young man who's sitting for a portrait in the studio of Basil Hallward, an artist. Observing both of them is Lord Henry Wotton, who preaches a philosophy of life where sensory pleasures are paramount to everything else. (How much Wotton actually believes in this, or in anything else, isn't clear.)


When the portrait is finished and Dorian looks at it, he realizes that it won't be long before he'll lose his radiant looks; like everyone else, he'll age and die. He wishes he could remain young, and that only his portrait would age.

His wish comes true, though he doesn't realize it at first.

Week in Seven Words #109

discreetly
The leaves when they return will conceal rubble, graffiti, and skeletal fences.

fritillaries
Van Gogh painted flowers that vibrate and gardens that rise up to meet you.

hissy
On the grill the hamburgers are spitting grease.

latent
I like watching people sprint up the art museum steps pretending they're Rocky. Rocky's statue isn't at the top of the steps though; it's planted at the bottom, where people who can't or don't want to race up the steps and pump their arms in the air can still stand next to him and flex their biceps for the camera. Somewhere in those unused muscles is the strength of a boxer.

pristine
For his nephew he laid out almond blossoms on a blue background - the skies of early spring, explored by blossoms and criss-crossing branches.

suggested
In each portrait there's a story - a harlequin in a winter forest, a lady who doesn't meet your eyes, a man who is considering his profits while smoking a pipe.

tarrying
Back in Halloween someone strung up a plastic skeleton outside the apartment building across the street. On New Year's Day it was still there wearing a festive hat. The hat has since disappeared, and it received nothing for Valentine's Day. Now it grins down on the street, anticipating spring like the rest of us.

Week in Seven Words #41

breath
I love these mellow gold mornings, when I go outdoors and the air has a bite to it, and the sun is out, and the trees shine with autumn. It seems like the most uncomplicated part of the day; everything is fresh and new. I'm not yet indoors somewhere chipping away at a pile of work. It's just me, my feet, my eyes, my roving mind, and I love taking it in - even if it's a short walk it feels like it takes up more space in time.

carmine
At sunset there is wine mixed into the waters of the estuary. The skies fade in a stupor.

marrowy
Good conversation is nourishing. Not just the usual small talk or discussion of minor practicalities, but meaty rambling conversation on all sorts of topics, over a hearty lunch - a break in the day that stirs up the mind and soul.

pigeon
Why peck at crumbs when I can feast?

sepia
She poses in plaid and jeans on a dusky field, her face framed with faded yellow hair.

spirited
In the back room of a storybook house that plays hide and seek among some trees, we talk about stories and poems. In the room the furniture is a hodgepodge of easy chairs, old sofas, and folding chairs that squeak beneath us as we lean forward and make our points; the light is low and warm, and a moth of some sort bangs around against the ceiling before crawling in shame-faced fashion between couch cushions.

swish
I amuse myself thinking of the trees as paintbrushes that have been swirled around in the brown, murky water of the pond.

Week in Seven Words #27

airy
I'm happy to see her in a sustained good mood, when she seems lighter on her feet and is prone to laughter.

cochlear
Our sensory perceptions are limited by our brains and bodies; there are colors and frequencies for instance that we can't sense unaided, and everything we do sense is filtered through our unique composition of cells - it's the only physical reality we know. The man lecturing at the front of the room used to rely on a hearing aid, but after becoming completely deaf he began using a cochlear implant - a small computer that's now a part of his body; he speaks of how his brain adjusted to it, and of what it's like to experience auditory perception through such a device.

fizzy
Popsicles melting together on a paper plate - lime, strawberry, wild berry - a psychedelic puddle.

fork
It's not that I fail to notice that the road splits in two - I notice it, vaguely - it's just that I walk down the wrong fork; actually it's less walking and more a determined barreling stride, because I'm already running late, and I don't want to keep my friend waiting. I don't notice anything amiss until I'm at a quiet residential street (cue crickets chirping), just past an enormous domed church, and my friend calls my cellphone and describes landmarks I don't see.

lush
They're so fine and bright and moist, those green grapes; we pretend to pluck them out of the painting and pop them in our mouths.

scale
Stones and columns from other continents and eras, reassembled in dark dramatic rooms. People stroll past and study the pillars, statues, and slabs of stone; they pose with a self-conscious smile in front of carvings with wild blank eyes, or they unfold their cell phones and snap up the heavy granite in quick pictures.

whirligig
All of the actors in this production of A Midsummer Night's Dream have a sense of playfulness and fun. Some of them have a sense of the words too, the cadence, letting the poetry roll off their tongue as they clatter around the stage; those who don't have a feel for the words tend to swallow them or scream them and rely mostly on slapstick fights and comic faces to pull them through. The best blend of well-spoken lines, comic timing, and physical humor is in the rendition of Pyramus and Thisbe at the end - with Bottom giving Pyramus one of the goriest deaths ever, after which the actress playing Thisbe tiptoes up to his self-mutilated, gutted, decapitated, flayed, disemboweled corpse (because in his great anguish he couldn't just stab himself) and whispers, "Asleep, my love?"

"A daughter is..."

A daughter is not a passing cloud, but permanent,
holding earth and sky together with her shadow.

(The poem is by James Lenfestey; the painting by Renoir.)

Happy Birthday, Edgar Allan Poe

Maybe Poe did manage a cheerful birthday or two in his time, who knows.




Why a painting by Monsieur Cézanne? It's his birthday too (Bon Anniversaire, Paul Cézanne); he was born 20 years after Poe.

So I quickly picked out a Poe-ish sort of Cézanne painting. One that might evoke the lost Lenore:

Eagerly I wished the morrow; — vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow — sorrow for the lost Lenore —
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore —
Nameless here for evermore.

The Edgar Allan Poe society of Baltimore presents his works here. Poems, prose, his groundbreaking work in detective fiction ("The Murders in the Rue Morgue").