Week in Seven Words #509

This covers the week of 10/20/19 - 10/26/19.

campus
Her campus is embedded into a hillside. She leads us up and down flights of stairs and shows us her favorite corners, like a nook in the library or a bench on a quiet lawn. In different corners, lemon, grapefruit, and olive trees grow.

citadel
A golden light has settled on the hill. On the remnants of a fortress, a chunky, plastic playground has sprung up.

colliding
I walk among peach-colored blossoms, and geese waggling their butts, and cats dozing in high grass. A booming noise, like the sound of car meeting concrete, ruptures the afternoon. It turns out not to be car-on-concrete, but one car glancing against the other, with thankfully no one hurt, though one adult is shouting and a baby is wailing.

illuminating
The sun presses like a warm hand on my arm and head. When the pressure gets to be too much, I find refuge in the scented shade of the garden. Later, we slip into the museum, which is laid out brilliantly, especially its archaeology wing. From room to room, with detours into adjacent civilizations, it's easy to follow the historical timeline.

purity
Parts of the day are marked by clean air, and clean, sharp flavors and scents. In the morning, we're in a forest with evergreens, and the purity of the air is stunning. Later in the day, I drink a rich, foamy, tart, sweet juice of pomegranate and red apple. Towards evening, we stop in a shaded yard. The air is cool, and the flowers spray from the shrubbery as from a fountain.

share
Dinner is served on many small plates, which we pass from one person to another while helping ourselves to dollops. The conversation gushes along, and into it we pack many missed conversations from over the years. Afterwards, we walk along broad, well-lit, empty streets.

whisking
The ceiling fan in the bedroom whisks air over me cool as milk.

Week in Seven Words #276

firsthand
They tell him not to take a swig from the hot sauce bottle. But how will he know what it's like for his tongue to catch fire? He compromises and shakes just a few drops into his mouth. Then buries his face in a pillow on the couch.

fleet
We're going to have an intense, pleasing conversation across a table covered in desserts. And afterwards, we won't bother keeping in touch.

frigid
Three winter-blasted souls. They're perched on a sofa, their eyes sharp and cold. When I nod 'hello,' they don't reply.

manhandled
I'm like a suitcase. She drags me over to the window where I'll be out of the way.

particulars
The young child insists that the elevator's '5' button is really a 'B.' He points out curves and lines to support his argument.

respiring
Brown grass and bracken in the clean air of the hills.

vocalization
After oral surgery, he tries a full sentence. All we hear is a groan that ends on a whine. There's probably a question mark at the end of the sentence.

Three Du Maurier Stories from Don't Look Now

Collection: Don't Look Now: Selected Stories of Daphne du Maurier
Author: Daphne du Maurier

For some of the stories, I didn't accept the premise; sometimes there was an over-reliance on coincidence and clairvoyance. But even in those cases, I enjoyed the atmosphere of the story.

Du Maurier is great at upending reality and writing about people who, in one way or another, are trapped in their own minds. They perceive a reality that they can't communicate to others; other people don't want to (or can't) understand them or believe them. Everywhere they go, they're failed by family, friends, the police, doctors, everyone we usually think can help. She understands this kind of terror and isolation. Even when one of her characters experiences clairvoyance, which you'd think would give them a greater understanding of what's going on around them, they're still blind in all the ways that matter.

Her stories will definitely stick with you. These are the three I liked best:

Week in Seven Words #189

acutely
Traffic noise pours in through the window with the cold air and sharp lights.

flavorsome
She's brought lunch for her child in a Tupperware container. She peels off the lid and releases the scent of deli meat. For a moment, we can all taste the sandwich.

nimbus
She prefers to straighten her hair, but I like it as it is, in an orange cloud around her head.

outlook
One of the young men speaks about visiting Syria on an idealistic mission of cultural outreach. The other shakes his head and tells him he'll get his throat cut out.

presence
Being present in the moment, experiencing hope but relinquishing expectations.

tranquility
The room is bathed in gray light. I linger for a few minutes, enjoying the calm.

whole-hearted
As the gates close, they crowd in around me. There's an urgency to the chanting and murmuring.

Week in Seven Words #124

ambiance
Dinner is held in a dim and peaceful room, the windows framing a pink sunset. On the table, flowers are cradled in a vase.

chipping
I'm fed up with "good intentions" - not actual good intentions but the expression itself: "Don't be mad, I have good intentions" or "I'm telling you that nearly everything about you stinks, but that's ok, because I have good intentions." They're an excuse for every insensitive remark, personal affront, and belabored criticism; they absolve the speaker of any wrong-doing. There's no need for self-examination or a sincere attempt to speak with tact and empathy. How can anyone be hurt or irritated by good intentions? ("That's one of your problems right there - you're too sensitive. No, it's true. Believe me, I'm telling you this out of the goodness of my heart.")

drippy
Walking in the rain wearing sandals that nick my toes.

galvanized
For the most part she's an easy dog to watch over. She solicits belly rubs, flops down on the carpet by my feet for a rest, and tussles with some of her chew toys. But there are ten minutes when a switch flips in her puppy mind and she tears around the room in a circuit, over the back of the couch and under the bed and back out again.

mellowed
A game of Scrabble on a bench outdoors with a breeze from the river.

photons
Light shimmering on the underside of stone.

sweetness
When I tuck them into bed they sing me the lullabies that their parents usually sing to them.

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?"

One reading of "Travel Directions"

Earlier this week I came across a good poem. Travel Directions by Joan Siegel doesn't focus on the traveler's destination, which remains unspecified.

There ought to be a word
for the way you know how to get some place
but don't remember the names of streets

The poem speaks of a number of things. For one, the very real phenomenon of knowing how to get around a place or from one place to another without necessarily knowing street names, exact distances, or any other details you could readily use to direct other people. It's just a route you've taken so often it's embedded in your cognition, your senses and muscles. You don't have to think about it, and if you do, the details that emerge will probably be meaningful only to you.

That's another thing about this poem - how ultimately personal life and its travels are. We can share our perceptions with others, but at a fundamental level we experience the world alone; no two people will perceive, experience, think about something the same way. We can always do our best to share though, invite people into our minds (as far as they can go).

Another beautiful excerpt:

then the road turns sharply uphill past a red barn
where a black dog jumps out to race you for a quarter mile
and finally recedes in the mirror like a disappointment

The dog offers enthusiasm, joy, and simple companionship; these are kept at the roadside, never embraced, as the journey unfolds.

the road winds vaguely past
houses people road signs
while time hums in your ear and you remember
the dream you left behind that morning

There's a shift from the outward senses and the external world (which, even if experienced differently, can still be acknowledged and experienced together) to the writer's inner world, to a dream that only the writer knows about and no one else can guess at. The traveler's at a place where really no one can follow her.

Now I'm going to go off on a neurology-related tangent:

The poem reminds me of an article I read a few months back on episodic vs. semantic memory. Episodic memory is the term used to describe our memory for autobiographical events, our personal narrative; semantic memory is for general knowledge (knowing the state capitals, or what a watch is used for, or the multiplication tables). The two kinds of memories can certainly overlap and be enmeshed, but there are also distinctions between them; these distinctions can be seen, for example, in people with certain kinds of neurological damage that predominantly affect one type of memory but not the other.

In one neurological study, a person with episodic memory amnesia was asked to describe his old neighborhood. He could remember major landmarks and broad, general spatial relations between different places. But it was all a brittle, bare sort of mental map, very sparse. Minor landmarks and details were absent. Associations, memories, the whole personal feel was gone; I don't think he would have had the experience of the person in Travel Directions, being able to describe a journey based on such personal recollections/associations rather than the most abstract generalities.

(Though I'm not sure how he well he would navigate those places on foot, and I forget if they gave him such a test. Episodic memory can also be distinct from motor memory; for instance, a person with episodic memory amnesia would not necessarily lose his ability to play the piano, so maybe he could walk around his old neighborhood in habitual accustomed routes.)