March 22, 2003
I have been saved from war. They started bombing Iraq and Cordelia came to stay. Cordelia is eleven. Don’t think me some Sapphic Humbert Humbert—though we did visit the Butterfly Conservatory at the Natural History Museum —but pre-teen and teenage girls have lately reassured me about the future of our race. I have a certain sympathy for Brian Mitchell and his wife regarding their abduction of Elizabeth Smart. This misguided and wretched pair, however despicable, do seem to have had some sense that this golden creature was an antidote to what they had become, freshness in the face of a life desiccated. I have absolutely no idea what is going on in Iraq and have been studiously avoiding all media. I’m more interested in what is going on in Cordelia’s burgeoning world. (See the work of Marlene McCarty who has articulated all this and more so wonderfully in her drawings.) Cordelia has not yet put away childish things, she is as interested in stuffed toy animals at F.A.O. Schwartz as she is in knock off Prada bags on Canal Street, she likes the Beatles and Nelly as much as she does Henry Mancini and Jerry Lee Lewis. Let’s not “refine” our tastes, not put away childish things, resist specialising and selectivity, let’s broadband the world in an effort to circumnavigate the bear trap of the aging brain. She likes to make things as much as she does to shop for them. Her receptivity brought me back to boarding school and to classrooms where girls would capsize a room during prep by rushing to the windows in order to look out at a sunset. Adolescence was not a misery in my memory, it was a beautiful excruciation that I have been trying to recapture ever since. The company of young women reminds me of those precious nerves that grow up raw, wild, and function as the wide open transmitters of the world during these years. In the hot, damp, atmosphere of the butterfly conservatory, faintly scented with urine, I am surrounded by children of all ages and by butterflies. I find myself watching the children’s wonder more than the colours and shapes of the butterflies. We are re-told the familiar and fantastic lifecycle of these creatures, how they hatch from an egg, feed and fatten themselves as caterpillars to carry themselves through the rest of their metamorphosis, how they become pupae and break down their tissue and reorganize their whole beings to emerge as butterflies that live brief lives in order to mate and reproduce. We scrutinize the pupae in the hope that one will burst open, we are informed that it is a surprisingly sudden event and rare to witness, although we have just missed the hatching of a huge furry moth that hangs from the incubating case, trembling and raw but relieved. The green pupae fidget in their skins on the racks that they hang from. Maybe I can learn to clean my fuggy conduits and recapture some of that shining vitality from the company of Cordelia and her contemporaries.
Sounds like a more fulfilling way to spend time than what I've been doing. I've been doing my bit of protest by debating/sparing/educating teen and twenty-somethings on the M tee vee message board. There's some pretty scary neo-con spawn out there. Your post helped restore some of my hope in the youth.
Happy for that. I think I'm spoilt as my friends children all seem to be wonderful human beings, very gratifying. But I'm aware of that spawn out there too, insulation seems to be the key in many areas of life!
she might not want to let this get out, but theres a moon around uranus with her name on it.
Fuggy conduits, my hinny; clearly you never lost that purest ray serene. Today, Ren is working on what he is calling his "life size volcano drawing." We are taping sheets of notebook paper together
on the vertical axis to accomodate all that lava. "The lightning came from Mars & started this volcano which is actually an underground tree of lava..."
I had a lengthy dream last night of one of my favourite boy children, a little older than Ren, called Julius. Boys are adorable too. I think my last eggs must be screaming as they rattle down the fallopian tubes. What better activity than drawing with a child?
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I have been saved from war. They started bombing Iraq and Cordelia came to stay. Cordelia is eleven. Don’t think me some Sapphic Humbert Humbert—though we did visit the Butterfly Conservatory at the Natural History Museum —but pre-teen and teenage girls have lately reassured me about the future of our race. I have a certain sympathy for Brian Mitchell and his wife regarding their abduction of Elizabeth Smart. This misguided and wretched pair, however despicable, do seem to have had some sense that this golden creature was an antidote to what they had become, freshness in the face of a life desiccated. I have absolutely no idea what is going on in Iraq and have been studiously avoiding all media. I’m more interested in what is going on in Cordelia’s burgeoning world. (See the work of Marlene McCarty who has articulated all this and more so wonderfully in her drawings.) Cordelia has not yet put away childish things, she is as interested in stuffed toy animals at F.A.O. Schwartz as she is in knock off Prada bags on Canal Street, she likes the Beatles and Nelly as much as she does Henry Mancini and Jerry Lee Lewis. Let’s not “refine” our tastes, not put away childish things, resist specialising and selectivity, let’s broadband the world in an effort to circumnavigate the bear trap of the aging brain. She likes to make things as much as she does to shop for them. Her receptivity brought me back to boarding school and to classrooms where girls would capsize a room during prep by rushing to the windows in order to look out at a sunset. Adolescence was not a misery in my memory, it was a beautiful excruciation that I have been trying to recapture ever since. The company of young women reminds me of those precious nerves that grow up raw, wild, and function as the wide open transmitters of the world during these years. In the hot, damp, atmosphere of the butterfly conservatory, faintly scented with urine, I am surrounded by children of all ages and by butterflies. I find myself watching the children’s wonder more than the colours and shapes of the butterflies. We are re-told the familiar and fantastic lifecycle of these creatures, how they hatch from an egg, feed and fatten themselves as caterpillars to carry themselves through the rest of their metamorphosis, how they become pupae and break down their tissue and reorganize their whole beings to emerge as butterflies that live brief lives in order to mate and reproduce. We scrutinize the pupae in the hope that one will burst open, we are informed that it is a surprisingly sudden event and rare to witness, although we have just missed the hatching of a huge furry moth that hangs from the incubating case, trembling and raw but relieved. The green pupae fidget in their skins on the racks that they hang from. Maybe I can learn to clean my fuggy conduits and recapture some of that shining vitality from the company of Cordelia and her contemporaries.
- rachael 3-22-2003 10:14 pm
Sounds like a more fulfilling way to spend time than what I've been doing. I've been doing my bit of protest by debating/sparing/educating teen and twenty-somethings on the M tee vee message board. There's some pretty scary neo-con spawn out there. Your post helped restore some of my hope in the youth.
- mark 3-23-2003 2:15 pm [add a comment]
Happy for that. I think I'm spoilt as my friends children all seem to be wonderful human beings, very gratifying. But I'm aware of that spawn out there too, insulation seems to be the key in many areas of life!
- rachael 3-23-2003 7:33 pm [add a comment]
she might not want to let this get out, but theres a moon around uranus with her name on it.
- dave 3-23-2003 7:41 pm [add a comment]
Fuggy conduits, my hinny; clearly you never lost that purest ray serene. Today, Ren is working on what he is calling his "life size volcano drawing." We are taping sheets of notebook paper together
on the vertical axis to accomodate all that lava. "The lightning came from Mars & started this volcano which is actually an underground tree of lava..."
- frank 3-26-2003 8:14 pm [add a comment]
I had a lengthy dream last night of one of my favourite boy children, a little older than Ren, called Julius. Boys are adorable too. I think my last eggs must be screaming as they rattle down the fallopian tubes. What better activity than drawing with a child?
- rachael 3-27-2003 9:14 pm [add a comment]