Autumn does this to me.

Whatever you think about Jonathan Larson's RENT (and let's face, the split over its artistic merits tends to be generational), the whole show is worth it for this one anthem. It's been said about literature that its only real subject is death. But the soul-shaking thing about theater is that it can testify to that inevitability -- that "our little life is rounded by a sleep" -- while simultaneously celebrating our joy that we got to be part of it.



Also, just for overkill, here's Idina Menzel's sweetly plaintive rendition of the same song:

Poem for a perfect autumn day

For make no mistake about it, it is indeed autumn here in the somnolent Pacific Northwest. And in accordance with the usual signs -- the softer slant of light, the scents of the earth cooling down, the return of morning mists -- I came across this poem in a notebook. It has no attribution and I cannot find its author via Web dowsing or through any other source. If you recognize the writer's work, will you please let me know?

I post this in particular for the participants of last spring's Delve course on August Wilson, for whom this poem will remind them of Joe Turner's Come and Gone and especially of Gem of the Ocean.


BONES OF THE EARTH

Some persons are possessed
With the power to tell
Perfect strangers
what is most evident in the air
They pull the past
like rays of light
Into the present

There are people who see the hidden things
Below the earth's surface:
Veins of metals
bones of the dead
subterranean waters
rise up to
greet their feet
their hands vibrate
in the pulsing shapes
of the earth's underground arteries

Light impressed upon an object
Retains its influence for centuries
Radiant forces proceeding from the dark
Form pictures

Why not waves of sound?
In perpetual existence
a panorama
Passing into unending symphony?

The great picture gallery of eternity
Mountains elevated, degraded lakes formed, drained, life
flourishes Passes away
New constellations reveal secrets
We have never been able to discover

Why not read the history of the planets
In the heavenly bodies beneath our feet?

The faintest whisper
Of every generation carried
In unyielding
remembrance.

Summer 2010 -- that's a wrap!

Though it’s not (quite) September yet, I’m going to go ahead and exult. It’s a dank, dark and wuthering day here in Portland, Oregon; the drizzle is sifting down through pines; and word has it that it’s snowing on Mt. Bachelor right now. Leaves of dogwood trees and shrubs have already begun changing color! So although there’s still plenty of time left in the season for a heat snap, I’m proceeding to herald autumn’s arrival, which never fails to cheer my gothic soul.

What is it about the fall that summons nostalgia and reminiscence? Maybe because summer already seems like a memory? I think of Lewis Carroll’s introduction to Alice in Wonderland:

A tale begun in other days,
When summer suns were glowing—
A simple chime, that served in time
The rhythm of our rowing—
Whose echoes live in memory yet,
Though envious years would say “forget.”

Autumn’s onset always prompts me to haul out all my ancient Incredible String Band’s albums, whose music reeks of autumn. Here’s a taste:



Some say autumn saddens them because it represents a corridor to winter, which they associate with death and negation. But I think of both seasons as just doors into other incarnations, ones where we occupy the same space as our ancestors and the veil between us is thinner.

However we regard it, we wouldn’t be human beings if we didn’t simultaneously resist and revel in these annual changes. That’s how contrary we are. Which reminds me that Carroll’s poem continues with this poignant couplet:

We are but older children, dear,
Who fret to find our bedtime near.

Happy Autumn.

Memento mori

Autumn has arrived in a big way here in the Pacific Northwest. All I love about living here – the gentle showers, the bruise-colored skies, the ways colors become saturated from the soft light – it has all returned, after only the briefest of summer hiatuses. Hiati? Intermissions.

Ah, but my staycation is nearly over, too, such as it is/was. Basically I worked at home for a week, preparing for juggernaut projects coming up. That’s not as pitiful as it sounds. As my friend Matt puts it so well, basically I’ve lowered my overall stress level by parsing it out over a longer period.

Perversely, considering that I feel most myself during the fall season, during this transition into it I’ve been coping with a major case of wist. Can’t seem to shake it. Maybe it’s because come Tuesday the PCS season will be full upon me, which means embarking on 10-month emergency. Maybe it’s an ingrained pattern from childhood, when falls always meant another galling year of school was starting (I was a bully magnet.) Or maybe it’s because Mac, my absolutely fabulous Kerry Blue Terrier, has also been going through something, which reminds me that he won’t be with us forever.

Well, who will, right? And autumn invites us to mull that over that sad fact yet again.

Here’s a confession. For years I’ve had this game I play with myself, as I squire Mac around Irvington. I look at this house or that one and think: hmm, maybe that would be a good place to live alone, when Mac and James are both gone. It would be easy to keep up…it’s just the right size……etc., in that vein. And also for years, I’d catch myself doing that and think: how odd. Because it sounds like wish fulfillment, when I know for dead certain I don’t want to be without my two guys a second sooner than I have to.

Then just last night, walking past all these haunted houses, I realize what I’ve been doing all along. Not fantasizing at all – rehearsing. In anticipation of the unthinkable, when they’re both gone forever.

Indicative of my mood these days is a line I remembered from an old Rickie Lee Jones song: “years may go by….” From “On Saturday Afternoons in 1963.” Know it? Well, here it is, in all its elegiac beauty.

The most as you'll ever go
Is back where you used to know
If grown-ups could laugh this slow
Where as you watch the hour snow
Years may go by

So hold on to your special friend
Here, you'll need something to keep her in:
"Now you stay inside this foolish grin ... "
Though any day your secrets end
Then again
Years may go by

You saved your own special friend
'Cuz here you need something to hide her in
And you stay inside that foolish grin
When everyday now secrets end
Oh and then again
Years may go by