Tarkovsky Unbound

As the snow began falling last night, I watched Andrei Rublev in its uninterrupted magnificent entirety, grace to TCM which like a kind of benevolent media-goddess allows me to view spectacular things in random offerings at 3 AM.  Reading Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in winter months has been a kind of life-habit for me; the concept of war in frigid landscapes-- the freezing soldiers and the blood-stained snow-- is uber-horrifying.  Given the tensions on the Ukrainian border, the vicious attacks of the Tatars and Russians seemed poignant and relevant.  How greed of all kinds has scarred the dignity of mankind... 

Coming up from the 6 train at Union Square this morning, it occurred to me that it was a day like this when the beloved Charles Otis slipped on the subway stairs at 125th Street and broke his neck.  No battle, no attack... just a random tragic accident that ended his drumming and shortened his story.  No responsibility from the city; apparently, when a snow event is ongoing, there is no accountability for a fall.  Be cautious, drummers and musicians, I whispered under my breath; we cannot afford to lose another.  

It was another day like this that my young father, closed in behind the French doors of the den, covered in newspapers and heavy with the burden of a young family, drank himself into some kind of hospital-worthy state.  I remember piling up some record albums as a step-stool, peering in through the glass door windows at my handsome Dad sprawled on the sofa, high-ball glass in hand, football on the TV console.  Don't bother him, my Mom warned; I was concerned.  My father's parents came from Russia-- one from Ukraine... they settled in upstate farmland and weathered the tough winters with stoicism and bitterness.  Maybe their genetics affected his dark winter heart... they were long gone by the time I was born. 

The blessing of snow, like a consecration-- like temporary forgiveness-- of course reminds us of the joy of cancelled classes, of pond-skating and hill-sledding on a weekday afternoon... hot cocoa and mother-love... bundling up my own son to stand among Christmas trees on Park Avenue and survey a silent city-- the drifts and piles untouched and inviting.   In those days, children prayed for snow.

My older neighbors are more shut in than ever.  They fear falls on the ice, do not navigate well in the crosswalks.  My younger friends fear for my safety.  I am thinking about Ukraine where a friend tells me most of the people are just continuing life obliviously, while I am somehow on high alert.  Part of my sleep-deprived head is still in the medieval monastery with the noble Andrei who refused to speak and paint as penance for the murder he committed, albeit to save an innocent.  

The concept of religion-- the passion and the commitment-- is at heart this allegiance to cause.  The issue of sin seems archaic and irrelevant but our whole culture functions on a level of human blasphemy that is appalling.  The disregard for consequences-- the institutional disregard for the less consequential... when everywhere we are reading about massive financial accumulation, bloated celebrity trivia... it goes on and on.  What did I do after the film?  I watched tennis.  Guilty.  But Andrei, as a symbol of the impassioned and oriented artist, broke my heart.  I had to bring myself a few centuries forward.  

Like so many things, our urban snow episode will have a mere proverbial fifteen minutes of fame before it is blackened and annoying.  Not so on the Ukrainian borders where it will persist and fail to deter the military threat.  I wish Putin could watch Andrei just once this week... I am not sure if these world leaders have permeable hearts and care about art beyond the massive monetary value and national prowess of the Hermitage treasures.  I am not sure whether the churches and frescoes move their emotions the way the old painters intended.  The Botticelli Man of Sorrows achieved 45 million dollars at auction this week; some funds at least will have to be moved.  Was it competitive greed for a prized trophy or true passion?  Tarkovsky gives us long minutes at the end of the film... where he lets us  see the images, in heavenly color... to leave us with some kind of message, some kind of epiphany-- a warning, about killing... about God and man and art and vision.  It seems so simple-- faith and beauty and the choices we make.  The living.  The snow. Amen.

Ad Lib

A late-winter snowstorm gives us all a chance to breathe-- and even though I knew this one was going to be a let-down, I still took the vacation day and binged on TV films.  On the heels of International Women's Day, I've thought a lot the past week about women in the arts.   So my first choice was Within the Whirlwind-- the autobiography of Evgenia Ginzburg, a professor of literature who was sentenced for 18 years to a gulag in Siberia during Stalin's reign of terror.  Ginzburg, played poignantly by Emily Watson, managed to survive inhumane conditions of extreme cold and starvation and-- a little like Patty Hearst, I couldn't help thinking-- fell in love with the prison staff doctor.

The other film was from 1975-- an early Chantal Akerman work called Jeanne Dielman--  a nearly 4- hour masterpiece showing 3 days in the minute-to-minute life of a middle-class Belgian woman.  Without much dialogue or drama we follow her tedious daily routine--  hours of washing-up, meal prepping, shopping, shoe-shining… occasional baby-watching, and brief daytime prostitution with the same prim, emotionless attitude and clean-up as the housekeeping.  By the third day, subtle small things begin to go awry… and unexpectedly and without drama, she kills her afternoon john.

Evgenia eventually wrote her memoirs which were published abroad and which document her heroism and bravery.  Separated from her sons and her husband, she used her survival instincts; not least of these was her beauty, which appealed to the doctor and earned her better treatment than some of the women inmates.  She was nevertheless selfless and compassionate and courageous.  The film, written and directed by women, celebrates her intelligence, her art and her strength.

Watching Jeanne Dielman, I couldn't help seeing my own mother-- with the perfectly coiffed hair, and the lipstick… the well-tailored skirts and nylons and elegant shoes--- putting on aprons, gloves--- delicately scrubbing the stove, cutting vegetables, setting the table, pouring coffee, straightening papers, emptying ashtrays…  the daily shopping trips dressed in fashionable coats and scarves… the relentless claustrophobia of domesticity that made me swear every single day I would never get married.

Obviously the act of murder was a kind of emotional breakdown, a disconnect… a shocking climax to a drawn-out hour-by-hour monotony with very little insight into her psyche or mental state.  It is hard to even feel sympathy for her…  and then it ends,  with the heroine sitting quietly at the kitchen table, fresh blood on her hands and mouth.

What we are capable of-- we women, what is expected of us-- it is a different trajectory than that of men, no matter how equal or even superior we may be in so many ways.  We have children, we clean up, we care for sick friends with much more frequency.  We rebel and rock and roll, but so many of us inherit these expectations from our mothers, and we carry out these chores with or without resentment-- because it's simpler to do it than to ignore and feel incomplete.  It's part of being a woman, to let things go sometimes--- children are watching or listening, and we learn to gloss over with silence things that should be argued or protested.

I visited with a woman today who is clinically depressed, who is young and lovely and intelligent and cannot seem to accept being on the brink of middle age… even though her husband is devoted and loving, and she is 20 years younger than I am; she is blind to what we see, and unable to find her footing.  For some of us, life events intervene and force us to appreciate whatever years we have as a gift-- as luxury.  We stop obsessing about our own image and find our context.  For others, the mirror is their confidante.  They scrutinize and compare, worship physical beauty and attractiveness as their gauge of worth.  The culture seems to encourage this.  It also encourages people who are apparently blind to their own image, and deaf to their personal noise.    I watched a photo shoot in Harlem on Friday-- a woman dressed in a blue fur and a blonde wig with way too much make-up… voguing and pulling up her dress.  What version of beauty is this?  What role model for the young girls passing with their schoolbags and plaid skirts on the way home from the Sojourner Truth school?

I am old enough to realize I now am what I do, what I create.  The 'I' visual is no longer relevant or iconic or memorable.  I am one of the army of women who try to find meaning in their life and leave something behind for our daughters and little sisters.  Chantal Akerman suicided in her mid 60's.  She was depressed; perhaps she'd run out of ideas-- she'd been teaching in Harlem.  Today I long to speak to her, but can only find her work.  It seems important that I watched Jeanne Dielman and that it was shown without commercial interruption on a free television station.  It is difficult to explain to my young friend that these things are enough for me-- that the slow snow day of solitude and black coffee and rice is fine, but maybe not enough for tomorrow when I will resume my place by the typewriter, by the window of my brain and the weather of my ambition, where I will avoid the feminine prison of domesticity and self-devaluation by forging my own path forward, scripting as I go.

The Snow that Never Drifts

One of my very early childhood memories is the day I nearly drowned.  It was a non-dramatic incident; I was 2 years old, standing in a pool-- at someone's beach club, maybe… my Mom was sitting on the ledge in her sexy black one-piece (she had that Jackie Kennedy vibe back then) with her sunglasses, and her long legs, and her manicure and her cigarette, holding me with the other hand...and I decided I'd lie down on the lovely blue wavy bottom, only to discover that I couldn't quite find the surface.  I could see my Mom, clearly… fanning her hand carelessly through the water--- laughing, joking with her friends in that language I couldn't quite grasp… and I was rolling awkwardly, trying to yell, breathing in water…

Anyway, I guess they fished me out and cleared my lungs, and I was fine… and no one ever spoke of this, that I remember; I was too young to blame, or even to feel sorry for myself, and I grew up with this childhood sense that my mother belonged to some slightly removed womanly 'cult' that I'd never quite infiltrate.  I never pointed a finger at her, or resented her for her failings, or even her politics, until she began to dislike me for mine, and by then I'd left the house.

There are lovely old photos of my Mom in maternity clothes, with a cigarette.  Middle class women didn't nurse babies in those days; they were given diet pills immediately after birth to lose extra weight. We drank milk-- not formula.   Babies in strollers were left in the sun outside the market while mothers shopped.  They nearly always travelled in packs or cliques, and the kids were expected to form alliances and amuse ourselves.  We didn't nag or beg for food or whine.  We wanted them to like us, to give us their attention willingly, to turn their powdered and lipsticked faces on us and smile like magazine mothers.  There was a sort of innocence in this negligence; no one was policing our parents and they were a little carefree and careless.  We walked ourselves to school, we played unsupervised in dangerous dirt piles and woods,  and we grew up.

Something about snow always takes us back to our childhoods, when snow seemed more plentiful, more omnipresent-- cleaner, quieter, less problematic.  Something about the disappointment of the much-hyped Blizzard of 2015 underscored my sense that some innocence has been lost forever.  I had this image of patients in their hospital beds overlooking the city-- feeling comforted that even healthy people would be paralyzed and unable to participate in their own lives-- that the world would stop, beneath a blanket of magical muting white fairy dust-- that every building, squalid or grand, would for a few hours look exactly the same-- -that Porsches and old battered Buicks would all be rounded white mounds on the side of the road.  That everything would be whitewashed and quieted and blessed… and for those of us who have already failed at our New Year's resolutions, well-- we could all have another slate.

Last night I went to sleep with hope and a sense of relief, in a second-chance-Christmas fog.  I'd have a 366th day-- no schedule, no counting, no obligations.  I'd be a shut-in; I could clean my house, or not-- I could turn on the last string of Christmas lights I've yet to put away, and read poems.  But it didn't happen.  It hiccuped and embarrassed and bombed.  People woke up feeling guilty they had overslept.  People felt duped.  We got sort of a tainted snow-day. By afternoon, I could pretty much navigate the streets in sneakers.

My Mom, who is perpetually covered in her own snowdrift of dementia, called to wish me a wonderful summer.  I've begun to save her messages, because they're so unpredictable they actually seem brilliant and philosophical, like that Peter Sellers character from whatever 1970's movie that was.  She leaves her telephone number incessantly, because she has no idea where she is, but worries that I won't find her.  The number has evolved.  It used to be my number, the one she'd called.  Now sometimes it rhymes; sometimes it contains letters, names.  Her television set has become a kind of God in her bedroom.  The Bloomberg commentators are her neighbors; the commercials provide the weather, her music, animal visitors, friends.. .a narrative of non-sequiturs that populate her life.  Sometimes she consults the TV for her own telephone number.  It can mirror the price of gold, the Nasdaq, or, last night, she carefully spelled out 'Celebrity Apprentice' on my voicemail, after the area code.  'Words', she said.  You know, it's 'words'.  'Call me back if you can,' she says, and then 'Call me back if you can't'.  

I can't help thinking in some way she is apologizing for all the childhood milestones she glossed over, or downplayed, or refused to process.  The school plays and concerts she attended but was careful not to applaud because everyone knows that women who become performers or artists don't have happy marriages.  Sometimes she even tells me she detests her husband.  Those are the conversations I like the best.  But I realize I am grasping at honesty straws in a bathtub of milky memories where snow both melts and falls at the same rate.  And I know for my father snow was quite a different symbol.  It was the responsibility of shoveling, and maintaining the cars, and the claustrophobia of being shut in with children and a wife who performed and cooperated but never really understood things.

I remember reading in college about the many words for snow among Eskimo people; how there was a word for fresh fallen snow and another for snow on water, and another for deep, soft snow.  It was sexy.  In college everything is sexy.  I also remember a word for 'snow cornice' which actually meant snow that was about to collapse or avalanche.  Father snow, for me.  I told my Mom about this tonight and she laughed like a child.  Lately she either laughs or cries when I tell her things.  She no longer knows how to react, but has all the inflections of normal conversation.  In a way, on the telephone, she is the same watery Jackie Kennedy silhouette I saw through the surface of the water--in 2 dimensions, as she is, as she needs to be.  She waves, she laughs--- she doesn't process sorrow or disappointment or shame, or guilt, or the weather, or the season, or the time of day.

I used to dread certain seasons-- they meant being sent away, or going back to school.  But I have never dreaded winter.  It feels safe and dark and the promise of snow is the promise of forgiveness, even if it disappoints us and doesn't arrive, because we still have the dream of snow, the sleep of snow-dreams.
Fuck the salt and the plows and the shovels and the MTA.  We New York dreamers got our snow day in spite.