~hail storms & swan’s nests~
May 3rd, 2009
While it’s true I am currently inclined more than usual to read signs from the universe, I’d have to contend that there have been plenty thrown our way in the last few days. There was the hermaphrodite/egg dream portending the news of immediate relocation, and then there was a hail storm of brief but biblical proportions.
It was tho a slit had torn in the space-time continuum and all the water in the world tried to pour through it at once. The temperature was in the sixties and still ice formed. An inch thick layer of tiny perfect ice spheres covered everything in a manner so dramatic people–Swiss people–stood in the streets and simply howled up to the sky. It was weather than demanded everything else stop. Bone-rattling thunder. Lightning. Crows freaking out. Less than thirty minutes later the sun came out, ice melted, everything inclined to flood flooded, including our lobby.
I went out for a walk to survey the damage. As usual my feet took me to my cathedral, a visit to which is a melancholy thing these days as we will soon leave and I doubt will return. At any rate it will never be “my” cathedral again. A chapter ends. (below is a dry dusk view. click to expand)
There was a wedding and the first tourists of the season. Often it seems abandoned up here. Everyone was confused by the weather. They will likely think of Neuchatel as that place where it hails on a spring day. I filmed the chestnut trees reflected in notable puddles and silhouetted against the sky. I got lost in picture making, something I thank Europe for reminding me that I do.
the mysterious display of the white shirt collection.
Like the sky, I felt something like crying (or spiting ice), but not exactly. Perhaps it is more accurate to say my heart is open, a little raw, fat with gratitude, and fear of the unknown and excitement in that fear. As always, there is an ever-present longing floating right up to the surface. The fact of all things passing is a pebble in my pocket that my fingers find and find and find. Goodbye.
The wind rustled the chestnut trees, which are in full bloom and withstood the storm fairly well. Everything green was vivalling, that kind of palpable photosynthesis verging on phosphorescence. Or as Virginia Woolf put it in The Waves, …so green that the eye seemed sucked up through a funnel by its intensity and stuck to it like a limpet.
Balancing my natural sense of fleetingness is a compulsion to get up and shake it when Funkadelic comes randomly on my ipod. Assertion of Yes. And a lot of walking. And badminton. What else?
I met Alfonso for a mediocre 70F pizza (yeah, goodbye to all that too) and we walked a good distance along the lake. We are both pretty giddy with the unreality of our reality at the moment. Our first crisis as a married team. New humor develops, a loosening of a kind, delightful. A reminder again: life is but a dream.
On our journey we came first upon a rainbow, a classic symbol of pathways. Then we discovered a swan’s nest. More birds, eggs, hatching. The path I am on now, or this particular detour–writing a book, grounded in my creative self, pursuing my truth through the life story of a woman I never met–began with a song about a swan:
One morning in Brooklyn I get dressed to go to the farmers market. I put on my shoes and search for the vegetable basket, listening to my favorite song on the new Thom Yorke album. It’s called The Black Swan, it’s lyrics gentle and insistent, “You have done your best to please everyone but it just isn’t happening…This is your blind spot, it should be obvious, but it’s not.” It feels great to dance, though I’m aware of being self-conscious too. I never dance anymore, around my house or anywhere.
I feel my awkwardness, dancing alone in my own kitchen, and the sorrow of it hits me until I am doubled-over, seized by the feeling of loss, of years wasted in misery. How could I do that to myself? How will I recover or trust myself again?
The Black Swan, the Ugly Duckling. A story written by the tormented Hans Christian Anderson, about the way he was exiled by the judgment of others and considered suicide when he turned that judgment on himself. He wrote, “It doesn’t matter that you were born in a duck yard, so long as you have lain inside a swan’s egg.”
(from Bohemian Rhapsody: Macdowell Colony, full essay below, in Other Writing)
It would seem we are reinventing the meaning of Swan Song, or at least to be throwing some Phoenix into the mix. Not so much a song of death, such as Pavlova’s or Alfred Lord Tennyson, but of metamorphosis. A swan’s clutch takes just over a month to hatch, which is also how much time remains for us in Neuchatel. My badminton backhand might improve a bit in this period as well. Stay tuned.
