Stacking Apple Wood

So many of the earlier posts in this series celebrate bucolic pleasures; this year between the lines we feel the pressure of recession: harried relationships, hurried tasks, and for a few people horrid choices, especially around the animals Quan cares for. There are dozens of abandoned horses around the state and the shelters are filling with rabbits, cats, and dogs of people who are moving to find work or simply cannot afford to feed them any more. Of course times are tough all over, but the poorer regions of the poorer states see the effects more deeply. The lobster prices are down, so is tourism, and so is demand for paper pulp, so we can feel the contraction of the economic cling wrap around us Mainiacs, bringing us closer together but hampering our movement.

Though not immune, I am very lucky to still have work, and a sailboat for that matter. But somehow I have not been able to write of my summer sails – it seems frivolous. They were mostly up and down the river in any case, a repetitive and solitary pleasure when, afloat, I could steal a few hours from keeping the business and the place afloat. When I took it down to be stored for the winter before I left for overseas, the eagles I wrote about have left, and the islands are aflame with October leaves alive in the northern blue sea and sky. Tycha and I, a bonded unit with a single mind at the end of the season, make our sails blades to slice the substance of the wind, bringing her across the white chop ahead of the storm. I was shivering solidly as I rowed with clumsy hands ashore to the boatyard against the sere breeze for the final time.

While I was in Amsterdam, the leaves turned to patches of rust, and Quan and a friend cut down the old apple tree. I had not quite consented to this; I have quite a history with those two trees. At about 10 I tried to smoke corn silk under the one they cut, and first heard some dubious lore about sex (“No, my parents never ever did that!”). The second one held my treehouse, and that one I definitely vetoed – many a pirate battle, western last stand, and GI heroism had emanated from that simple box and ladders set in a crook overlooking the garden, and I am not ready to let it go. But with 50 years of growth, they were too much shade for the tomatoes, and the womenfolk wanted them down. The apples were only good for the horses anyway.

I guess we compromised with the one, as it was a bristling plug of firewood stacked against the stump when I came home. It takes a bout one tree each year to keep the fireplace and sauna going, so this year that’ll be this tree. Next year actually, because now comes the wood palaver – you want the newer wood in back to dry, and the older wood in front, but with a minimum of fuss. We created a new front row, and tucked the half-cord or so in behind. It’s an act of respect for the tree, almost fitting it together again with your hands in the stacking – square on square, and the round ones into the V’s.

The tree was centered in dry rot, and needed, I admit quietly as the truck empties and we sweep out the bark and the lichen, to come down. Some of the wood near the rot is already dry and goes on the front row. Apple burns hot, and is good to mix with other wood. This evening, we burn a few sticks to ward off the damp – such a cheery smell! This morning, with snow on the ground, it is hard to pack short-sleeved shirts for a week in Phoenix.

When I was 10 or 11, I remember as I look at the remaining tree with frosting on its remaining leaves, I came upon my little sister and her friend in that treehouse, with a brown golfball of a steaming turd laid on the rough pine floor, the girls’ 4-year old eyes wide with fear fighting with giggly pride. Though one part of me intuitively understood that this was normally exploratory, the other part – it was the 50’s – stood aghast. That part went and told my mother, who handled the situation with relative aplomb. But that I went and told has always been an act of which I was secretly ashamed – at my weak need to seek another authority than my own native common sense.

Paint

Can’t be all work and no play on these trips, so after the conference ended I joined Christoph and Riccarda for tour around what’s open of the Rijksmuseum, Some days you want Van Gogh, but today it was Rembrandt I was craving, and I was not disappointed. As dark and smooth as Dove chocolate, Rembrandt’s paintings crawl out of the murky edges, gradually filling in until he finds his center, imbued with unearthly light. It may be just a portrait of Dutch burghers, or the Nightwatch, or a commissioned portrait of some self-important notable, or his own endearing self-portraits, but the dude knew his paint, and made faces luminous.

Willem Heda has got to be the still life artist of the millennium – a table full of random shiny objects, each reflecting the all the others perfectly and subtly. And the brushwork on some of the trees in the landscape series, and the ships with sails flying in the naval depictions.

But in the end, I have to go back and stand in front of the ruffled collars and their faces, unafraid of wrinkles or of character, and certainly not flattering, but suffused with an illumination that is simultaneously profound and oblique, single-pointed yet permeating capable of ignoring or simply implying whole stories and areas of the canvas while bringing one telling detail so the fore with no more than a prick of photons. Rembrandt – it’s more than a toothpaste.

Lost walk

After dinner with a friend, I decide to walk back from downtown to my hotel at the Vondelpaark (pronounced fondle-park and apparently, according the number of used ‘Charles River Whitefish’ in the bushes, living up to its name).

We had eaten very hot Thai in a funky dive downtown, and my first few streets were very much the red-light district. In the outer reaches of canals, the women are older and blousy and heartbreaking in that they are still in the red-lit windows. The girls downtown are much hotter, in studded bras and butt-floss, crooking you in with the finger of one hand, while they talk on their cell phones with the other. Nearly 40 years ago when I was here, I was too naive and scared to take them up on their offer, but now – however much I know about feminism and equal opportunity – I cannot see these girls as anything other than my potential daughters – what if Misty took a turn here? Ay-yi! After a while I cannot even look any more, these hopeful faces atop the black-lighted perfect bodies – it’s all incest and incestuous, and I strike out up a main canal with my blinkers on.

It is not more than 3 miles, I would say, but Amsterdam is so curvy and confusing and (I have noticed this in the woods as well) I have a tendency to veer to the left. Thus, while it seemed I was crossing the canals in the right order, etc, I was actually headed over to east Amsterdam, and when I found myself bordering an industrial district, I realized I had gone badly wrong.

It took me two hours to get home (and I have foresworn the ‘coffeeshops’ after my one encounter with the GMO hybrid carefully cultivated weed they purvey here, so being loaded was not the reason). I don’t usually get lost; it is in fact hard for me to get lost, but this city leaves me wondering whether I should be going this way or that way down a main road I encounter, and a bus map on a signpost orients me enough to get me near. Finally I recognize the National Theater and wend my way successfully to my hotel and gratefully to my bed.

A few other rolfers we happened to meet at the restaurant were on their way to a sex show. Apparently they watched several couple make love. How boring could that be? The mechanics of lovemaking can be acrobatic or interesting, but hardly erotic or edifying. Or am I just too old? or too snuggly comfortable in the depth of gentle connection that characterizes Quan’s and my leftover steam from the volcano of our earlier days? I find it all a little sad, a little amusing, a little despairing, and not at all attractive. I have become adamant about fidelity (more to oneself than the other person) in my older years, but it is without prudery or moral ascendency, but simply as an expression of inner integrity. May writing this not bring me to the fall that goeth after pride.

FRC Day 2: Series: Sliding and Sticking

Here are some highlights from Day 2, though the coup de grace on the old anatomy was delivered by Jaap van der Wal, but more on him later.

The theme of the day was the sideways connections of the fascia within the muscle. Jst how does the muscle convey its force to the fascia and vice versa?

Carla Stecco of the famous Stecco family started the day by tracing the ‘trellis’ (I would say onion bag) arrangement of the fascia at rest, with additional ‘crimping’ in the tissue. Dense irregular tissue is not ‘irregular’ at all, but has a variety of directions at very precise angles for dealing with the forces. What slides, and what is fixed?

How much is the thoracolumbar fascia a sense organ and how much a force transmitter? asks Jonas Tesarz.

Jean_Paul Delage, working with Guimberteau, shows the cells in the paratendon (what we used to think of as the sheath).

Peter Purslow showed great pictures of the honeycomb of the endomysium, showing the same angle of fibers Stecco described, which go longitudinal when the muscle is stretched, and go circumferential when the muscle is contracted. Interestingly, while the endomysium is well-equiped to transmit force, the perimysium – which is continuous with the epimysium – is poorly constructed to transmit force – so what it is for?

Coffeeshop

When in Rome… Gathered up in a group of Canadians, I’m hanging on the back side of a bicycle, tootling around the canals in search of night life. The difficulty of getting people motivated goes up geometrically as the number of people goes up arithmetically, so indecision was reigning and my ass was getting sorer so I made an executive decision for ‘Kelim’, a Turkish restaurant.

After patliçan and lamb, we slide over the road to a ‘coffeeshop’.

Having not been in Amsterdam for nearly 40 years, how could I expect it to be the same? There’s a menu of various kinds of weed and hash, along with papers, tobacco, and raspberry leaf for those allergic to tobacco. They even sell perfectly rolled joints for those with fumbly fingers. One of my companions is an expert, and negotiates our way through the various choices of afghani or moroccan or these crystals or that White Widow whiff.

One or two hits later I am floored by this strong European stuff and have to quit this hole in the wall dive with its loser patrons and stale air to walk it off on the streets. Predictably, my companion and I got lost and ended up on a several hour walk through Amsterdam – catching up, solving the problems of the world, gossiping, and laughing our heads off but shaking them at the poor sad women who sit in the windows overlooking the canals until a man comes in and they close the curtain,

We finally make it back through the winding park to the hotel, on the ground again. Once was great, but now let’s refocus on the task at hand.

Federer v Del Potro

It is getting later and still later here in England; the hour of the taxi and the long travel tunnel looms, but still we sit mesmerized by the unfolding battle of the US Open finals beamed from New York.  The quality of tennis is the finest I have ever seen – long volleys of terribly fast and perfectly placed shots on the new blue court until someone is outdone and makes a mistake.  Federer had the upper hand the whole way, winning the first set handily, and being only edged out of the second in a tie-break that seemed stacked against him, getting the third with only a little more difficulty, 6-4.  He is angry, though, with Del Potro and the officials – Del Potro is taking too long to make his call challenges, throwing Federer off.

My friends are for Federer (for no better reason than that Del Potro is ‘too swarthy’ – a foreigner – isn’t Federer German?); I take Del Potro’s side (for no better reason than he has the most integrated shoulders I have ever seen). The fourth set was a titanic struggle, in which Federer had a number of break and match points, where he could have put Del Potro away, but the young Argentinian – tired to the point of sometimes looking asleep between the points – always found a way to reach inside and keep himself alive – and the fourth set again went to him in another high-wire tie break.

We are resigned to stay with it until finally in the 5^th hyper-dramatic set, with our fingers tingling and our stomachs tight, Del Potro bests the older but petulant Federer.  The Argentinian fell on his back in exhaustion and disbelief that from so far down he has pulled it off – won his first US Open at 20, beating the cold, intemperate, but highly disciplined champion.

Earlier this very day I was railing against the watching of sports, the voyeuristic slump of the observer rather than the total involvement of the player – but this puts paid to my notion: this is a pas de deux that satisfies as much as any dance.

Routier

Not wanting to stay near the airport, we dive off the motorway near St Emilion, un region de vignobles – wine country.  I spotted the dilapidated hotel/bar just up from the exit, where the Holiday Inn would be in America, but we sped on toward what we hoped would be picturesque little towns between les Chateau de this and that.  We wind among the vines, heavy with purple grapes hanging like dark udders beneath the torsos of green leaves, surely about to be picked.  The occasional villages, however, were strangely deserted, shut up tight with no hotels, so we turned back to the old routier.

Tiles were falling off the roof, the shutters peeling and haphazard, the parking lot potholed – we knew we were in for an adventure.  Stepping past the couple of outside smokers into the bar (which had been unfortunately remodeled in, I would guess, the early 70’s – does avocado formica speak to you?), we inquire about a room.  Clearly used to truck drivers, the trim barmaid with the Wal-Mart clothes, tight curly hair, and machine-gun delivery shows us a dusty room with two beds tiredly sagging in the middle, covered in cheap souvenir blankets.  We take it.

Though we have a sink in the room, the toilet’s down the hall.  I stop to take advantage of the facilities on the way back down – when I pull the handle water intended to flush spurts up and over the edge.  I warn Misty that if she should have to use the bathroom she should be prepared for a bidet  (and bring her own paper), but she can read the sign that I cannot (roughly): Pull the handle gently or you will be … arrosé (sprinkled like a flower).  Only the French…

In the bar, I discover a Gottlieb pinball machine (they’re the best).  I love pinball, but who, in this era of video games, can find them any more?  Crash your electronic car and live to drive again, blast aliens or bad guys all you want; I like the precise measure of the initial skill shot, the satisfying chung of the bumpers, the careening silver ball either poised momentarily on the flippers or sped on with a shove with the heel of a hand to the corner of the machine, knocking down the targets, ringing the bells, or, alas, slipping down the side lane, and, if you’re lucky or been at it long enough, the thrilling definitive ‘tok’ of a free game.  Stupid, I know, but if you grew up with it – the occasionally changed-out pinball games in the bowling alley were the most exciting thing in my tiny Maine town.  Unfortunately, this one – the board and runners patina’d in black from long years – has lost the scoring function, so the general uselessness is piled onto by utter pointlessness.  Even though I bought 3 games, one fulfills the nostalgie.

Meanwhile, Misty has negotiated a fine bottle of red wine for a ridiculously low price from the barkeep, who looks like a cheerful cowboy in a paid shirt and a neckerchief, but this turns out to be a cover for a tracheotomy.  A knot of questionable characters sits drinking and watching France vs. Serbia on the tellie; Note to self: make sure the Audi is locked for the night.  A woman in a full skirt and long gray hair that she holds protectively across her mouth is anxiously waiting for someone to arrive.  She watches me playing pinball and reads judgment in my eyes (I do not intend it, but she is not the first).

Misty and I sit outside at a wobbly plastic table to enjoy the wine in the fading light.  This woman paces back and forth, looking down the road casting us menacing glances from behind her hair.  From the doorway, she unexpectedly launches herself forward, she spits at us, revealing the missing and rotted teeth she was hiding with her hair.  Fortunately most of it hits the glass door by our table, but the venom of her look is even worse, belied by a flashing grimace at Misty that could have been glee or apology or just plain craziness.  The barkeep and the brunette, clearly she is a tolerated local, react in horror and drag her safely away, “Non, ces sonts les clients!”.  This has the unexpected effect of putting everyone else on our side, and the atmosphere, sans la folie, warms considerably.

Dinner at a routier can be marvelous or dispiriting, and ours is a mixture – richly-sauced coq au vin, but with a tired buffet of mixed salads, measly olives, overcooked haricots verts, fatty terrines, and packaged crab sticks.  This is followed by flan from a package, and capped off with such fabulous local cheeses that even I, generally not a fan of the cheese course, cannot resist.

Throughout the meal, Misty has been recapping her year in terms of friendships won and lost, and lessons learned about loyalty and betrayal – and self-loyalty and self-betrayal that these days often get clumped under the heading of ‘boundary issues’.  Would that I could have been so self-aware at 22 – what humiliations and useless twists and turns I might have avoided!

The beds await, and after consuming Joss Whedon’s short Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog (Misty and I are both Whedon dorks, and can to our horror identify a moment from the 10 hours of Firefly with no more than a snippet of music), the creaking beds, the wild splashing of the toilet down the hall, or the unidentified electrical buzz – any of which could have led to insomnia – are not enough to keep us from the welcoming arms of Morpheus.

Alegria

Any bodyworker who ran away to join a circus would surely gravitate toward Cirque de Soleil.  An outgrowth of the Paris street theater of the inter-war period, Cirque retains a radicalism not of politics (all the shows I’ve seen steer clear of social positions), but still present a definite challenge to the status quo as regards physicality, and that of course is the life blood of a bodyworker’s politics.  At least this bodyworker’s politics.

Of course, the economics are not those of social change – thousands of us ticket-payers flexed into our chairs at BU’s Agganis Arena, while the Asian and Russian (or so I expect) acrobats thrilled us and put us to shame in their ability to bend, coordinate, balance in extreme positions with a relaxed mien and élan to spare.  On that level, it is simply a great show, thrilling to young and old alike.

But underneath, we can read between the lines a little.  Multiculturalism is packed into the show.  The songs – all live music in every Cirque show – seem to be in Esperanto (even if they have a certain Celine Dion recognizability). The syntax mimics a language, but only an occasional word is recognizable.  The clowns also, when they speak beyond noises, have the same quasi-language understandable by all.  The masks are commedia del arte, the costumes from French baroque, the set and props straight off the latest high-tech shelf.  We were seated behind the tech board, and it was huge and required four people to run the lights and sound.

Aside from the worldwide values, there is a strong political message of being enough.  Billions of dollars are spent on advertising, and most of the message is: You are not good enough as you are.  You need this cigarette, that deodorant, or this or that pill to be really good enough.  Use this product, the ad seems to say, and you will get a total makeover, have friends, and be the toast of the town. But the Cirque performers ignore all that and say, “Watch this!”

Never mind the balance and the coordination, try on the core strength required to stand on your head alone and still juggle three balls at the same time (remember, the juggling is taking place upside down).  The snaky girl who worked with the metal-ring hula hoops at one point had one ring circling around the knee of the leg she was standing on while she transferred another from her wrist to the other ankle, which was over her head.  But the knee one on the standing leg is still going on and on in place.

It’s so ordinary, it almost could be happening on a school playground.  The message is: “You could do this too.”  Of course I can’t, any more than I could stand two minutes on a professional football field, but this seems somehow more reachable, just practice, practice, practice. A human, rather than a superfuman scale.  I absolutely delight at the astounding feats of footballers, but the skills seem Olympian, out of reach for any but those who are born with it, and born into it.  But I could be (in my dreams, or could have been, since I have passed the big 6-0) a trick bike rider, or able to jump from beam to beam with aplomb.

The political message of the body underlies the debate we are having on health care (way underlies, given the level of the dialogue we are having in the media).  Beyond how we pay for health care (who took the single payer off the table/ – I have lived under a number of systems, and the only ones that socially work are single-payer, socialized, government regulated ones), there is a much larger debate waiting to happen.  How do we educate, inculcate, and reinforce health, rather than waiting until it becomes a disease we can ‘cure’?

We know how to do this: encourage exercise (and make that exercise more complete), good nutrition, and self-expression, while discouraging overconsumption of food, liquor, and drugs.  So simple.  So hard.  So hard for the current system especially where, no matter how well-intentioned the medical practitioner, the system encourages heroic procedures for well-advanced diseases.  There is no money, no incentive at all, for preventive medicine or health education.

Nowhere is this more evident than in our attitude to sexual health.  I was raised in the era when masturbation was thought to make you go blind, and went by the euphemism ‘self-abuse’.  But nothing is more indicative of health or more conducive to getting the hormones, nervous system, and circulation to work right than healthy sexual release.  Reich recognized this, while Freud skirted around it.  I know my clients are getting healthier when their sexual selves are getting a regular workout.  Even sexual excess or fetishism is less damaging to the body than food or drug excesses.  But sexual health remains far from the discussion table.  We’ll know we are getting healthier as a society when health education, including real sex education, is up for discussion.

Which brings me to another act of Cirque, and a comparison of the Alegria we saw last night and the Zumanity I saw a couple of years ago.  I’ve never thought that hanging onto a couple of ropes and being swept up off the stage and around the theater air by a cable required much skill, compared to what I have been describing.  The guy last night got much applause for his spins, but we were applauding his strong shoulders and his adaptable inner ear.

At Zumanity, it was a woman who wrapped the red curtains around her wrists and went sailing off above us.  But in this show, a tribute to human sexuality, even if Las Vegas style, she built the intensity of her song and her swoops and soars until it broke into a distinct (and, I’m sorry, very satisfying) orgasm.  This is a deeply political message for our age: the right of every woman to control, explore, and take command of and pleasure in the full range of her sexuality, from orgasm to abstinence, from birth to yes, even abortion.

One can construct a theory of modern culture that it is a patriarchal system designed to contain and control the primal, creative, right brain, intuitive, messy, dream-filled and illogical power of the feminine. (Actually, I don’t recommend it any one-dimensional analysis of culture – be it race, the Masons, extra-terrestrials, or the Tri-Lateral Commission – it will miss a lot and be poorer for it.)  Cirque de Soleil, for all its commercial success and slick presentation, points the way to a new relationship with the body.

Health Care Reform

As a small businessman, consumer, and health care / education provider, I am vitally interested in health care reform.  Get out of stupid wars, restore American integrity, and reform health care – that was the mandate I signed on for when I voted for Barack Obama.

I have lived under ’socialized medicine’ in England.  Bring it on for America, as far as I am concerned.  The problems (and there are some, definitely, with any health care delivery) are minor compared to the problems we have; the government runs health care very well.  Those with the money are free to buy private supplemental insurance.  I grumbled about the NHS tax charges when I was there, but it was substantially less money than I pay here for substantially less coverage.

So it is inexplicable to me that Obama has been marching toward the right on this: taking single-payer off the table from the gitgo (bad move) and conceding again and again, most recently on a public option (even worse move – amounts to no reform at all).  And all for naught – not one Republican has deigned to show support or commit their vote.  Rush Limbaugh and Hannity and the rest of the thoughtless voices  – who have yet to offer any alternative – must be laughing at how easy this has been, the total derailment of any and all reform efforts.

Shortly after Labor Day, or when the Congress returns, Obama should:

1) Announce his own plan – he should separate his plan from the Democratic Party (in the toilet) and certainly from the GOP (in the cess pool), and it should have three key points (including the public option) and a good slogan.  He should also keep stressing the economic aspect: in order to compete with China and India in the coming century, we have to get hold of health care costs.

2) Mobilize his base around this plan, and use the mobilized base to stop ridiculous mischaracterizations like ‘death panels’, unplugging Grandma, and government takeover.

3) ‘Or else’ the congressional democrats to get this through.

When it’s done, let the chips fall where they may.  But caving to a right wing who knows not what it wants seems nonsensical – it gets no votes, it guts the intent, and the half-baked reform will be an albatross around Obama’s neck.  Stand up, live your ideals, now’s the time, get it done!

(And even if we do all that, we will only have begun to work toward a physically educated populace.  That would be a health enhancement program.  Stay tuned.)

Eagles 3

It seems like only yesterday that the eaglets were peeping (their whistle goes up at the end like Austra’ian, where the ospreys’ goes down at the end like a souf Londoner ).  The last time I saw them they were trying their fledgling wings and their little heads were poking up above the huge – 6 feet across?- -doughnut of branches, big ones! – high in the pines on the point of Hodgson’s Island.  But really yesterday I sailed close to shore, and there, quite suddenly, was one of this year’s twins, out of the nest, perched on a branch.  Surprised me when he swam into the binocular view – seemingly and suddenly as big as Mom, but then I realized that it’s just his feathers that were juvenile, puffed-out, giving him a hooded look like an owl.  He also had that owl stillness, already low in his body and regal; no other word will work even though this bird is the symbol of our non-monarchal republic.

How did they grow so fast from tern-sized squawker to commanding the cove from his perch?  How did he gain so much apparent wisdom in his face in a few short weeks?  These animals must partake of their ancestors’ accumulated wisdom the way Jane Auel says the Neanderthals did.  Or perhaps it is just that they look down so sharp-eyed at the rest of us fool mortals, scurrying around scavenging at the bottom of the air-ocean.

One of us fool mortals is Joy Vaughn, a local artist and no fool.  She comes out to see the eagles nearly every day, and she was out there in her outboard with her binoculars when I was, “They’re my grandchildren,” she says, laying claim to ‘my’ eagles.  Soon the young ‘uns ‘ll be looking for a new place to nest.