Rambling

    If you happened to read the last post, the comedian W. Kamau Bell titled his book a collection of awkward thoughts so I figured why shouldn't I just ramble (okay, I used to do this with earlier posts but just consider this a segue into my clearing off recent piles of papers and notes and thoughts all at once...at least until they begin piling up once again in a few days).  Part of this collection of the miscellaneous hit home as both my mother and my dog are now testing the resiliency of my back, often times sending me off to bed with soreness and aches that I've previously been able to fend off.  Then I read about reviewer Lorrie Moore attending a concert by Stephen Stills (now age 72) of Crosby, Stills & Nash (and sometimes Young) fame and noting in The New York Review of Books: No sooner had the Long Players begun with Stills’s “Carry On” than the capacity crowd was standing --this cannot always be counted on with members of the AARP-- and singing along at the top of their lungs.  Jubilant, revelatory, the evening was more than a geezer-pleaser: it was baby boomer church, late-middle-aged ecstasy, a generation stating that it had not just yet entirely surrendered to the next.  I started to suspect that no American demographic had so thoroughly memorized an album --not even one by the Beatles or Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell-- as this generation of baby boomers had Déjà Vu.  For those of you not old enough to be in this vivid long-term memory crowd (but one which I can personally add tends to forget the short-term stuff), part of those lyrics went "Rejoice, rejoice, we have no choice but to carry on...love is coming; love is coming to us all." (he was in his early 20s when he wrote that song, and did so in 8 hours)   But yes, that would have probably been me unashamedly standing and singing and valiantly thinking that their voices sounded as good as ever despite the version my ears were hearing.  Funny how music can sometimes do that, a song or version thereof almost transporting you back to that arena or grassy hill or nightclub...I was there, you proudly scream to your friends who have heard it all before and probably just politely acknowledge your enthusiasm without really caring (unless they went to that same concert).  My wife recently gave me that "you okay?" look as I listened to The Temptations do their version of Leon Russell's "A Song for You," a song I saw them perform way back when the Universal Amphitheater in LA was open to the sky and performed with and under the stars (yes, that long ago).  Anyway, all of that was a long roundabout version of explaining why my back was now hurting...it just comes with age.

    Okay, rambling, but nowhere near the rambling of Clarice Lispector whose writing rambles like a drunken marathon runner...the main character is a male, no, a female, no, back to a male.  Grammar and punctuation, forget it. And story...what story?  But somehow (and bear in mind that this is fiction, a category of reading which I rarely explore) she keeps you hanging in there.  Elizabeth Bishop said of her: ...she's the most non-literary writer I've ever known, and 'never cracks a book' as we used to say.  She's never read anything that I can discover -- I think she's a 'self-taught' writer, like a primitive painter.  Award-winning writer Colm Toibin wrote of her: Most late work has a spectral beauty, a sense of form and content dancing a slow and skillful waltz with each other.  Lispector, on the other hand, as she came to the end of her life, wrote as though her life was beginning, with a sense of a need to stir and shake narrative itself to see where it might take her, as the bewildered and original writer that she was, and us, her bewildered and excited readers.  Most rambling writers (Jonathan Franzen comes to mind) I do attempt to read but soon decide that I have better things to do such as make a batch of popcorn or sit outside and watch my clothes dry.  But Lispector, at least in the short book* of hers that I was recommended to read, broke that spell.  See, you can teach an old dog new tricks...

    So enter a few more discoveries, my intake of salt vastly increased per my doc's recommendation (he feels that I perhaps drink too much water and so I dilute what would be considered a normal intake of salt).  He could have just told me to drink an Oreo milkshake (over 1000 mg. of sodium) or have a 16-ounce bowl of minestrone soup which has nearly double that amount (1600 mg.); even a single flour tortilla (plain, with nothing else added) clocks in at over 500 mg., about the same amount the average blueberry muffin or chocolate-frosted doughnut has.   And then there was this piece in Better Homes & Gardens on going to the beach, dispelling some myths ("Wait an hour after eating before going into the water"...wrong; or "skip sunscreen if you're under an umbrella"...wrong) and adding a few others ("Walking on sand requires 25 times more energy than walking on a hard surface at the same speed").  But here comes Bloomberg Businessweek again with a report on the new "sport" of freediving.  I don't dive but I do swim and one of the things I try to work on is my breathing...but I'm terrible at it.  Said the head of USA Frrediving, Grant Graves, "Most everyone has a 30-meter dive and a 4-minute breath-hold inside them."  Four minutes?  Try one minute (despite all of my years of swimming, my normal "breath-hold" is only about 30 seconds...don't laugh, give it a shot, go ahead and stare at a clock and hold your breath; you may find that 30 seconds is one heck of a long period, one that clicks away much more slowly that you thought).  But here's what was interesting about the diving bit (and I'm only swimming in a pool that is less than 3 meters deep): For a diver, the degree of difficulty increases exponentially.  Lungs shrink to half their size at a depth of 10 meters (33 feet).  After about 30 seconds, blood vessels in the arms and legs constrict, redirecting red blood cells to vital organs, including the heart and brain, part of the “mammalian dive reflex.”  After a minute or so, trapped carbon dioxide causes the diaphragm to spasm, signaling the brain to breathe.  Keep going, and eventually the spleen will release stores of red blood cells to keep you alive for a while longer.  Below 50 meters, capillaries around the alveoli in the lungs expand to create a cushion to protect the rib cage from collapse as pressure increases on the body.  Most people will shortly lose consciousness.  If you’re still under­water at that point—watch out.

One of the hikes just before our dog's accident

 
   There I go rambling again.  Which makes me think that since my dog and my mother have now caused my wife and I to reduce the time we have for lengthy outdoor activities, we are looking at the things we took for granted, our hiking being one of them.  There was nothing like forgetting the problems of the world and your own troubles with a simple walk in the woods.  Lo and behold my discovery that the word "hiking" didn't even enter the U.S. lexicon until 1900 (John Muir would reject the word).  Said a review by Charles Petersen in The New York Review of Books: In German, to hike is wandern, to wander; in French, it is randonner, which originally meant to move with impetuosity.  Even in English, “hiking” is a peculiarly North American word: for the British and the Irish, a walk can designate any kind of perambulation, from a stroll in the park to a trip through the Alps; New Zealanders go tramping, while Australians prefer bushwalking...Muir, when asked for his own opinion on hiking, rejected the term, preferring “to saunter”; most others talked of tramping (the author adds: “saunter” comes from “à la Sainte Terre,” a pilgrimage to the Holy Land).  Why talk about all of this when there's no sense looking back?  Is that part of the "just comes with age" bit as well.  At my point in life, it's a bit like those words from The Beatles: What have I done to deserve such a fate?  I realize I have left it too late.  And so it's true pride comes before a fall.  I'm telling you so that you won't lose all.

    So to end the suspense.  Here was the catalyst of all of this rambling.  Back to Clarice Lispector, this from the book published just before her death at the age of 57 (she wasn't told that she had advanced ovarian cancer): Was the ending as graniloquent as you required?  Dying she became air.  Energetic air?  I don't know.  She died in an instant.  The instant is that blink of time in which the tire of the speeding car touches the ground and then touches it no longer and then touches it again.  Etc., etc., etc.  In the end she was no more than a music box that was slightly out of tune.  I ask you: -- What is the weight of light?  Hmm, maybe I should just end as the reviewer did in trying to sort out all the terms of just meandering on the trail (or in general, such as daydreaming), gathering and losing thoughts, getting healthier in both body and mind and spirit: ...the next time you see me on the trail, whether in a park, along the street, or in the woods, you'll find me rambling.   My, pre-1900 I might have said, what an awkward thought.

   One final note (à la Clarice, you certainly didn't think that I was finished, did you?)...growing older is indeed rejuvenating in a sense, your discoveries of that which you thought you knew now blown out of the water and you finding out that learning anew is actually pretty fun and engaging.  So I'll leave you with this, the award-winning amateur photo-winner in the recent travel photography contest sponsored by National Geographic.  Said picture-taker Sergio Velasco: This picture is a gift that nature has given to me.  When I saw the camera display I was shocked—. I didn’t believe it.  Sore backs be damned...get out there and ramble!

Photo by Sergio Tapiro Velasco

*Her book is titled The Hour of the Star and has been translated from its original Brazilian by Benjamin Moser.