Check. Please. Mate. Out

     Those are words no chess player cares to hear.  Mate.  It means that no matter how many moves you may now make, the game is over (so well exemplified in the Netflix series, The Queen's Gambit).  And there are times where I feel in a similar mood, stuck in the mud with few directions left, perhaps my age telling me that the "game" of my life is nearing its end.  Which is not at all depressing, at least not in the sense that I've lost, or am about to lose, for my life has been extraordinarily filled will good and will hopefully continue.  I have, in a word, been more than fortunate.  But that said, I do feel as if I have moved from being a player to perhaps a coach at one point, but am now a fan in the bleachers, content to just watch and enjoy.  There is a lot to see when viewing life from these high seats, things both good and bad, happy and sad, encouraging and depressing.

Photo: Nat Geo photographer Kiana Hayeri

     Take the image on the right, just one of many from National Geographic's 40+ photos chosen to represent 2021.*  The picture is of Hafiza, an Afghan who watched her village destroyed and her sons leave to join opposing sides; and now with the U.S. withdrawal after occupying the country for 20 years, Hafiza tells the photographer, "I've cried so often, so many times that I've lost the sight of my eyes."  Hafiza is the same age as me.  The photo that ends this post is by photographer Stephen Wilkes who captured the flags planted by artist Suzanne Brenna Firsten to mark (at the time) the nearly 700,000 people who had died from Covid. "In the midst of 20 acres of flags, loved ones know they are no longer mourning on their own," said Firsten.  

     When neighbors arrived the other day for dinner, I mentioned that we were all fortunate to have stability in so many areas where we are living, from our physical and mental health, to being okay financially.  Remove any one of those three and the life can become more difficult.  Perhaps I should have added to that a feeling of safety, that although we may grumble about rising costs and housing and getting older, we still do not have to worry (for the most part) about walking out our door or having to decide whether we may need to leave our country to save our lives.  Which is not to say that we are guaranteed a long life.  As author Timothy Snyder mentioned in his book Our Malady, we in the U.S. have a shorter life expectancy than 43 European countries, shorter also than that of Canada, Costa Rica, South Korea, and even Lebanon.  Reflecting on his time in the emergency room, he noted that, "A virus is not human, but it is a measure of humanity.  We have not measured up well."

     John Green, in his book The Anthropocene Reviewed, had another view of viruses after he developed viral meningitis: I find it difficult to grasp the size of viruses.  As individuals, they are tiny: A red blood cell is about a thousand times bigger than a SARS-CoV-2 virus.  But as a group, viruses are unfathomably numerous.  There are about ten million viruses in a single drop of seawater.  For every grain of sand on Earth, there are trillions of viruses.  According to Philipp Dettmer's book Immune, there are so many viruses on Earth that "if they were laid end to end, they would stretch for 100 million light years -- around 500 Milky Way galaxies put next to each other."  Viruses are just single strands of RNA or DNA lying around.  They can't replicate until and unless they find a cell to hijack.  So they aren't alive, but they also aren't not alive.  Hmm, that was starting to sound a bit like how I was feeling, just hanging in there.

     So jumping around to looking at something familiar and yet not familiar (sort of like picturing yourself at age 8, then at 20, then at 40, all of which were indeed you at one point but aren't you now), I looked forward to watching the newer version of West Side Story, a film and score I enjoyed since I was but a teen.  This newer version was directed by Stephen Spielberg, now 75, and a director who seemed consistently innovative and generally approached things with a fresh perspective, and to be honest, I felt that it would be worth the trial on Disney+ to get that viewing.  Alas, except for the choreography, I found myself wondering what the heck happened?  The casting, the singing (okay, Rachel Zegler's playing the part of Maria was a highlight...on a trivia note, the high schooler was selected from over 30,000 others who auditioned for the role), even the sets seemed, well, not at all fresh.  Where was the newness, the creativity, the spark?  Or was I asking too much?  I found myself asking the same question after watching an hour of Hamilton, daunted at the prospect that the initially-creative words and rap could carry me through yet another two hours of the story (it couldn't).  Then came the Beatles' Get Back archive, a peek at the young band creating songs out of thin air (the title song indeed comes out of nowhere as Paul strums his bass like a guitar, humming and searching for anything that might come to mind); the compilation for that runs just under 8 hours.  

Photo: Matjaz Krivic, Smithsonian Photo Winner of rhino caretaker

     Fresh, to me at least, was composer Leonard Berstein having the rare chance to conduct West Side Story the way he imagined when writing it, with opera singers doing the roles.  Said an article in Gramophone about the 1984 project: The new West Side Story is not just different in terms of tempo; it is also, at 75 minutes, much longer than the two previous versions on record, both of which were heavily cut to fit on to single LPs.  The slow and touching introduction to the duet "One hand, one heart", with a melting clarinet solo, is a case in point.  Indeed, the whole song makes more impact than in the theatre; here is music which, says Bernstein, "exists on the brink of a precipice of an abyss of sentimentality: the slightest little push and you're just dead ".  But artists of the calibre of (Kiri) Te Kanawa and (Jose) Carreras - "whose main reason for existing is their singing" can bring out the gravity of the dramatic situation in which the star-crossed lovers are secretly exchanging marriage vows without benefit of a priest.  "If that song is any less than 100 per cent, well it sounds simply sappy. But yesterday 's final take just destroyed me."  When Carreras sings "Maria," the frustration is evident; but on take 126 he nails it (yes, take 126).  Here's a peek at Bernstein's version vs. Spielberg's take...

     So at what point or what age do we lose that freshness, that creative spark, that urge to just try something new?  For some people, that newness never leaves while for others it may feel as if it is there but it is gone or fading quickly, whether they know it or not.  Here are just a few categories...singers, gigolos, politicians, wealthy men.  Okay, I've stereotyped a few but you get the general idea.  For many of us, it is simply an age thing, a gradual realization that whatever we once had --flexibility, attractiveness, compromise, memories, new ideas-- are now not appearing quite as quickly or as clearly as they once did.  Geoff Dyer's recent book had this reflection from the publisher: When artists and athletes age, what happens to their work?  Does it ripen or rot?  Achieve a new serenity or succumb to an escalating torment?  As our bodies decay, how do we keep on?  In this beguiling meditation, Geoff Dyer sets his own encounter with late middle age against the last days and last works of writers, painters, footballers, musicians, and tennis stars who’ve mattered to him throughout his life.  With a playful charm and penetrating intelligence, he recounts Friedrich Nietzsche’s breakdown in Turin, Bob Dylan’s reinventions of old songs, J. M. W. Turner’s paintings of abstracted light, John Coltrane’s cosmic melodies, Bjorn Borg’s defeats, and Beethoven’s final quartets—and considers the intensifications and modifications of experience that come when an ending is within sight.  

     One vivid memory for me (still) is talking with the guest lecturer, a glaciologist, as we both stared at a glacier calving (a chunk breaking off and falling into the water below) during an Alaskan cruise (noted in an earlier post).  "You know," he said, noticing my delight in being able to witness such a chance event, "you're watching a glacier slowly die."  Jump to today and again the recent issue on Earth by National Geographic.  Picture Ireland --all of Ireland-- buried under 10 feet of water.  That's the average amount of water that has melted from glaciers every year since 2000, said the article (and that does NOT take into account the melt from Greenland or Antarctica).  It notes that the Maori of New Zealand call the Franz Josef Glacier Kā Roimata ō Hine Hukatere..."the fallen tears of a snow maiden mourning the tears of her human lover."  The issue also noted that some bird species have so dwindled in numbers that juveniles are unable to accurately reproduce mating calls due to a lack of adult birds which pass such calls onward.  The issue also did something it hadn't done in over 100 years and that was to produce a scratch-n-sniff circle on a page, giving readers a chance to smell a Hawaiian flower considered extinct since 1910.  Of course the reproduced smell, despite extensive DNA research and reconstruction, is just a guess notes the magazine, since no remaining flowers exist to compare it to.  The piece also adds: Resurrecting a smell isn't just about smelling something that no longer exists, says Sissel Tolaas, a researcher and artist whose Smell Research Lab in Berlin worked with Ginko on the plant project.  Through smell you engage with memory and emotion," she says.  Calling forth a long-lost smell is a way of experiencing the extinct feelings it might have sparked, a whiff of the past.  Today an estimated 40 percent of Earth's plants are in danger of going extinct, according to a 2020 report by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.  Many more will disappear before scientists even realize they exist.

     Extinct.  Checkmate.  But like so many things, there are so many ways to look at things much like walking up to a hotel desk and being asked, "Are you checking out or checking in?"  On the near horizon are groups such as the Sunrise Movement, and the new chess champions and grandmasters: Hikaru Nakamura and Anna Rudolf, both 35; Alexandrea Botez, 26; and Fabiano Caruana, 30 (he became a grandmaster at the age of 14).  In how he handles feeling down or depressed, Fast Company wrote: He has developed several strategies to change his outlook when he’s in a tough spot.  For instance, “If I feel like I’m fighting for something, it’s easier.  I can decide to consider a draw a victory.  I can also decide to make it as hard as possible for my opponent to finish off the game.  I have to realize that I still have a chance.”  Patricia Mark took a different approach in her urge to move from being a maximalist to being a minimalist, giving these few tips in The New Yorker: TIP No. 1: Life is not “Antiques Roadshow.”  The thingies you found in your grandfather’s drawer after he died are his dentures, not a valuable Jurassic-age fossil...TIP No. 5: A major perk of death is that you don’t have to clean up after yourself.  If you can’t muster the courage to deal with your three storage units, leave the contents to your heirs.  Mention in the will that there’s something valuable in one of them.

 

     There, I'm almost out of this mental quicksand.  And while I try to make levity of all of this, it is difficult for me to pretend that life is not that bad when there is so much happening beyond my control.  A recent issue of The London Review of Books presented some heartbreaking letters coming our of Ukraine, one opening with: Before the war, I was a writer.  Today, on the ninth day, I feel unable to string two words together.  It’s hard to believe that just over a week ago we were living a normal life.  I have to try very hard to remember what that life was like.  Still, I like to think back to the opening phrase of "check, please."  A polite request, and generally a sign that you are ready to leave and to move on.  Not to check out, perhaps, but to walk away content after a nice meal, ready for the night and ready for whatever else may be waiting to surprise you out there.  It's not that you ignore the sirens going by or the chatter as people pass you; you are just glad that you are alive, here now, and ready to just enjoy a breath of fresh air.

Photo by National Geographic photographer Stephen Wilkes

*The 43 or so photos for the issue were chosen from over nearly 2 million under consideration.  Said the editor: Even a whole "Year in Pictures" isue contains a finite number of pages, of course.  An arbitrary partial list of notable people, places and things from 2021 that are not found in these images: the Tokyo Olympics; private space launches; the sideways-wedged cargo ship blocking the Suez Canal; and the inauguration of the first Black, Asian American, and female U.S. vice president,  The presidential assination and catastrophic earthquake in Haiti.  The Perseverance rover rock-boring into Mars.  The July 4 week on Massachusetts' Cape Cod, when tens of thousands packed the bars and restaurants of Provincetown, spilling out into the streets, because so many vacationers thought vaccination had finally made it safe.  Their next issue was titled "Welcome to Earth" and the editor wrote: That's an oddly appropriate greeting, addressing us as if we're strangers to a place we think we know well.  But we may find that we don't know it well at all...The flag display by artist Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg was done when Covid deaths had not yet reached 700,000.  Little did she know that within a few months, she could have expanded the display by almost half as many more as Covid deaths in the U.S. neared the one million mark.