Like any other, but not

Today had the feel of a familiar room, of a space whose contours I knew well. Autumn Saturday: rise at 6:30 to Cleo's stirrings; carry her downstairs for a change of diaper and a cup of espresso - and then spend much of the day grading students' art history papers, while L. takes Cleo to the zoo. Oh, I've spent afternoons in this way before: a Midwestern college football game on, muted, in the background, while thesis statements come and go, and the pile of work to be read slowly grows a little slighter. And with the Miles Davis Quintet on, in the background, I pause and listen at the very same moment in Nasqualero where I've paused in years past: at the soft, delicate development of a piano motif, rising.

But of course it's never quite the same as in years past, either. A year ago, I read a similar stack of papers; Michigan State may have competed on the small field of our television. Perhaps Miles Davis blew his horn. But Cleo wasn't walking, last year, from room to room, having returned from the zoo and now kicking a red balloon and now sitting to leave Crayola skid marks on a pad of paper.

The same river, they say, is never the same. Nasqualero had a new dimension of domesticity, I thought today, and the students advanced, bless their hearts, new theses about works of art that are hundreds of years old. And Cleo, still an infant in our minds, totters up and indicates that her diaper is wet.

Thursday evening, and I've got film on the brain. Or, at least, I've got mistaken memories of a film in my mind. I'll get to Cleo in a moment, folks, but first, this: the other day I had a sudden flashback to what I thought was a moment from one of the Godfather films. Man in opera box, I thought, eating cannoli: a scene in which wealth, culture, and dessert come together. All in place.

But it turns out that I misremembered. (Or dismembered?). Now that I look it up, I find that the scene is rather more sinister. There's a montage in The Godfather III - the legendarily disappointing sequel to the two legendary original pendants - in which Coppola, the director, cuts rapidly between the melodrama of a Baroque opera, performed on a Palermo stage, and the real-life violence that stems from Vinnie's orders to kill the rivals of the Corleone clan. A musical vendetta thus parallels the actual vendetta. And, as if that's not enough, Connie offers an enemy named Altobello, seated in an opera loge, a box of poisoned cannoli: she then watches, from a distance, as he samples, and slumps over, dead.

Um, yikes. And here I'd begun to feel, about 20 years after seeing the film, that I wanted to be that guy in the stands, eating cannoli. In fact, now that I think about it, I once tried to recreate the image in my mind: in the winter of 1992-3, I attended a performance of Don Giovanni in Brno with two friends - and brought the closest semblance of a cannolu that Moravia could offer. Did I feel as cultured, as accomplished, as distinguished, as I'd hoped? I don't think so. But at least the cannoli weren't poisoned.

Anyway. The other day I took Cleo to the grocery store, at the end of a busy Tuesday. She's been big enough to ride in the cart for some time now - one of the small joys of fathering - and so I usually place a few items next to her, so that she can look at them, or feel them. Or, as on Tuesday, begin to eat them, to my surprise. Her little hand wandered into the bag of red grapes once, and again, and again, and as we moved up and down the aisles she continued to help herself, in a leisurely manner. And it occurred to me, briefly, that perhaps she felt as I had long imagined Coppola's operagoer to feel: in the right place, with a good seat, and all that is needed at hand.

Areas of the mind

Let's open today's meditation with a quote from Merlyn Mantle's memoir, A Hero All His Life, on her philandering husband Mickey: "He was married in a very small geographic area of his mind."

Remind you of anything? Yes, sure, you in the back. Of what? Of recent research into music? Can you be more specific? Ah, yes. Yes, there was a 2001 study that claimed that "the gamma band EEG over distributed brain areas while listening to music can be described by a universal and homogenous scaling." But can you put that in your own words? Okay, good. Yes, I saw that study, as well: a 2010 Stanford project that posited a link between listening to "obscure 18th-century composers" and activity in areas of the brain associated with decision-making and with memory.

And would anyone like to go further? Can these observations be applied in other directions? No? Nothing? Well, then, allow me to present my own findings, based on 16 months of research into the geographic areas of the mind of a girl named Cleo. Please observe, and then discuss, in small groups:

Orfeu

My dad's never been, well, a groundspring of film recommendations. Sure, he gets to the theater every now and then, and he never quite complains about being less than entertained, but one gets the sense that films aren't exactly his cuppa. A Bulls game on a July evening, or a string quartet at Duke - now you're talking. But he's likely not going to be the guy to tell you that you absolutely, positively have to see the latest Iron Man flick.

And that makes his filmic recommendations, when they do come along, all the more powerful. I remember, for instance, that when he told me that he'd once enjoyed the Brazilian film Black Orpheus (Orfeu Negro) I quickly found a copy and watched it especially closely. Indeed, indeed: it's a touchingly strong film.

Orpheus, Orfeu: regardless of the rendering of the name, you know the myth. But do we in fact agree on the moral? Orpheus, granted a second chance, looks back at his promised, ascending beloved, violating his agreement with the god of the underworld. From which, perhaps, we learn that we are not to doubt the pledges of gods. Or that we should not desire too much: given love, we must obey limits. Or, if space is a metaphor for time, that perhaps we should concentrate on what is to come, rather than what has been. Or on and on, if one trusts the collective mind of the Web.

There's no need, clearly, to settle on a single version, and in fact films such as Black Orpheus seem to show us that the myth is a wonderfully flexible and adaptable narrative. In thinking about it over the past few days, though, I've begun to believe that I prefer a descriptive, rather than a prescriptive, reading of it. That is, I don't necessarily see the story as insinuating that Orpheus was mistaken in looking back. Rather, one can also see the process as inevitable, and as fated: we always look back, regardless of prohibitions or desires - and the result is always faint, and thin, and dissolute.

Again and again, over the past few months, I've been struck by how little I seem to recall of the first year of parenting. By how many gestures are lost; by the raw fact that Cleo will never be an infant again. Call those losses a first death. And so this blog becomes my deal with Dis: an effort to reconstitute, to give flesh to the lost, to make the dead alive. But I know - and you know, as well, if we're being honest - that even such efforts are temporary. You'll forget these words in an hour or two. I'll forget their theme in a week. The web servers that enable them are fragile, and shockingly temporary, in the larger scheme of things. And so an attempt to reconstitute can only point, all over again, to loss, and to memories.

Genre mastery

The d.j. was talking about Neil Young's new album, and his basic point was that Young has made a career of moving from genre to genre. Each album seems to imply a temporary commitment to, or a momentary immersion in, some musical tradition or another. "He had his country phase," argued the d.j. "He had his anthem rock stage. He had his rockabilly phase. One album was all about roots music."

Cleo seems to work in much the same way, although where Young gives each tradition a year or two, Cleo's usually satisfied with a week or two of intense exploration. For a time, it was thresholds: she would crawl back and forth over small changes in floor level, up and down, up and down. Then it was rocking chairs: she learned to climb onto her small, Mandarin red chair, and to propel it back and forth with a force that belied her tiny frame. Next up, swings: over the course of a week dedicated largely to swing sets, she learned to lean forward while swinging, and then to slouch; to put her arms up and to grab small objects while arcing back and forth. And in recent weeks, it's been shoes, as she has spent several happy quarter hours trying to put on and take off her tiny pairs of shoes, and slippers, and sandals.

Young just issued his new release, which is widely seen as a combination of several styles. And there, too, Cleo is just behind: like the grizzled rocker, she learns, and learns, and then tries to synthesize. Soon enough, she'll be strapping on shoes and walking coolly over a threshold to take a seat in her rocker.