A clearing in the jungle

In the interest of full disclosure, I'll admit that there's an imperfect analogy coming up, in about two paragraphs. So consider yourself warned - but let's see, anyway, where it leads.

Last night, still puzzling over Cleo's sudden rash and ragged moods, L. and I ate a quick dinner after putting the girl to bed, opened the door to our babysitter, and went out for an honest-to-goodness date. It was time for The Stoop, a series of occasional collections of live stories, with a house band and a generally reverent audience. With Veterans Day less than a week behind us, the night was dedicated to stories that centered on war and conflict. And even the band nodded to the evening's theme, offering an affecting song that opened and closed with a stirring version of Taps, on trumpet.

I hadn't heard Taps in a long time: it's just not something, I suppose, that you encounter if most of your time in the real world is spent on playgrounds and in libraries and sports bars. But my unfamiliarity with it only intensified my interest in the rendition we heard last night, and I was struck by the simplicity of the melody, and by its powerful use of repetition. It consists - and you may well know this, but I certainly had never realized it - of what you might call 8 three-note units. 7 of them rise; only the seventh falls. And, as the first and the eighth are exactly identical, the piece leaves a listener where s/he began, but, at the same time, slightly changed. Juxtaposed with the descending triad immediately before it, the final restatement of the opening notes is profound and newly rich.

And here's the leap in imagery, the straining in the metaphor. Today, in many ways, was a very ordinary Tuesday for me and Cleo (who has made a quick recovery from what we realized, late last night, was roseola): we dropped L. off at work, we took a brief walk, we went to Children of the World, a co-op for wee ones, and we lunched at Panera and spent an hour at the Towson library. Back home, we leafed through a couple of books, pieced together a puzzle, and shared a mozzarella stick. Nothing, for the most part, unusual: it could have been any relatively recent Tuesday. With the exception, that is, of two happy, jarringly unexpected moments. At the co-op, I was holding Cleo while we began to put away all of the toys, for song time. When I lifted the mirror that I usually carry to the back room, Cleo suddenly said, quite distinctly, 'Mee-uh.' I paused, never having heard her say that word before, and asked her what she'd said. 'Mee-uh,' she repeated, unimpressed by the fact that she'd more or less increased her roster of spoken nouns by 25%. Hours later, at home, we were playing in her bedroom when she gestured to the stuffed penguin in her crib. I fetched it for her, and then went to pick something else up. When I turned back, Cleo said "Hi,' and used her right hand to wave the penguin's fin back and forth at me. Suddenly my little daughter was using a doll as a vehicle for her own imagination.

As I said, the rest of the day was exceedingly routine. It was a Tuesday, you might say, of repeated triads. But while the familiar tableau that greeted L. when she came home - Cleo and I, on a bed, Old MacDonald on the CD player and a puzzle between us - may have looked familiar, it was seismically different, to me, because of what had come before. I was now playing with a girl who can say mirror, in a manner of speaking, and who can role play. The same triad is not the same, once we've experienced the entire melody.

This evening, in preparation for a class tomorrow, I was reading Carol Duncan's essay 'The Art Museum as Ritual.' In her deservedly well-known piece, Duncan quotes several luminaries on the experience of attending a museum. Among those quoted is Sir Kenneth Clark, who once remarked that exhibited artworks "produce in us a kind of exalted happiness. For a moment there is a clearing in the jungle: we pass on refreshed, with our capacity for life increased and with some memory of the sky." Yes. Yes, we do. Back in the jungle, back in the bedroom, or back at the side of another soldier's coffin, we are shaken and moved by the momentary exception.