No trace?

If you're at all like me, you may have caught yourself at some point in the past year mistakenly assuming that virtually all of our actions are somehow recorded, or registered, or filed away on a hard drive somewhere. My alma mater is currently interviewing, in the wake of a hate crime, all of the individuals who used their electronic ID card to swipe themselves into a campus building at a particular time; meanwhile, a lawyer friend of mine recently relied on months of Wal-Mart security camera footage to document the presence of a client at a particular time. Looking for that e-mail that you mistakenly deleted? Gmail can likely retrieve it. And, as you wait in the cafe chair for it to do so, you may well form an unintended background element in a cell phone photo taken one table over.

But I'm here to tell you, friends, that in fact it's not all preserved, in pixelated form. On Tuesday, I took Cleo to Druid Hill park for a nice play session before we headed to the zoo to look for Curious George in the monkey house. (He wasn't, it turned out, in on that particular day). We watched oak leaves drift down from their lofty branches; we made tiny hammers out of sticks and tried them out on the benches. And then Cleo wandered over to the adult swings - swings that have always been, since she learned to talk, for "older children," and thus inspired a deep fear - and asked to get on.

Say no more, daughter. I lifted her up, rooted her tiny body in the center of the depression, and watched as her hands easily found the chains. I pushed her gently, only to learn that she wanted to go higher, and then higher still. And suddenly, there were were, a dad pushing his little girl on the real swings: graduates, with little fanfare, of the bucket swings intended for infants and the fainter of heart.

I felt like whooping - until I realized that the camera was in the car, instead of in my pocket. But didn't this moment deserve to be preserved? I wondered, for a moment, what to do. And then I knew: even if we left the playground without some sort of photographic proof, we would hardly be empty-handed. Lived moments can be indelible, after all, in several ways. They may leave a trace in wandering strings of ones and zeroes, in digital documents or JPG files. Alternatively, they may leave a much simpler mark: call it on the heart, or in the mind.

She swung. I type it, click on Publish Post, and the fact is stored on a server somewhere. But it was already stored, days ago, on a more fragile and more loving vellum.

No smaller interval

In his sprawling, engaging - and very, very French - book The Arabs: Their History and Future, written in 1960, Jacques Berque devotes a few pages to a consideration of the differences between Arab and European musical traditions. He quickly realizes that longstanding Arab musical scales are more subtle than their Western counterparts. Or, as he puts it,

Our scale recognizes no smaller interval than a semitone. It climbs the ladder of sound by degrees which shock the Eastern ear by their crudity.

That is, to a Baghdadi or a Cairene raised on the airy, snaking melodies of an oud, or used to the winding rhythms of the muezzin, even the leap from a fourth to a fifth can seem coarse, or overstated. And yet, Berque insists, this should hardly be read as a criticism of Western music. One adapts to the system at hand, and symphonic composers, he writes, have used rhythmic discoveries to perfect the Western octave, as an instrument. Arab music, he's happy to admit, is wonderfully subtle. But if major and minor scales can support a Mozart, then they are probably also sufficient.

Such an observation's been on my mind of late, as Cleo has started to bloom as an artist. For most of the past year, her drawings and paintings have consisted of roughly controlled and seemingly randomly applied marks. Left hand, right hand: she didn't seem to care, and the joy of applying color seemed to be enough. In the past month, though, she's begun to articulate a style, and then to work representatively, rendering forms that clearly convey intent and even meaning. The painting above, for instance, is one of several in which she left a half of the paper - a diagonal wedge - unpainted, while sparsely filling in a lower corner. Such images suggest, to me at least, an interest in compositional balance - even as the brilliant blue mark upsets any easy symmetry. Just yesterday, though, she stunned me by dragging a magnetic drawing board out of a thrift shop bin, and by drawing a series of motifs clearly identifiable as figures. Here's one of them:

Sure, I couldn't tell if it was Daddy, or Mommy, or Cleo, or Joe: only she seemed to be aware of the figure's particular identity. But look closely, and you'll see, next to the toy car, a dominant head, four limbs, hair, and two eyes.

Berque, of course, could say that such an image shocks us with its crudity. But I think that he would add, again, in a subsequent sentence, that Cleo is learning - slowly, perhaps, but learning - to perfect the coarse magnetic pen as an instrument.