Beyond the known

Increasingly, Cleo, you're raising questions that I can't answer. Not the iconic question, yet, about the sky being blue, but a wonderful curiosity - sometimes explicit, sometimes unspoken - nevertheless in other directions. What is that wrinkled fruit that drops from the tree next door onto our steps? Might it be useful to think of bacteria as purple seeds? How does one remedy a slight burn occasioned during the making of the morning's pancakes? And, over the weekend, what are the full lyrics to 'Here Comes the Bride'?

Cleo and I were attending an imaginary wedding in our bubble-wrap dresses when I decided to teach her the traditional entry theme. But, as often happens, the seemingly simple soon turns out to be complicated, and the limits of our adult knowledge are quickly shown to be embarrassingly narrow: we know just enough, it seems, and rarely more. Were you aware, for instance, that the traditional wedding march was composed by Wagner, and is thus rarely played at Jewish weddings, where the composer's rabid anti-Semitism is hardly desired? (Indeed, given that it originally accompanied the motion of a newly married couple into the nuptial chamber, it's sometimes seen as inappropriate for use in any holy setting). Or do you happen to know the line that comes after all dressed in white?

I did not. And neither, it turns out, do many others: it's been parodied many times, but the original is hardly a standard, in full. But, Cleo, should you be reading this years from now, know that your daddy sometimes had the time, the good sense, and the modesty to try to learn from what you taught him. So:

Here comes the bride,
all dressed in white
Sweetly, serenely, in the soft glowing light
Lovely to see, marching to thee
Sweet love united for eternity.

Rules to live by

With the rains now returned, and most of our age-appropriate books thoroughly perused, L. and I are doing our best to come up with new activities that keep the days feeling fresh. A morning croissant at Melissa's, before school? Sure: and it turns out that Cleo likes to place her own orders, with a lively emphasis on the strawberry jelly. That meter of bubble wrap I bought, on a whim, just in case? Made into a pretend wedding dress last night.

Happily, though, we don't have to do all of the thinking, as one of Cleo's grandmas sent us to Cape Town with an arsenal of small gifts that included a sort of time-release capsule, Santa-style: nine tiny presents, each individually wrapped, in a small bag. We've been doling them out one per week, on Fridays, and yesterday, at about 6:30 in the morning, Cleo unveiled a pack of fish-themed playing cards. By 6:33, we were on the floor, trying to figure out the intended rules - see accompanying card - to Fish and Pig. Suddenly, though, Cleo announced her own rule. "If you see a dragon," she intoned, in an almost complete non sequitur, "you can't give a card to a dragon."

All right, then. I'm all for gnomic advice and koan-like aphorisms, and this one struck me as a relative pearl. My favorite, easily, is a sentence uttered by my senior religion professor in an introductory course, in 1989. Although a gentle man, he had a stern appearance, and his fluent command of the difficult anthropological texts that we read intimidated us; so, too, did the rumor that his wife, with whom he lived about an hour from campus, was battling cancer of some sort. And so when, one day in the moments before class, he suddenly said, "On the drive here, I saw horses. They could have been anything, but they were horses," some of us took notice. Was this deep, accrued wisdom, in a form opaque to us? I still suspect that it was.

Are there musical sages who speak in the same vein. Frank Zappa might offer a fair analog. Consider, for instance, this doozy from the man who is arguably the most popular musical figure across Eastern Europe: "Remember, information is not knowledge; knowledge is not wisdom; wisdom is not truth; truth is not beauty; beauty is not love; love is not music; music is the best." I like the way in which Zappa moves from a sort of Marshall McLuhan-like stance to a bald rejection of Keats, and then into, gradually, an apparently self-consciously playful tone colored by braggadocio.

Love is not music; they could have been anything; you can't give a card to a dragon. More than enough, young grasshopper, for one blog entry.

Alles klar, Kommissar

I think I wrote, in an entry many moons ago, about my tendency - a common one, perhaps? - to sing or to whistle, often unconsciously and often under my breath, snippets of songs whose lyrics pertain to the situation at hand.

No surprise, then, that over the past few days I've been singing, regularly, the chorus to Stevie Wonder's boisterous Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing. For one thing, the weather in Cape Town suddenly turned spectacular, after a stretch of bleak rain that has residents grumbling about the worst winter in memory. And, too, with just over a week left in our stay, several of my projects are coming to fruition: I'm wrapping up work on a new fall course, have read the thirty proposals to a 2013 conference session I'll be chairing, and just completed a draft of a 5,000-word essay on Candice Breitz that feels strong. L.'s program has gone well, and the students have bee both responsible (as far as we know) and safe. Perhaps most importantly, though, Cleo's been having a good time, which makes life for all of us a bit easier. She's healthy, she clearly enjoys several of the local eateries, often requests rides on the cable car - and, just the other day, asked me to pick up her up from school a little later than usual, 'so that I can eat lunch with my girlfriends.' Sure, her request to arrive at 10, rather than 3, was a bit misguided, but certainly her sentiment was sincere: school's a place she likes to be, these days. But so, too, is home, where things are humming and our busy routine is producing good vibes. No need for a lengthy entry today, then: all's clear, in short, on the southern front.

But before we go: if you suspected that the title of this entry was a reference to the song by Falco, now is the time take a bold step forward.

Open wounds

If you wait long enough, the kid eventually - of course, of course - takes your place, carries you, helps you out. Aeneas bears a feeble Anchises from burning Troy; Joannes Florentius a Kempis replaces his father as the chief organist at Brussels Cathedral. And Doug Drabek scans the box scores, in which his name once appeared, for his son Kyle's stats.

No blogs since Monday, as my tools - my hands, that is - have been pretty beaten up, and in no real mood for additional typing. On Monday, my left thumb had swollen by about half: a big purple ball that itched and emitted an unnerving warmth. On Tuesday afternoon, I went to the doctor, who immediately diagnosed it as a staph infection, slit it and drained it, and sent me home with my very own box of antibiotics. And then on Wednesday afternoon, as I played at home with Cleo, I tried to open a window and slit my right thumb but good, on a sharp metal fastener. Walked to the bathroom to retrieve a band-aid, only to realize that I simply couldn't open it, with one of my thumbs wrapped in gauze and the other bleeding openly.

And so Cleo stepped up. She stood on the toilet, as she likes to do while she brushes her teeth, and calmly opened the band-aid wrapper: her efficient gestures the result of lots of practice bandaging in Baltimore. In a few seconds, she handed me the clean band-aid, and soon all was well, again.

What did Nicolaus feel as he watched Joannes play the cathedral organ that had once been his domain. A sense, I would guess, of his own mortality. A relief, perhaps: a sense that he had discharged his generational duty. And, of course, a swelling of pride.

Coincidences

Granted a relatively open weekend, and feeling uninspired by the recently monotonous drizzle of Cape Town, we decided to head north, up the western coast, on Saturday, for a brief family trip. First stop: Langebaan, a windsurfers' destination in the summer and a quiet town on a lagoon in the winter. During the 80-minute drive there, I sat in the back of the car and read a few books to Cleo, including the new favorite Strega Nonna, in which we trace the consequences of a rather daft witch's helper named Big Anthony. At one point, Strega Nonna leaves Anthony in charge of her little cottage, so that she can visit an old friend, Strega Emilia, who lives over a mountain. That departure sets the narrative into motion, as Anthony quickly heads for the forbidden magic pasta pot - but in our readings, it also involves a temporary caesura, as Cleo likes to add, for reasons I don't quite understand, an aside. "Strega Emilia," she says, reverentially. "That's a nice name."

With that in mind, you may be able to understand the unexpected joy of a moment that occurred at lunch. After enjoying a soggy round of mini golf at a Greek-themed resort in Langebaan, we'd headed further north to Paternoster, a small fishing village, and we were sitting in a handsome restaurant with rugby playing on a t.v. screen in the corner, and a pleasant fire in the large hearth near our table. The manager of the restaurant, a gentle older woman, came over to tend the fire, and took a momentary interest in Cleo. "What's your name?" she asked.

Now, Cleo, being only three, is not exactly a paragon of manners, and you never quite know what you'll get when a stranger addresses her. Sometimes she turns abruptly away, hiding her head in a violent gesture of shyness. Sometimes she smiles, throws a hand forward almost like a bear taking honey from a hollow in a tree, and says, loudly, "Bop!" But on this day, for whatever reason, she was all politeness and sincerity, and she looked at the manager and replied, gracefully, "Cleo." "Cleo," said the woman, "that's a nice name." And Cleo, as if adhering to an improbably idealistic script, replied "Thank you." We then asked the woman what her name was, and... well, can you guess? It was Emilia.

What is the pleasure of coincidence? I suppose that it largely lies in the momentary sense that the world is organized in a completely comprehensible and fortuitous manner. About a week ago, L. and I managed to catch a matinee screening of One Day on Earth, a documentary built out of thousands of hours of footage shot around the world on a single day (October 10, 2010 - which, coincidentally, was my 40th birthday). Near the opening of the film, we see a barrage of clips, each labeled with the country of origin. After we'd seen about a hundred countries represented, the pace of the film slowed slightly, and we began to see more sustained shots. I leaned over to L., and whispered, "We haven't seen Lesotho yet." Five seconds later, the next shot appeared: an image of young boys in Lesotho. Or take the experience of a blogger who goes by the name Classical Listener. In 2006, he heard part of a symphony, on the radio, by Johann Vanhal. Curious about a name he'd never heard, the blogger looked Vanhal up - only to encounter him again, the next day, in detail, while listening to Robert Greenberg's lecture on classical symphonic masters.


So much does not cohere, does not make sense, does not feel quite poetic. But when the details converge, we are momentarily giddy with the joy of sensed order - or, at the least, with a wry smile at the whimsical nature of coincidence.

You had to be there

A blog like this can accomplish, I suppose, a few useful ends: it can let curious grandparents know that Cleo's been healthy for a full week now, or give them a look at her new haircut; it can give me practice in writing short-form prose; it can perhaps console the lonely Russian who spends her nights Googling "Ruskin + toddler" by giving her a hit or two. And, I want to say, it can serve as a sort of journal, to which I, or my daughter, might return in a few years, to remember how, exactly, we spent these years together. But in that sense, I know that it will fail.

The image above is a detail of a poster that Cleo and I saw after a walk through the lovely gardens of Kirstenbosch. It nudged me into a brief melancholy, and I think I can say why: the realization that the poster pointed toward an evening of sound that will never again be heard seemed a sobering one. We gather, we make music and enjoy, and we scatter. The instruments sing their songs, and are then put aside - and all that remains is a poster. Or a blog.

Or perhaps, say the optimists, a memory? Yes: that too. But memories are hardly more permanent than these letters. Instead, the lesson seems to be this very familiar commandment: enjoy the current moment, the day at hand, the winding path through Kirstenbosch beneath your feet. Enjoy it, because future residues will never - though they may be enjoyable in their own way, in their own moments - reflect it fully.

Coming together

You watched, perhaps, the local fireworks; thousands of miles away, I slept. You complained of the brutal heat, maybe, while on the beach of Camps Bay, Cleo and I felt the cool of the sand through our clothes as we fashioned a pretend cake. You went to bed, and I rose, and followed her to the living room, fired up a new episode of Wonder Pets, and made a cup of tea.

But now, thanks to the magic of text and what Judy Densch's character in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel calls the Interweb, we're on the same page. I type; the keystrokes create electrical impulses that are stored in a tiny reconfiguration of microchip circuitry; I upload, and bundles of data are sent to and through servers, from which they can then be accessed (in a series of steps that still boggles my analog mind) by your own computer's hard drive.

"Semiotics," I read in Anne D'Alleva's Methods & Theories of Art, on the second floor of UCT's main library, "is the theory of signs. Simply put, a sign is something that represents something else. Here's an example: look out of the window and find a tree. There are all sorts of signs for that thing you're looking at."

This morning, during a bright, cold daybreak, I carried Cleo down our local hill to Melissa's, a gourmet grocery and cafe, so that a sick L. could have a little time to herself. I ordered a flat white, to which Cleo judiciously added some brown sugar, and we waited on the first round of muffins: a few minutes later, a steaming bran and nut muffin appeared on our table. We added a small pat of butter; it melted on contact, and ran down the crusty sides. Waiting for the muffin to cool, we picked up a magazine: a copy of National Geographic: Kids. In the center of the magazine was a photo essay about what the editors called the new seven wonders of the natural world - and the first was Cape Town's own Table Mountain.

"Look!" I said to Cleo, and pointed to the glossy photo of the remarkable peak. "Table Mountain!" "And look" - and I gestured outside, beyond the large cafe windows, toward the mountain that stood above us. "It's the same." Sign and object, signifier and referent, related directly. A nifty semiotic match, with as little slippage as possible. A lovely moment.

But how lovely, exactly? Along comes the irreverent Oscar Wilde, in the day's second reading, to pressure my sensation. In his playful, provocative "The Critic as Artist," Wilde argues at one point that music is in fact the perfect type of art precisely because it cannot represent its object realistically at all. The thoughtful critic will turn, he says, away from merely illustrative paintings and literal casts, and will reject modes of art that have but one message to deliver. Put down, in short, that photo of Table Mountain, and pursue a reverie instead; craft an ode; enjoy a symphony to the slopes.

Ah. Understood. But the photo was in fact never the source of my small joy - which was rooted, instead, in fortuitous correspondence, and in a surprise at the collapse of there (the editor's decision) and here (the peak above us). A pleasure now perpetuated, I hope, in your reading this text, composed in Cape Town at 11:07 a.m. local time.