Without declaration

Did you happen to read about the discovery of a 59-page letter summarizing many of the composer Mahler's most intimate relationships? Yowzers: while some of the language used by the author of the letter, a viola player and friend of Mahler's named Natalie Bauer-Lecher, tends towards the euphemistic, some of it is downright steamy. Take, for instance, her description of her own affair with Mahler:

"As we were immured in the very narrow room and isolated from all the world in fervently animated Scheherazade-like tales, up until the graying of the morning, we unfolded our entire lives before each other. Without declaration, question, and vow, our psyches and physiques melted into each other."

Well. As the critic Max Graf wrote, of Mahler's Tristan, such passion had been unheard of in Vienna. The leaf, perhaps, does not fall far from the tree.

Anyway: here at Half Step, we like to keep things more solidly in the G range. And yet, despite such basic resolutions, even we sometimes stumble onto declarations of passion. A couple of weeks ago, for instance, we arrived at Bolton Hill Nursery to learn that Cleo had married one of her classmates, in an elaborate ceremony that included an exchange of rings. In piecing things together, through the varied accounts offered by Cleo, a classmate and a teacher, we learned that Cleo had told the boy (a fine young lad named Oliver) that she loved him; he'd responded by offering that he liked her head. And then he failed to show up for camp the very next day.

But Oliver's unintended treachery (I assume his family was on vacation) was nothing compared to my own, in Cleo's eyes. Deep in another princess story the other day, I thought I would point out that princess can, after all, marry princesses - at least in 15 countries around the world. And princes: well, they too can choose. Yeah, said Cleo, and I'm going to marry you and Mom. Well: while I liked the feeling behind the thought, I wasn't sure how that would work, exactly, and - surely pushing my role as source of facts about the world a step too far - noted that the list of countries acknowledging those unions would be even shorter. And Cleo, bless her heart, burst into momentary tears. But I just want to marry you, she said, crying into my lap.

I can't say that our physiques melted into each other. In fact, they didn't. But we did make up quickly, and, recomposed, headed out to pick tomatoes in the garden, back in the world, far from immured, and delighted with each other's company.

Sometimes

Sometimes the most beautiful music is music unadorned, music unarranged - music that's not even, perhaps, music. The patter of raindrops on the porch roof in the middle of a summer night. The rip of water, as Cleo jumps ambitiously into the mushroom pool against a background of untrained chorus of playful shrieks. The sound of L. to Cleo reading softly in the quiet hour before bedtime. Or, yesterday, the focused silence in the Toyota's back seat, as Cleo worked on her magnetic drawing board, before suddenly producing this sweet emblem of musical notes emanating from a flute: a silent, static melody that grew out of a brief ride on the highway:

Spaghetti heads and air heads

You might recall, you insightful and voracious reader you, that a few months ago I wrote about Cleo's fondness for a CD called Beethoven Lives Upstairs. Part children's story, part musical lesson, and part Viennese promotional literature, it's an appealing fictional epistolary account of a young boy's growing fondness for the quirky but talented composer who lets a room above his house. But it's also, it turns out, part of a series, and due to L.'s attentiveness and diligence, Cleo's now moved on to another entry in the group, called Vivaldi's Ring of Mystery.

Arguably, it's even better. It's certainly more relevant, as it's set in Venice, and it's fun to hear Cleo joyfully repeat references to monuments (such as the Bridge of Sighs) that she saw in person only a few weeks ago. It also does a nice job of integrating samples of Vivaldi's compositions with the story, which is a mystery that centers upon a talented orphaned girl with an unclear past. And, finally, it can also be rather funny - at least, on a plane that appeals to your resident four-year-old. Whenever Vivaldi chides his forgetful students for acting like spaghetti heads, I can hear a small laugh in the back of the car. The laugh, in turn, eventually gives way to experimentation, as Cleo tries to find comparably silly insults that can provoke a smile without being censored by whichever parent happens to be the target. Butt head? Not acceptable. Table head? Well, okay - although it leans towards the nonsensical, it's at least a funny image.

So imagine Cleo's delight when I taught her the phrase air head. I did it self-mockingly, after forgetting for the fifth or sixth time to unbutton a sun dress before trying to pull it over her head. I'm an air head, I said, and she immediately repeated the phrase.

But I think that Cleo, like Vivaldi, knows that terms like air head and spaghetti head are ultimately terms of affection more than they are degradations. At least, one of her recent pronouncements seems to imply as much. A few days ago, as I was buckling her into her car seat, Cleo looked at me meaningfully, and said, 'You know, you guys aren't dumb. And you're not mean, either."

I may be an air head. But I'm smart enough to know that little girls don't mind being called spaghetti heads, when they know that they're loved at the end of the day.

Old music, new music

Maybe a few of you saw, or remember hearing about, Ray Allen's clutch three-pointer in Game 6 of this year's NBA finals: the shot that helped the Heat erase a 5-point deficit with 28 seconds left, and that made their eventual series victory possible. LeBron James certainly remembered it: after the game, he was quoted as saying, "Without that, I'm boarded up in my house right now growing my beard and listening to old music."

Well, now, wait a minute. That's more or less how I spend some of my days: in fact, if you're one of the millions of web users to whom the 1980s seem old, and if you're willing to count benign negligence of a beard active growing, that's arguably how I spend most of my days. And, folks, I'm here to tell you that it ain't half bad. One can do worse than to listen to Bach, as I did today, while stroking my stubbly chin and mulling over PowerPoint images for the fall's classes.

But of course it's not that simple, either. Ray Allen did hit the shot, with a few seconds left. And Cleo came along, just over four years ago. And now each day, instead of being a retreat into the familiar, is a trek into new territory. Yesterday it was a sudden, unexpected conversation about how pork, her favorite meat, can make her sad, because she hates the idea of killing an animal. (Although it felt out of the blue, I can't say that the topic was totally unprecipitated; she and I were rubbing spices into a 2-pound pork shoulder, to make a batch of pulled pork). And today it was little laps - one-yard glides, in Cleo's parlance - in the pool, without the comfort of her water wings: a small first step towards actual unaided swimming.

The beard grows, as a matter of course. The music grows older, day by day. But Cleo grows, as well, and keeps us young in the process.

Words

High summer in the city, and while that does mean sticky asphalt, it also means sno-cones and Natty Boh - and some relatively free time, as classes don't begin for another 50 days, and Cleo's happy at day camp. So I've had some time for the gym, and in fact I've even had a few spare minutes here and there to dig up our ancient IPod, and to upload some songs that make that extra set of flies go down a little more easily. But since our CD towers are essentially monuments that were constructed in the 1990s, any time with the IPod is essentially time spent in the Clinton years. And that means, in turn, a lot of drastic changes in volume, earnestly political lyrics, and, too, some wonderfully creative lyrics.

I'm thinking, for instance, of this brief segment of Eminem's 'Lose Yourself,' in which he evokes the anxiety of a white rapper in the intensely competitive arenas of inner-city Detroit. Rabbit's ambitious, and he's got talent, but as his moniker implies, he can also tend towards the timid, when his moment in the spotlight comes:

His palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy
There's vomit on his sweater already, mom's spaghetti.

It's a classic, of course, and hardly needs my support. But check out the wobbling rhythm of the opening line, where the ellision of 'are' in the central clause implies the lack of strength in his knees. Check out the creative rhymes - three ways of echoing sweaty - and check out the final image, in which his panicked regurgitation acts as a proof of both his fear and his lamentable status as a mama's boy. No hardened gangsta, here.

And then the IPod pauses, and the next track is Dead Can Dance's American Dreaming, a beautiful ode in which Brendan Perry sings in a wistful mode:

We've been too long American dreaming
And I think we've all lost the way
Forlorn somnambulistic maniacal in the dark

Did he just say 'Forlorn somnambulistic maniacal'? He did, indeed - and in fact the audience breaks into warm applause at the end of the song.

Well, anyway: the gym has its pleasures, and sometimes unexpectedly ambitious wordings are among them. But they can turn up in other contexts, as well. Just yesterday morning Cleo surprised me when, waiting for me to cue up her DVD of Dinosaur Train, she pointed out that I wouldn't have to watch with her. "The next one will start automatically," she pointed out. Automatically? That's like an 18-syllable word, and yet it had just issued from my 4-year-old's mouth. And then, later in the day, she told me that when she and L. had returned home from the dentist, she had "discovered that my pink pinwheel is missing." Discovered that it was missing? Who was I talking to, a character in a Doyle short story?

Well. Eminem can turn a rhyme, and Cleo can say automatically. And I, in turn, struggle to put words together in my mundane manner. No blog entries recently, you coolly note. So I, in turn, point to a just-published essay on the alleged crisis in criticism in the inaugural issue of Kapsula, and just finished a draft of a curious extended essay on a memory of Richard Serra's. And, finally, Pearson's editor just contacted me to let me know that my book on criticism was their most-requested title, at a recent conference and book fair. Words, words. They do take time, but they carry rewards, of various sorts.

First times

There's a nice page on the RadioBDC blog site on which staff members recall their first concerts. Some of them happened to attend relatively momentous shows - Bowie in the mid-1970s, Pearl Jam shortly after the death of Kurt Cobain - while others had slightly less dramatic experiences. Mark Lewis, for instance, recalls being taken to a Billy Joel concert at Madison Square Garden in 1982 - and falling asleep, midway through the fifth song. The Piano Man can be compelling, but so can a nap.

Given that, I wasn't quite sure what to expect when I took Cleo to her first full-length feature film yesterday: Monsters University, a prequel to the wonderful 2001 Pixar film Monsters Inc. We've been watching 25-minute segments of the latter on DVD over the last few weeks, and as Cleo has come to know the world of Sully and Mike she's also come to understand the concept of sarcasm ("Why does Mike say 'Great plan' when they are put into the ice world??), the cynical deceitfulness of Randall, and the retro appeal of Roz. But, still: how would she come to terms with a full 1:45 of new material? Could she stay awake, in a dark theater? And would she really tell me if she needed to go to the bathroom?

The answers turned out to be, in order: Well; yes; not quite. In the cool of the air conditioning, she sat in my lap for the whole film, making it through six previews and a short film before taking in the pleasant but hardly transcendent feature attraction. I tried to clear up a few of the plot complexities during quieter moments, but the storyline was generally clean and accessible, and Cleo confidently demonstrated, in an inappropriately loud voice, that she was on top of the other details ("They're sitting," she correctly announced to the nearly empty theater at one point, "on a bunk bed"). I asked her a few times if she wanted to stay, and the answer was always a focused yes. And when we left the theater afterwards, chatting about the film, it was clear that she'd understood much of it, even if the references to fraternity hazings were aimed more at me than at her.

But the first thing that Cleo said after her first film was in fact less directly related to the plot. It was: "I'm a little wet." And she was: just a touch, as the result of a minor lapse in bladder control that might be seen as a testament to the film's appeal more than anything else. Some find the memory of spectacle indelible; some fall asleep. And some forget about slight pressures. But the first time out is often, in various senses, absorbing.

Finding oneself

But let's put our Dante down for a few days, and acknowledge the fact that summer's also for easy, low-friction fiction: for Dan Brown, read onsite (as above), and, for part of this past weekend, Christopher Krovatin's youthful but rather touching Heavy Metal and You. Written when Krovatin was just 20 (and a PUSH intern), it's the story of a West Side prep schooler who finds himself torn between his allegiance to metal and his love for a warm but straightedge girl across town. Drawing heavily on Nick Hornby and Junot Diaz, and nodding reverently towards Salinger, Krovatin manages to craft a sweet story that fairly evokes the intensity of those years, and that is ultimately about the importance of being true to oneself (or of avoiding, as Salinger would put it, the phonies).

But finding oneself can take, of course, many forms. And while some of us go about it with our toes buried in the poolside sand of Meadowbrook, other folks begin to discover themselves at - well, at the neighborhood trattoria. That, at least, seems to be Cleo's way. On one of our last nights in Venice, we joined the fourteen students and several colleagues at a restaurant in Dorsoduro for a farewell meal. Generously, a waiter placed a bucket of pens and several sheets of paper on the table, and so L. and I let Cleo take care of business, as we chatted with others about upcoming travel plans and about the Angola pavilion. And then I happened to glace over at what Cleo was doing - only to find that for the first time ever, she was writing phonetically. And no small potatoes, either: the girl had tried to figure out, on her own, how to spell sailboat. Granted, she says it a bit differently than us: it's more sao-bot than sailboat. But that only helps to explain her spelled version, as you can see here:

I was floored. Of course, every kid eventually figures it out. But, still, when it happens, it's a small miracle. As is, I suppose, a high schooler's realization that he wants one thing more than another. We find ourselves in the strangest of places: in mosh pits, or Venetian restaurants. But the environment doesn't really matter, in the end, for as we remove the sheath, all else momentarily disappears.

Rings

Here, reader, let your eyes look sharp at truth,
for now the veil has grown so very thin...
                               -Dante, Purgatorio, 8:19-21

We fly back to Baltimore tomorrow, and I'll be leaving my wedding ring here. Presumably, it's in the sand that lies beneath the soft waves of the Adriatic, which is where I think I lost it while playing with Cleo two weeks ago, but it may have been snapped up by one of the beachcombers who ply the shore with metal detectors, or by a vacationing Russian housewife. All I know is that as I held Cleo on a sunny seat on the number 2 vaporetto back from the Lido, I noticed it missing, and when we returned to look for it, it did not surface.

It was relatively thick, and made of solid gold; I'd worn it since our wedding, just over seven years ago. And it was inscribed with a passage from Inferno: Inferno 5:138, if you care to look it up.

For the past two weeks, I've felt a bit as though I have a phantom limb; I find myself trying to toy with it, or to turn it - only to realize, again, that it's gone. At this point, it's as though I've lost the ring - or relived losing it - at least a hundred times. But there are also ways in which the loss feels, well, almost poetic. For example, for centuries the Venetian doge annually took a private gondola from San Marco, in order to cast a ring into the sea, commemorating the city's marriage to the water. And he did it on the Lido: precisely where my ring went missing. Admittedly, the doge could count on a local fisher boy to plunge into the water and recover the ring; in my case, no youth presented himself. But then there is also the realization that I likely lost it during a raucous game of Marco Polo with Cleo and an 8-year-old named Zoe. And Marco Polo was from - well, you know the answer to that. In several senses, then, the ring is perhaps where it belongs.

But, still: such a loss can feel heavy. Or, at least, it can feel heavy until one remembers what heaviness truly implies. Today, I took Cleo to the Lido for a final morning romp: we built a castle, punched waves, and piled sand on our legs. And, when Cleo was making sand cakes, I neared the end of Purgatorio, which I've been reading in quiet moments over the past couple of weeks. Canto 31 felt especially appropriate, in two places. Early in the canto, Beatrice challenges Dante, before the river Lethe: "What are you thinking?" she asks. "The water has not yet Obliterated your memories." Indeed not; I still missed the ring. My thumb idly found the paler spot on my ring finger. But then this, in Dante's subsequent confession: "Mere appearances Turned me aside with their false loveliness..." Indeed; why do we find ourselves weighed down with symbols of love, when the real thing is right at hand?

I put down my book and read no more; I jogged to Cleo, who asked me to make balls of sand for her. And tomorrow I will fly, as Beatrice recommends, with wings unweighted by pargoletta o altra novita.