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.

Monotony

The following being an attempt in which the caffeinated author tries, earnestly, to draw on several of his varied current interests: viz., the 1890s, art criticism and the care of a 3-year-old.

Because, really, that's what the last few days have been made of. Cape Town, of course, is a modern city, with more than its share of splashy cafes and slick design firms. But I've found myself gravitating towards its older traces: towards the city as it stood in the last days of Victoria's reign and in the years shortly before WWI. And so I swim laps in the century-old public pool complex (where signs forbid, among a longish list of trespasses, petting and the preparation of food), and then walk a long block to Hiddingh Hall, the university art library, which stands directly next to a wonderful Egyptian revival structure and which offers, on its open stacks, improbably old volumes by Ruskin, William Morris, and peers. And so I sit down and read them: excerpts from The Stones of Venice; News from Nowhere, and on, and on.

And then I walk up the hill, past the mozzarella bar and the gothic fashion store, and dive into a different sort of pool: the world of imaginative, fluid play. This world has its own logic and rules: yesterday, for instance, Cleo suggested that we skip around the sofa, before augmenting the exercise with small, percussive egg rattles. After a few minutes of skipping and shaking, she paused, and suggested that we build a nest out of blankets and pillows, and tend to those same violently shaken eggs. And then this, in her enthusiastic little voice: "How about Lisa gonna shake her hair and Lisa gonna be silly?" Sure, Cleo, I said: go ahead. You pretend to be Milkshake's singer, and you shake that hair, girl. It's simply nice to see you healthy and happy.

Do the two spheres have anything, though, in common? Not, on the surface, much. But there's this: I can see, in Cleo's play, the same involved absorption that Ruskin and Morris sought in work. She is, as she romps in the living room, as far from alienated as the fulfilled craftsmen in Morris' late utopian novel. But I'd go further than that, in fact, because I'm also fascinated by the rhythm of Cleo's play. I remember, from her first couple of years, regular periods of relative tedium, as I tired of reading the same book, or repeating the same action again and again. But her current pace is more involving, from my point of view: just as I begin to feel a certain monotony setting in, she too seems to yearn from something new, and to suggest a change of course. And the resulting effect is engaging, or even powerful - an aspect that Ruskin, in fact, once noticed in great art and thoughtful music. In "The Nature of Gothic" (a section of The Stones of Venice that was later republished by the deeply impressed Morris), Ruskin wrote the following:

"Monotony after a certain time, or beyond a certain degree, becomes either uninteresting or intolerable, and the musician is obliged to break it in one of two ways: either while the air or passage is perpetually repeated, its notes are variously enriched and harmonized; or else, after a certain number of repeated passages, an entirely new passage is introduced, which is more or less delightful according to the length of the previous monotony. Nature, of course, uses both of these kinds of variation perpetually. The seawaves, resembling each other in general mass, but none like its brother in minor divisions and curves, are a monotony of the first kind; the great plain, broken by an emergent rock or clump of trees, is a monotony of the second.”

May we collapse two separate fields, then? Each turn around the sofa, plastic eggs in hand, resembles the last in general mass, but never repeats it in minor divisions and curves. And soon enough, you're building a nest.

Set list

Even as L. oversees a flourishing study abroad program in public health, both she and I continue to receive an ad hoc tutorial in pediatrics, right at home. After 11 days of antibiotics, Cleo seemed to have triumphed over Lyme disease: she was upbeat and energetic for much of last week, and the tick bite had shrunk to small dot on her ankle. But then, on Friday night, the spots arrived.

Dime-sized blotches that soon bled into larger discolored circles, they covered much of Cleo’s abdomen and legs by mid-Saturday. And as she scratched at them, we went through a ritual that’s no doubt familiar to almost all parents of our generation: the online search for a medical explanation. Soon enough, using various picture galleries and drop-down menus of symptoms, we’d ruled out most of the more sinister candidates, and settled on hives. Usually relatively benign, hives are nonetheless rather enigmatic, and their cause is often impossible to ascertain. A reaction to the many doses of penicillin she’d ingested? Possible? Her body rejecting something in South Africa honey? Also possible. And on, and on: as her doctor told us yesterday, most cases are never entirely explained. Regardless, L. and I were simultaneously comforted to know that it wasn’t something worse, and daunted to realize that she’d have to go on a program of antihistamines.

From Cleo’s point of view, though, the news wasn’t all grim. After all, she doesn't resent medicine, if it tastes reasonable (and here a shout-out to the chemical engineers who developed a vanilla-flavored syrup is the meet and right thing), and she’s never unhappy to spend a day or two in the comfortable confines of home, playing with the parents. So that’s what we did: all Sunday and Monday, L. and I traded off and then joined in together, keeping an eye on her symptoms as we tried to devise new games that can be played with legos, kitchen spoons, and blankets. The spots swelled, the clock turned, and we did the simplest kind of parenting imaginable: playing with our daughter.

But how exactly, you might wonder, does one pass ten hours, and then another ten, with a sick girl? Sure, brief outings to the aquarium and the cable car can help to break up the day. But we really were inside for most of the time, and as game gave way to game I was reminded of the set lists that bands produce before a show. Here's one from a 2010 show in London: care to try to name the source?

Anyway, we moved, like a band, from number to number, and stage right to stage left. Pretending to change diapers on each other gave way to a game of hide and seek; while we were playing that, Cleo noticed her drawing board, and started to draw, alternately, the sun and the moon, expecting me to rise and slumber with each new motif. Then she suggested that we pretend to oversleep, and we spent several minutes trying to rouse each other from deep pretend rest, until her eye drifted to a board game that features marbles, which we spun and rolled, and used as props in a make-believe casino game of roulette. And so on: such a list, I suppose, soon grows tedious, but at the same time it points to the sheer fluidity and variety of play with a 3-year-old.

She's already feeling better - even if, as the rash is receding, she's now contracted a cold. But that doesn't mean - not yet, at least - an end to the show. At 7:50 this morning, we were busy building a puppet theater, whose contours were clear only to Cleo. And this afternoon, that theater will inevitably give way to another, newer idea. The show goes on, and yet it's always also evolving.