what's in a name

My first name is an old-fashioned French name. When I was born my parents had not decided on a name, and asked the family doctor to choose one. "Noisette" he said without hesitation (or something very close to that, anyway). As a result of this one carefree act, all of my life I've been conscious of names and their connotations.

Yesterday I met a man who up until that point I had only talked to on the phone. "Noisette" he said, "You're not at all what I expected" and he made a mysterious gesture above his head as if outlining a large bow or elegant pompadour. I've been musing over that gesture and what it could possibly mean.

I think it can only mean this...

Images via Boubou Teatime

beginning and believing

I like to live always at the beginnings of life, not at their end. We all lose some of our faith under the oppression of mad leaders, insane history, pathologic cruelties of daily life. I am by nature always beginning and believing.

excerpt from the diary of Anais Nin, volume four 1944-1947

charming parisian lovers found here

horticultural exhibits swoon

It's possible that the presence of humans in any number tires plants. Horticultural exhibits swoon and die almost every evening, when people have paid them too much attention. I find myself weary after my friends have departed.

Image via We Heart It

macres

A friend has sent us a package of water-caltrops, or  water-chestnuts. The French name is macres. Water-chestnuts are so unappreciated, and last for such a short time, being considered a delicacy only in places where there are ponds, that I should like to write a little about them here.

This strange water fruit, of ooze and autumn bred, forms with four protective horns when fully ripe a shell of very hard texture. Cracking them open with a good stout knife will leave blue-black stains on your hands and at least a couple of damaged fingers. The flesh has a bluish white color the consistency of candle wax. It neither looks like a chestnut nor does it taste like one. Even when cooked it still calls to mind the pond where it was born and the mud that nurtured it.

"And... are they really good?" you might ask. I don't rightly know, but there is something very nostalgic about their fragrance of riverside reeds, of spearmint, of disturbed water in the early days of autumn.

Image via We Heart It

sworn to be keepers

Finders Keepers we sang when we were children

or were taught to sing

before our histories began    and we began

who were beloved    our animal life

toward the Beloved,     sworn to be Keepers.

On a hill before the wind came

the grass moved toward the one sea,

blade after blade dancing in waves...

A short excerpt from A Poem Beginning With a Line By Pindar by Robert Duncan.

Enjoy the slow descent into autumn. I'll be reading your poetry.

Image found via We Heart It

from eva sounness

I recently discovered Miriam Lo through Poetry International, a worldwide forum for poetry on the web. I've been carrying this poem around with me this week. It may sound silly, but I like thinking about Eva Sounness (she is Lo's grandmother and is featured in many of her poems). I'm thankful to Miriam Lo for sharing her family with me.

FROM EVA SOUNNESS: THE WAR COMES HOME

When the war begins
Eva is feeding her first daughter, Robin, oat porridge
boiled soft for her infant mouth which drops to an O
at the sight of the spoon, the small pink tongue expectant.
Kim, her son, is running around in the yard
rounding up chooks and shouting at sleepy dogs,
pretending to be a farmer.

Somewhere faraway
a place called Austria is annexed, Poland collapses,
Jews are garrotted and pinioned in ghettos.
With the usual burst of wattle and birdsong
spring arrives in the South-West corner
of Western Australia, which is, Robert Menzies declares,
also at war.

In China the blood has been running
for months, years, is dripping off crusted walls
in tight alleyways, congealing in gutters, and all they hear
in Mt Barker is the crackling cut-and-dried
news on the radio: No Real Cause for Alarm and
Business as Usual and Eva is pregnant
with twins.

Canberra bickers. Two heads and a tangle
of limbs press themselves against Eva’s taut abdomen.
Menzies resigns, Arthur Fadden stretches himself
across forty days, two independents take a short walk
to John Curtin’s government. Labor. “Good,”
says Eva, “no more crawling to London.” Cliff scowls
and rustles the newspaper.

Closer to home
there is rustling through jungle. Impregnable:
word like a fortress falling apart, cracking up into syllables:
did not think the Japs would get here so fast. Footsteps at the door
carry the prospect of carnage. The children rush in
suddenly soft and vulnerable as newborns. Eva cradles the twins.
Disaster is one panicked moment: What if I lose them?

Losing is for other people’s children. Here,
the war is a headache that lasts six years,
tightening sometimes into a deep sense of unease—
a little like standing in the kitchen
waiting for the baby to cry itself out.
Pain that belongs to somebody else.

five more days

-- the barking of a dog. autumnal burnings. five more days of summer.

image found here

graphotherapy

There are many types of therapy that would be appropriate for me, dear reader, but this September I am embarking on the great graphotherapy project.

Graphotherapy, the behavioral science that invites the writer to take pen in hand and change self-defeating aspects of the personality by altering specific strokes in the handwriting. Graphotherapists are trained in graphology and have additional training in psychology. Their expertise is to guide the client in altering handwriting patterns as a means of removing negative thought habits and replacing them with positive, self-supportive ones. By changing writing patterns we simultaneously reconfigure the neuropathways in the brain that record our self-image.

I write in the kind of printing we all learned in elementary school. Uppercase letters occur at the beginning of sentences and in other appropriate places; there are also lowercase letters. This is called upper-and lowercase printing. u &lc for short. My writing looks very much like the lines you are reading. Guess what the graphotherapist has to say about this, "Printing is a shield usually put in place by a sensitive soul who has been betrayed in one way or another and isn't about to let that happen again. Printing keeps people at a distance by creating a boundary. The u&lc printer has erected a wire fence around himself... If you want to tap into your creativity in a big way, begin now and again to connect a letter or two within your words." *

What about you? Are you a dedicated pencil user, or do you prefer a felt-tip pen? Does your writing slant back, vertical, or forward? Do you have zonal balance? Angles and curves? Or are you a printer like me?

*Your handwriting can change your life by Vimala Rodgers

Image here

WschodKsiezyca

The moon is like a clean, fragrant body. Sound asleep, it gives off a seductive smell. A night is pressed on either side by two days. Between them all, the dark circles around your eyes stay joyful.


A stanza from a poem I read years ago. If anyone knows the author, you would save me from being haunted by the feeling that I can just almost remember it… It’s beautiful, I think. Please excuse the dabbling in Polish. If I had time, I would study it alongside French.



Image is Moonrise by Stanislaw Maslowski

coq au vin

Feeling extravagant this evening, I decided to start preparations for a dinner of coq au vin. I wondered to myself if it was a bit too early. It's not really Fall yet. But Tadzio is back in school, the weather is cool, and at least one of my co-workers has the swine flu. Fall is here, ce n'est pas? It's time for me to drag my boots and coat out of the closet. Time for me to convince Przemek to read Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain with me, one or two chapters per week. Przemek has been reading this book for twenty years, but has never finished it.

Coq au vin is a dish that amuses me to no end. It's simple and delicious, and I get to empty a whole bottle of red wine into our dutch oven. I like to prepare it with game hens. The sweet man in the deli section searched high and low for hens, but only located a goose. It is too early. It's not really Autumn. I do have a recipe for braised goose with white wine and coffee, but I'm saving it for later this year.

Anyway, this evening I was in search of much smaller fowl. Finally, sweetly, the man in the deli section found some frozen hens in the freezer and I was on my way.

Image via wet behind the ears

a season in the life

*****

Anyway, we were serious about the decision to move to Canada. Not tomorrow, but in the next five years. This afternoon I'm flipping through How to Move To Canada: A Primer for Americans. It is a delightful, practical book. This, I would argue, is a practical dream. My favorite part of the book is the section labeled "Where to Move in Canada." It runs two-hundred pages long, and begins, "If you're serious about moving to Canada and trying to decide where to live, this section of the book will get you started."

And because I think about life in terms of books, I'm also thumbing through my copy of A Season In the Life of Emmanuel by Marie-Claire Blais. I stumbled across this author years ago on a lonely winter evening spent in my local library. I was enchanted by her voice and the descriptions of snowy Quebec City. Somehow, her writing is all wrapped up in my mind with the idea of going north. This, I will admit, is not practical. Here are a few pages from her beautiful notebooks.











Notebook images found here

midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

- Yeats, The Lake Isle of Innisfree

We are off to natural hot springs, a cabin in the woods, and the ocean. This is the magic of living in the Pacific Northwest. When we return it will be time to think about preparing Tadzio for another year at the French school, navy blue uniforms, and whether or not to sign up for that poetry class.

Take care in these last days of summer.

Image by Marc Bordons via Feaverish Photography