I am Vertical

This month for book club we wanted to try something new, so we challenged ourselves to each memorize a poem or two to present to the group, along with some prepared discussion of these poems. Although I have a good number of poems memorized that I teach again and again (especially Emily Dickinson), I thought I should rather challenge myself by memorizing a poem that does not have a rhythm/rhyme structure, so I can't just rely on that. Thus, here it is, my poem recitation, by Sylvia Plath:

I am Vertical

But I would rather be horizontal
I am not a tree with my root in the soil
Sucking up minerals and motherly love
So that each March I may gleam into leaf,
Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed
Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,
Unknowing that I must soon unpetal.
Compared with me, a tree is immortal
And a flower-head not tall, but more startling,
And I want the one's longevity and the other's daring.

Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars,
The trees and the flowers have been strewing their cool odors
I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.
Sometimes I think that when I am sleeping
I must most perfectly resemble them -
Thoughts gone dim.
It is more natural to me, lying down.
Then the sky and I are in open conversation,
And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:
Then the trees may touch me for once,
And the flowers have time for me.

Translating Nostalgia

I just finished reading I'm Off Then: Losing and Finding Myself on the Camino de Santiago, by Hans Peter Kerkeling, a German comic. When I walked the camino - now two full years ago - I again and again met Germans who were doing the pilgrimage because of this book, so when it was recently translated into English, I had to add it to my Camino Library.

I read many books that are not originally in English: I love Umberto Eco, Jose Saramago, and I just finished Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. As I am reading these, I seldom think about the fact that they were translated, yet with Kerkeling's book I couldn't think about anything else. If I hadn't felt so incredibly personally connected to his topic I wouldn't have made it past page 10, since the translation is so awful (I felt like I was reading the simple sentences of an elementary student). By the second half of the memoir, though, I was so engrossed in his story - he was so often telling my story - that I was able to mostly ignore his sudden stops and awkward phrases. The story worked in spite of the language, rather than through the language.

Tomorrow marks two years exactly that I walked into Santiago de Compostela, thus finishing my 800-kilometre pilgrimage. It's hard to let that experience go: I feel this strange tension between wanting to hold on to this nostalgia and wanting to move on. I guess in essence, though, the camino is about holding on, letting go, and moving forward all at the same time, so I'm okay for now.

(Next camino-text adventure = going to see Martin Sheen's The Way, which he was filming alongside of us as we walked.)

Shostakovich & Svengali

I have been lucky enough to go to the Concert Hall twice recently: once to see the RWB's new production of Svengali, and then once to hear the WSO do an evening of Shostakovich. I had high expectations for both, and I was not disappointed. (Aside: Sometimes I wonder about this "cultured" side of me. Can I really love the classical world while also thinking the Joss Whedon is the best thing that has ever happened to television?)

Mark Godden's Svengali was a new ballet, and although it was based on Georges du Maurier's novel Trilby, it didn't really follow the story, and wasn't really a story ballet at all. Though some were disappointed by that, I, personally, was thrilled. I don't care if a ballet tells me a story, as long as it takes me on a physical and emotional and visual and musical roller coaster - that's what makes the ballet my favourite thing in the world. I got to see amazingly creative movement set to everything from Rachmaninoff to a Klezmer band, and my eyes and heart followed everything, even when I didn't know what I was supposed to be following.

Although I have loved Shostakovich - both his music and his story - since taking Russian history in university, I was not anticipating the symphony to be as amazing as the ballet. But it was. It was more than amazing; it was like hearing a language I'd never heard before but instantly understanding every word. (That may be a lame simile, but I like lame, just like Joss Whedon.) Although we got to hear his music for Hamlet and his symphony in response to the end of World War II, it was Shostakovich's violin concerto which really enthralled us, since it featured a violin soloist who seemed to know his music instinctively. He didn't follow a score, and instead moved through his music/through his violin as though this was also a dance. Like the ballet, it was mesmerizing.

I have been to many great shows over the last fifteen years, including everyone from Arcade Fire to Arlo Guthrie to Alanis Morrisette and Justin Timberlake, but nothing compares to what I get to experience when I go to the Concert Hall.