Flash 'n Snap (or vice versa)

Happy Sunday, folks!

For the past two weeks, words have been weaving a web in my mind -- strange words, contorted vowels --  building scraps of stories, scratches of poems, twists of screenplays… you get the idea.

I’d been hellbent on finding photos to match them, but ultimately gave up.  The ordeal felt like stuffing a light bulb into the mouth of a field mouse. Perhaps I got lazy, or perhaps Freddy’s angry voice started to make sense (at least this time):

“Matching photographs with stories? What a crock of shit! Sure, once in while… let it capture the essence of a story. But often the magic happens when those babies don't quite match up. You know what I mean? Like, a photo that seems totally unrelated can actually add a whole new layer of meaning to the story. It's like it makes you think deeper, ya know? It sparks your imagination and gets you seeing things from different angles.  Embrace the unexpected, homie, and let the photos do their own storytelling alongside the words”

For someone who had been banging his head against the wall for days, those words revealed a flicker of light inside a dark, deep tunnel. So, here goes…

Student

“I want to rewrite the book of Genesis,” she says, “for my final project.”
She’s eighteen, possibly nineteen. Long legs, faraway eyes.
“In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth, thimbles and cheese, weak men and tampons, high-heeled shoes, foreign words, fast cars, emasculated goats, and mindfulness,” she mused, her voice creaking with defiance.
 “But what if it wasn't just about creation? What if it was about reinvention? About reshaping the universe in my own image, with Orwellian rebellion and Lynchean absurdity?” Her words hung in the air, pregnant with the promise of a narrative yet untold, a journey through time of her imagination.
Who was I to argue?
“You have my permission to rewrite the cosmos, one Genesis at a time,” I said.
“And may God be with you.”

Tomorrow

Tomorrow morning he’ll be gone, hacking his last breath while we were sound asleep on the other side of town. “You just missed him,” the night nurse will say when we arrive at the hospital. “I’m sorry.”

I will try to shake his hand for the last time, but under the gray blanket his body is already wrapped in plastic. The nurse lied. He must have died during the night. "Fucking liar," my sister will say, reading my mind, her voice laced with enough steel to make the nurse shrink.

My mother will stand over him, pale, unable to cry, murmuring something she wouldn’t want us to hear. She’ll look calmer and more composed than I expected. His mouth is half-open, his nose swollen and crooked. At his funeral, I was hoping to say he looked peaceful. But he doesn’t. I was hoping to see him again, one last time, dying yet still alive.

But tonight, I hold his hand in mine, the stumps of the three fingers he lost in a Donbass mining town during his wild years feel soft and warm. He starts to recite a Nekrasov poem in Russian about a railway cutting through a landscape, as if he were on stage. It’s about the progress of transit and technology. It was required reading back in the old country. It’s too long, too old-fashioned. But he knows it by heart. “…with God, now go home - congratulations! (Hats off - if I say!) I expose a barrel of wine to the workers And - I give arrears! .. " He’s so into it, he tries to get up. The nurse, a different one, motions me to keep him supine. There are tears in his eyes.

Our ups and downs, ons and offs have been smoothed out by the ravages of time. He wanted me to be a mover and a shaker, but I had other plans – to daydream out the window and pretend to live on a different planet. It took years to work through our rough patches, hash out our differences. “Aging makes things lighter,” my mother likes to say, “and that’s the best thing about it.”
“Help me out of bed,” he commands, “I can walk.” He repeats it, again and again. “Fuck’em all! I’m outta here!”

“He’s a fighter,” the nurse says. “He’ll pull through the night. Go home, get some rest.”

Safe Journey

An elderly lady sat on a park bench in a busy city, staring straight ahead, her hands on her lap, palms up, as if supporting a belly that wasn't there, her mouth slightly open, drinking in every second of the fading light. Nearby, a young woman in a white lab coat and cap rocked back and forth on the swing set, smiling mysteriously at the elderly lady.

“Nice weather we’re having today,” said the elderly lady, glancing down at a stuffed pooch by her feet.

“Splendid,” the pooch replied.

The pooch’s right eye was blind, but in its left eye, the elderly lady saw a reflection of her husband looking young and handsome, as he did on the night train to Amsterdam four decades earlier. He was drunk, and as she helped him climb onto a top bunk, she saw a reflection of a stuffed dog in his right eye; his left eye was lazy.

Turning to the young woman in the lab coat, who was now sitting next to her, the elderly lady rolled up her sleeve, offered her arm to the young woman, and closed her eyes.

Film:
Perfect Days (dir. Wim Wenders)
A critic refered to it as “Zen and the Art of Toilet Cleaning”
It is that; but it’s so much more than that. A beautiful visual poem about the pain and wonder of everyday life.
Here’s a review by Stephanie Zacharek, who is probably my favorite American film critic right now. I would love to see her replace Richard Brody (that man has a proctologist’s point of view of the world) at The New Yorker.

Book:
Poems of Paul Celan
Translated by Michael Hamburger
”The essential poet of the Holocaust, Paul Celan was one of the greatest poets to ever write in German and among the indispensable writers of the twentieth century in any language. His poems ‘embody a conviction that the truth of what has been broken and torn must be told with a jagged grace.’ (Robert Pinsky, The New Republic).”

Podcast:
Drs. Andrew Huberman (Ph.D, Standford) and Chris Palmer, (MD, Harvard) discuss the benefits of ketogenic diet for mental health.

Quote:
“When I have a camera in my hand, I know no fear.”
– Alfred Eisenstaedt, photographer

As always, thanks for reading and being a subscriber.
’Til next time.
ak