I Found a Fragment

 

Sunday, chusan it is.  The third day of Lunar New Year.  The ancestors, who were welcomed into the physical world on the midnight turning of New Year’s Eve, were to have been sent home this morning with loud fireworks to scare away the ghosts.  I thought of it after the fact when my father and I were walking the other day.  His father, he suggested, had only left the country once, in the later part of his life, on a trip to Rome.  And he mentioned his mom, my grandmother and how good she was at Latin, unlike his husband. It was the morning of chuyi and there we were with both of his long-deceased parents invoked.  Later it seemed meaningful when I mentioned the tradition and we recalled that we’d been talking about the paternal ancestors. 

Later in evening we visited my mom and her husband.  Chuyi should be the time when you qiaomenr and visit nearby relatives and snack on some snacks and down a shot or two of baijiu.  And once again we found ourselves talking about my mom’s paternal line, as she was heading up to Albany the next day for her first Covid-19 vaccine shot, finally, and that’s the sod the paternal line hailed from.  I let them both know that beyond eating the dumplings we’d brought over they ought to know that the ancestors are all about the earth just now. 

 

I finished off the first volume of Joseph Needham’s “Science and Civilization in China.”  There are approximately twenty-six other such volumes in his remarkable series.  Like many I’m indebted to Simon Winchester who introduced me to Needham and the grand project in his account of Needham’s life in “The Man Who Loved China.”  I’d referenced Needham many times in my classes and always felt a bit disingenuous referencing his many volumed series examining the myriad seminal contributions to science originating from China though I’d never read a copy nor even seen a copy.  Out of print, Volume II is over one-hundred-and-fifty bucks on Amazon.  Some of the subsequent volumes were significantly more than that. 

 

It’s Valentine’s Day.  Should I rush out and buy a flower at, where?  Tops?  Do I really want to go out and shop this morning.  Making my way through a book of collection of Han and Six Dynasties poetry this morning I found a fragment that I thought to send to my wife.  They had conveniently left the Chinese in, and all of the characters were easy enough to find, except the yan that had the nvzi-pang before it. (嬿) My Mac’s built in Chinese dictionary was flummoxed.  https://www.mdbg.net/ , my go-to online dictionary was able to tell me that when you put a female radical in front of the character to describe the old territorial name for Beijing, Yanjing, you get . . . “beautiful.”

 

（苏武）

结发为夫妻，恩爱两不疑。

欢娱在今夕，嬿婉及良时。

 

 

 

Sunday, 02/14/21

 

To Consider the Unconscious

My older daughter is taking a course on Freud as a historical figure.  There are at least four required texts and with her permission, I went out and bought them and told her I’d follow along; “Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis” by Eli Zaretsky,“Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis”, by George Makari,  “Freud (The Routledge Philosophers)”, by Jonathan Lear, and “The Freud Reader” by old Sig himself.  A week ago, I’d read the first assignments in each of them, according to the syllabus.  This evening she’ referenced the next week’s reading and I realized I’d fallen behind.  So, I started with the one and it was late by the time I’d properly caught up.

 

With only a surface knowledge of psychoanalysis, I found the Makari reading remarkable.  Set back in the late nineteenth century, in Vienna and in Paris, here was a young mind, trying to work within an intellectual tradition and distinguish himself.  He becomes fascinated with the possibilities of cocaine which he then rejects and commences a period of study alongside Jean-Martin Charcot, a practitioner of hypnosis.  Later Charcot is discredited and Freud in a remarkable bit of intellectual gymnastics, manages a critique the work, defending parts of the tradition and suggesting as well and entirely new way to consider the unconscious.   I don’t suppose I’ve ever properly considered what it might have been like as Freud, trying to assemble what 'Freudian' was.  A number of the works reinforced this idea of psychoanalysis as a necessary corollary to the industrial revolution, when families and communities were broken down and society forced a different confrontation with the self.

 

Trump was acquitted again, today as we knew he would be.  My wife said it depressed her.  It was so obvious.  How could it be?  Perhaps more patriotic than I care to admit, I took it to ultimately be a sign of strength. The system held, against a tyrant.  He’s out.  He didn’t want to go.  He’s gone.  A flawed compromise, was for the thousandth time in the country’s history, fashioned, fifty-seven, to forty-three, to allow both sides to continue on.  The citizenry watching compelled to make up their own minds.  As intended, the American system, once again in a revolutionary cycle. 

The team of House prosecutors were, in my opinion, heroic.  I wanted to hug Jamie Raskin.  His closing statement, invoking Thomas Paine, whom he’d named the son, who’d only just taken his life, after: “senators, this is “common sense,” rose, to my ears as a gripping crescendo.  Everything about his intonation, the ferocity of his humility, the unflappable competence, seemed both noble and familiar.  Stacey Plaskett, Joaquin Castro, Ted Lieu, I could sit down and enjoy a conversation with any of you.  You and your colleagues all handled yourself with restraint, professionalism, grace.  And then we had the tall and unconvincing Bruce Castor and the caricature-like performance by Michael van der Veen, who felt like middle school shop teacher or your neighbor's father, the football coach, gruff and dim, seemingly dancing on time, at the request of his client.  They gloated.  Of course they would.  The schmucks.  They gloated and it wasn’t impressive.  No one seemed to think their victory was particularly well-earned. 

I took a break to present my dad and my stepmom who came by some dumplings, that my wife had made for them.  It’s Covid.  They couldn’t stay.  We chatted a bit.  They drove back home about five minutes-drive from here.  And when I went back into my office, the live stream of the trial had old Mitch McConnel on.  There he was, finally saying all he should have said days ago, months ago, years ago. He has a deep voice.  I enjoyed hearing it excoriate the former president, and then the stream was cut and now I was watching the gloat-twins again.  It has switched before Mitch could utter his undignified “but.”  The but that tried to let him have it both ways, where he could speak the truth about the former president’s behavior, finally, but still acquit him.  Shameful. 

 

 

 

Saturday, 02/13/21

China's Already on Break

 

My dad and I met this morning as we generally do on Friday mornings. We agreed to meet up at 9:00AM at the gas station, there on the corner of 299, and New Paltz Road.  I texted him that I’d be ten minutes late though he was probably expecting as much, anyway.  Friday I must always push through from a one AM call till 4:00AM or so, when China closes up for the week.  But this week China’s already on break.

Friday’s we’ve been having pizza.  Every week we try a different spot in New Paltz.  And we have a hallway full of Chinese food we’d bought in Hartsdale the day before.  My younger one and I were debating other cuisines, mixed with pizza.  In San Francisco, out in the Mission, not far from where we used to live at the corner of Mission and Cortland, there is a remarkable Indian pizza joint:  Zante Pizza.  Indian cuisine traditionally has bread, they traditionally have cheese, a different pallet of flavors with bread and cheese works.  But China has no baked breads nor any cheese.  Soy sauce on pizza?

 

We rifled through a few different classic Chinese dishes on a cheese pizza in our minds: Eyebrows raised: tangsuliji on pizza? yuxiangrousi on pizza?  Could work.  So before we headed out to deliver dumplings to my mom and stepdad for the holiday, we agreed that we’d get a pizza on the way home and slather it with jiaozi xianr, laoganma and dofu.

Driving out of town on Main St, I asked my little one to write down the name of the pizzeria there on the corner of Main and South Manheim Blvd.  Bellas.  We dialed from my mom’s and swung by to pick it up fifteen minutes later.  There was a family inside, dining.  And there was a couple in front of us.  We dutifully waited.  The lady behind the counter was stressed.  This made me stressed.  She asked if the table needed anything else.  The guy said “salt.”  She went to get some.  I made eye contact with a large guy behind the counter.  But it became clear that neither he nor the other guy in the back were customer-facing. And I wondered all of a sudden if he wasn’t Russian.  He certainly wasn’t Italian.  “Bella” ?  Maybe that the story behind this place?  But then, when I heard him speak I wasn’t so sure that the Russian assignation was accurate either. 

Friday, 02/12/21

All The Good Stuff

 

Down 87 today to the land I grew up in.  I lived more time in China. I came to love other parts of the state more.  But I still identify with the piece of geography there between the Bronx, and Greenwich CT and Putnam County.  We’re going to cross over the Mario Cuomo bridge and head to Hartsdale today.  I lived from the age of two till ten in Harrison and from then till fifteen in Pleasantville.  If I ever want to understand why my kids consider Beijing their home even though they were born here and live here now, I merely need to consider how it is I feel, driving about in Westchester County. 

A name with brio, the “Asian Supermarket Golden Village” is there in Hartsdale.  Today is the eve of Lunar New Year.  My wife and younger daughter had wanted to head all the way down to the H Mart in Queens.  ‘Twas I who suggested there must be something in Westchester.  Asian Supermarket Golden Village has lots of cool stuff and while not as spic-and-span as the H-Mart we visited down in Flushing it has a pretty good assortment of things we’ve been missing from Cathay.  A quart-sized jar of laoganma sauce?  Yes.  Pickled tamarind? A big yellow pomelo?  A can of water chestnuts?  These can call be had. 

 

And, we are all in the midst of a let’s-all-go-vege-for-six-months phase just now, so all the good stuff, like dried salty squid and juicy pork dumplings are off limits.  People inside are nearly all from China and it suddenly feels like we are operating according to different ideas of personal and public space.  In the air are loud, spring-festival folk songs.  I recognize an old melody I associate with Zhou Xuan from the 1930s.  This has a mechanical drum beat and a tinny, shrill singer.  One person who is not from China, besides myself is the gentleman whom I’d guess was from the Dominican Republic.  He’d obviously asked and been granted approval to crank merengue in his domain, behind the butcher counter. 

Driving down we’d listened to Jamie Raskin.  We’d listened as he introduced the woman who would follow him, the representative from the Virgin Islands, Ms. Stacey Plaskett, who had been his student.  She was dazzling.  All the way down we all listened and felt indignation rise.  They referenced “new” videos which I had to have explained to me by the reporters on NPR.  Eric Swalwell, spoke about cops as the brother and the son of a cop.  Joaquin Castro spoke in a clear, familial way.  And when we got home, I couldn’t make up my mind if begin getting ready for Chinese New Year as was only appropriate.  Or to dive back into this insular, American trial which was sad, predictable and yet powerful at the same time.

 

 

 

Thursday, 02/11/21

The Millennium's Old Ritual

 

China is always twelve hours ahead.  “Today” had already become New Year’s Eve in China.  This morning, China’s Wednesday afternoon, was the last I expected any of my team in China, in Taiwan, in South Korea, in Hong Kong, to be at work.  We had a call early in my morning and the team at the client headquarters were very thoughtful about acknowledging the holiday and about considering one year winding down and another about to begin. 

 

In China we’d likely be heading out to Shandong.  And the millennium’s old ritual of return and rest and accounting for things would be underway.  And only at this time, in a manner quite ghostly would the throbbing metropolis ever quiet down, half the population returned to home, stores and restaurants and all the operations of the state, closed for the next ten days.

Here, there nothing to mark the transformation.  We don’t have much of a community this year, let alone a Chinese community.  My daughter wants to know why her school doesn’t get Chinese New Year off?  I try to explain that Chinese are after all only two percent of the population or so and if they gave every group that made up the population their special day of acknowledgement you’d have nothing but holidays.  I try to make this nuanced, but I feel like Archie Bunker. 

 

I remind her of the time when they went to the local Chinese “international” school in Beijing.  There were very few “foreigners” in the school as with any school there were some aspects of the curriculum which were excellent.  Both my daughters took their Chinese to mastery as a results of that school.  But the first year they were in attendance, they wanted my younger daughter to perform in the Christmas performance, which sounded wonderful until they made it clear that she and we’d be expected there at the school around eight-thirty AM on Christmas morning. 

 

 

 

Wednesday, 02/10/21

An Unmistakable Crimson Color

 

Once I had an admin.  She was very good at what she did.  She later went to Yale.  I don’t have an admin now.  Haven’t for seven years.  And, I am in charge, therefore of my calendar. And I do well enough.  But a day like this morning you note how much room there is for improvement.  I had a call at four, and then six and then eight, and then ten and then at noon.  Calls every two hours leaves you winded, feeling like you haven’t really done anything yet.

It snowed all day.  Inches of new snow fell on the feet of snow covering out there.  I have a suet feeder and the Tufted Titmouse (mice?) and the Carolina Wrens had reduced it down to a small, snow covered nub.  One brave squirrel and then another locked their feet on the porch and stretched the fullness of their bodies all the way down to the green catch and scratched and chewed in hope of grasping a seed or two.  I went down through the untrodden snow and inserted a new cake of seeds.  And then, as always, I filled an empty gallon milk container full of seeds and threw those from the porch out below my window.

 

Later the deer came, as always.  I try not to begrudge them.  It’s cold. A hard life must have just gotten much harder. And older youngster is eating sunflower seeds.  The younger one seems to smell his ass.  The older one, perhaps not surprisingly doesn’t like this and lets the youngster know with a rear kick. The younger one does it again and this time the kick is more pronounced.  He (she?) spins and rises, as does the smaller one and now they slash their paws at each other till once again the younger one backs down.  

 

Later, my wife comes by the widow and asks: “What’s that?  Is that blood?”  And down where the seed is out over the snow there is an unmistakable crimson color that could only be the outcome of the earlier clash.  “Yes.  The deer were fighting earlier.”  She insists that I do not put any more seed below the window, but I don’t agree to this. 

 

Later I noticed the sun didn’t properly disappear till 6:00PM.  Soon it will be quite different.  And now I need to take the garbage up to the top of the drive.  We missed it in the snow last week and now its snowing again. 

 

 

 

Tuesday, 02/09/21  

Downhill to the Trail

As if it were a nearby river that I depended on for water, and transportation and food, the rail trail out in the back of my house is a critical egress from my house out into the world.  The driveway up to Route 208 isn’t so much further.  But its steeper.  And unless you’re driving along Route 208, which is fine, people whipping around the corner at 60 mph, without much of any shoulder it isn’t where you’d want to do much of anything else on foot.  It’s downhill to the trail.  And there is next to no traffic.

 

This year there seems to be no end to the snow.  It’s fallen.  It’s been added to.  It isn’t melting.  It’s impossible to ride a bike on the trail with a covering of packed snow.  And this year I’ve come a long way with the cross country skiing routine.  Slowly my thighs are building up the requisite strength to push and then hold the weight of my body on one thigh, while the other swings back and then down to relieve the weight on its side. It takes a while to get a rhythm and move beyond the faltering, painful half-steps that get you started. 

The journey right, into town has a slight incline downward and I have good memories of finding my stride in that direction. The turn left, up to the apple orchard sets off at an incline.  Not long after you start you need to take your skis off again when you reach Cedar Lane and then again, not long after when you come upon Plains Road. Then, after the bridge, over the stream, you have a more pronounced incline.  You notice it but it passes in a moment pedaling a bike, where as on skis the destination in your mind, Boppys Lane can seem grindingly long.  Up on the hill to the left in the grey house two dogs reliably bark and me and anyone along the trail. 

 

I snap a few photos as always.  There’s an impressive wall of mist that is sliding in front of the Trapps, as the sun descends.  I turn my skis around awkwardly.  I’m sweaty and though its cold outside my frame is warm.  And now, heading home this section becomes a lot more fun.  With a downward incline I can finally, for the first time in this trip anyway, feel the motion properly of sliding, holding, lifting, adjusting.  Concentrating on the cyclical count of one-one, two-two, up until one hundred I do what I can to lose myself in the repetition before looking up, before stopping.  There is no one else on the trail.

 

 

 

Monday, 02/08/21