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"The Goldfinch"

9/30/2014

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Picture"...it's hard not to see the human in the finch. Dignified, vulnerable. One prisoner looking at another." Donna Tartt
(Spoiler Alert)
Lost among the reviews of Donna Tartt's 771-page Pulitzer Prize winning book
is its story of a man's metaphysical journey, about his transformation and awakening to truths 'beyond matter'.

The reviewers note
Tartt's over-writing (she's not the only one guilty of this), complain about the hackneyed expressions of her teenage characters (true, most boys don't speak like literary writers), and criticize her for not making every sentence sing. Well, as the book's fictional Theo Decker says about the painting's scholars, let them. This book, like the painting itself, touches on metaphysical truths the way art does; in a place "where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime."

The story: Theo Decker is 13 years old when a bomb explodes in a museum he's visiting. In the tumult and trauma, he steals a 17th-c Dutch painting, Fabritius' final masterpiece 'The Goldfinch.' The painting becomes Theo's obsession during his chaotic, rackety road into adulthood. Over the years (and pages), Theo builds a persona, an ego construct that grows dysfunctional by the day. He develops addictions, with a little help from his friend Boris. He becomes ever more compulsive and destructive to the point of near-death in an Amsterdam hotel room. You feel his despair; that there's no way out. I was sure he'd died.

But Amsterdam was Theo's Damascus. It was his ego, that fake persona, that had died. In the final pages, we see his transformation. We see the contrast between an individual controlled by its artificial ego and a person who's let it go, who can now embrace the "mysterious, ambiguous, inexplicable. What doesn't fit into a story, what doesn't have a story."
Instead of drama, he's at peace. Instead of taking everything so personally, he has a calm overview.

It's not rainbows and puppy dogs though. The painting is not of a butterfly, but of a tethered bird with a barely-there chain on its ankle. Theo has no illusions. He has work now to do, his frequent airplane trips a mimicry of the finch fluttering up and down in the same spot. But he transcends the physical, goes beyond, concludes: "That maybe even if we're not always so glad to be here, it's our task to immerse ourselves anyway, wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping our eyes and hearts open."

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Last Gasp of Summer

9/19/2014

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With just a few days left before summer's end in the northern hemisphere, I've been reflecting about the last several months when I've been in transit, homeless, off the grid. It's a little easier being a nomad in the summer Sun. Out of the Sun streams light ether. Like neutrinos or electromagnetic waves, light ether is invisible. But it is valuable because it creates space, makes room, and has a lengthening effect.

You can see this with us humans; we're a little more open to freeing ourselves from schedules and habits in summer. In the natural world,  grains grow, trees branch out, calyxes of flowers open wide. Now, up north, many flowers have long shrunk, the fruit continues to fall, and soon it will be harvest. We might not receive as much light from the Sun in the months ahead, but what we do get we can work with in creative ways, through our yoga, to keep this sense of space.
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Goodbye, London

9/12/2014

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PictureGomukhasana (The Serene Face)
This is about the time of year when I would be heading back to my home in London after summer travels Stateside. For years, this has been the routine. Except this time around, I'm not going back across the pond. A pattern broken, a cycle ended, my rhythm disrupted. Home is now in the U.S. It's my native country, but I've relocated to an area completely new to me. It's Goodbye, London and Hello, New Jersey.

When I first arrived in London in 1999 I was a lot like one of those tourists in Westminster tube station hungry to tap into this city through its royal places, history, cultural venues. But after living there a while, those icons faded into the background, side-lined by other, less obvious, fascinations.

Back then I had lots of plans in my head; goals to accomplish so that when I did move back to the U.S. 'two years later' (yes, this was part of the plan), I would have this and do that. Of course, none of those things happened. The future did not unfold as my ego wished. I learned here not to plan too much, too far ahead.

Never mind the grand plans. Everyday schedules can quickly go haywire. While the UK is becoming more convenience cultured, the vagaries of London public transportation alone can scuttle the best laid plans of mice and men. You're never quite certain you'll get to your destination until you get there. Most homes don't have the space for appliances that many Americans would consider basic. Washing machines are usually in the kitchen and maybe if you're lucky it'll be a two-in-one with a dryer function. In winter, I often felt like that John Candy character in 'Uncle Buck', roasting and broiling damp clothes over kitchen radiators. By spring, I'd look into the sky to divine whether the sunlight was strong enough to hang the towels. But you learn about timing; how Life has its own flow outside your control.

The land of Shakespeare lives up to its reputation. I'm still astonished by the upper-class ability to speak, turns of phrases and vocabulary, words rolling and frolicking off the tongue all the whilst saying very little of any substance. In the working classes, no one verbally hugs better. Where else do vendors call you love, darling, or sweetheart when buying apples? Once a Royal Mail lady called me darling so many times when I bought stamps that I thought any second she was going to open the glass partition, reach over, and give me a hug.

In London, there's such a variety of people in your face on an average day. Almost every demographic group was represented the length and breadth of my Sumatra Road in West Hampstead. From squatters to power-lawyer couples to to the professional dog walker. On Upper Park Road in Belsize Park, I lived near both a Hollywood film actress and a drug dealer collecting job benefits. One day stands out: in the morning I was inner-city shopping at a market. By evening, I was in 'Richistan' at a party in a Holland Park mansion being served bottomless crystal flutes of Dom Perignon.

The poor, the rich, and the few of us somewhere in the middle of these growing extremes. You can interact and engage with them all, in ways I've yet to experience in any American city. The opportunity for spontaneous interaction is everywhere, and what I learned is that true engagement with another means transcending exactly all this societal stuff, the labels, the cultural conditioning. I will remember all this as I settle back into America. 

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