Anatomy Trains

I just saw, and really liked, the new Bond film Casino Royale.  The bland pop formula for that series, degrading steadily from the none-too-sharp beginnings with Sean Connery, had become insipid and banal under Moore and Brosnan, and  was badly in need of a makeover.  Though this  attempt is a little flawed, it is a very brave attempt to contact the nitty-gritty that would make a real Bond.  The most telling scene is an out-of-context, black & white flashback of what is presumably his first kill, an awful, grungy, fight to the death in a washroom.

This is followed by a usual bit of derring-do, but unusually shot and edited so that the impact is quite visceral and kinesthetic - less the feeling of watching Bond, more the feeling of being him in some quite extraordinary, just outside of believable feats.

Of course, Dame Judi Dench has no trouble putting more meat into her role as M, but the real surprise is the ubiquitous Bond girl, which this time takes on elements of a real relationship.

A few bits are clumsy and repetitive, the film is overlong, the nods to earlier Bond efforts seem out of place, and the plotters’ motives less than clear, but Daniel Craig (who shows his range in the underappreciated Layer Cake) is easily watchable, definitely worthy of the role, and of the remaking of the role.  If there is a next time, let it be even stronger in it’s adherence to reality.

One of the joys of this season is being able to read a bunch of things at once - what Aldous Huxley called ‘rich mixed feed’. What do I have on the hop this January 2nd?

Bob Bylan’s Chronicles, (surprisingly down to earth)

Let Every Breath… Secrets of the Russian Breath Masters (a book on the martial art Systema)

The Traveler, by John Twelve Hawks - a post-9/11 novel of interdimensional derring-do

Off the Coast, a book of Maine poetry

The New York Times Cartoon Puzzle Book (amazingly well-constructed as well as fun)

and Monkey Hill, the new Paul Theroux stroy in The New Yorker.

Oh, and Priscilla Barker’s PhD thesis on the lumbar fascia fiber direction (not nighttime reading)

The Farmer’s Almanac predicted a heavy winter of snow here in the northeast. They were right about the precipitation; wrong about the form. The temperatures have held up so that we reach early January without a decent layer of ice on the pond - I tried stepping on it yesterday, only to crack straight through - and all the snow has fallen again and again as rain.

We have a love-hate relationship with winter here- we hate to shovel and bundle up and have flights and events and driving cancelled, but on the other hand, we live here because it has four seasons, and we love to see the landscape change so radically as it does when the snow covers the ground in fantastic white shapes, quieting this world and revealing others in the uniqueness of the season.

But whether it’s global warming or an off season, we find ourselves with a Jersey winter, cold rains, sleet, ice in the corners, deep mud underfoot. Grays and browns are the colors of spring here, not winter. Winter is all white and black - most winters you can take a picture with black & white film or color film (I know, I am dating myself) and barely see the difference. One nice thing is that many more birds have stuck around at the feeder - a pair of cardinals in January!

But I digress, because rain is the great boundary crosser. The rain insures the mixing of everything, and reminds us that all skin is just a selectively permeable membrane. I was out walking the shore under a set of small granite cliffs, to which trees cling. Water from the rains seeps through the cracks, freezing at night into curtains and stalactites. You see them by the road, too, where the highway cuts through a rock formation and the seams in the rock sprout icicles and sheets.

This whole post comes down to this one observation: where the water passed through a stump, it turned the ice below it brown with stump nutrients. We wouldn’t see this, except for the slowing of time achieved by the freezing: the fluids in us are constantly exchanging, picking up bits of the environment, coloring them, giving them a taste, giving us a flavor, the flavor of everything around us, mixing them all together. The ‘rain’ inside our bodies, as well as in the world, turns us all into soup. We are all a mixed bag.

It’s a soupy world here right now. I wear my boots everywhere. I don’t mind this in April, but it’s January - I want the crisp sounds of ax chops riding on the thick air, the air dense in your throat like mercury, the ski tracks stretching behind you in the virgin snow of a forest fairyland, not this sloppy mud that drags us all down to a common life in the dirt.

In winter, you can pretend that you are separate, the eagle of the north, clean, sere, and aloof. This winter that feeling is denied us, and we wallow in the springtime mud, tied to our biological underpinnings, but without that hope of renewal that April has inherent. In other words, it’s Christmas, not Easter - we want the spiritual feeling of independence that the winter breeds, not the feeling of belonging that belongs with spring.

I just flew out west - snuck through between snow storms - to celebrate a dear person’s one-year anniversary of a sober life.  Nothing could be more worthy of celebration - a full run of seasons without recourse to the easy way of (not) handling what needs to be handled, and yet no occasion could be more indicative of the hollowness of anniversaries: it can also be seen as just another day in the steady march of handling life’s challenges one day at a time.

The African explorer Stanley was attacked by a lion, who sunk his claws into Stanley’s shoulder and his teeth into Stanley’s neck.  A desperate and lucky shot killed the lion and saved Stanley (who interestingly lived to tell of his feling of narcotic lethargy and detachment during the experience of being killed to be eaten - the protective endorphins of the prey animal).  Every year, he later reported, on the anniversary of the attack, his scars would inflame and the pains of the attack return ot haunt him.  This is a testament to the power of the mind, the power of trauma, and, I suppose, to the power of anniversaries.
Myself, I am not an anniversary person.  I don’t remember my own birthday, don’t expect anyone else too either.  I struggle to remember anyone else’s.  My best friend of 30 years, for whom birthdays are very important, feels slighted every time I forget, which I do unless I write it down ahead of time and remember to look where I noted it.  I would prefer to call, write, or gift someone when I think of it, rather than on a particular day on the inaccurate and astronomically unreal Gregorian calendar, but life being as busy as it is, I am probably guilty of doing that less than once a year, which would be the purpose, I guess, for anyone other than an astrologer to assign someone a particular day.

That’s actually an easier way for me to remember - that friend is a Taurus-Gemini cusp, my other best friend is an Aries, my longtime sailing partner is a triple Sag - my wife I have no problem remembering - she’s a Leo.  If I kept up with it all, I would need a list, and I would be writing cards every morning, and I would be a better person for it, I suppose.

There’s no reality in anniversaries - it’s all human markings of time.  The earth has moved on, time has moved on - it’s only us who see the years moving in circles, rather than spirals.

Please don’t expect me to remember your birthday, but I do remember you outside of any time marker in the things that call you up - I see a book you liked, a friend we share, I’m in a town where we met.  These remembrances seem more real to me; anniversaries seem arbitraray and contrived.

That said, congratulations, dear person, on making it through a year without relapsing into the easy way.