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for those of you who might be frustrated by the fact that i don't write or call, that i don't even write back or call back, that i seem to be a less reliable or less present friend. forgive me.
or -- better yet -- think about what it might take (that is, in addition to no Internet, no home, no money and no time), what could have happened, for someone like me, to be this lame and unresponsive.
then, when you're done, think about what could have happened, again.
***
the truth is i need to write, i know that. it isn't helping me, that in the last six weeks i have not strung six words together that were not related to working, teaching, or Italian bureaucracy. it isn't helping me that i cannot hear myself think for all the static that i keep stumbling over. there is not one part of anything that is resolved or simple or settled. instead there are so many parts -- so many big and frightening parts -- that are shattering in slow motion.
***
this is a picture of my mother, taken in 1977.
i know the year without having to ask, because that bump under her sari -- the bump that is right about level with this line of text -- that's me.
i've had this image cropped and ready to be a blog-picture for over a year now. so many times i have drafted it in. so many times i have changed my mind at the last minute, and given you statuary, or flowers, or dried paint instead. partly because i felt the image was way too long (you'd never find my left-hand navigation). partly because i don't like to have faces on this blog. partly because i don't know.
***
last week the second-opinion core biopsy confirmed what the first-opinion mammogram, ultrasound and fine-needle-biopsy had already suggested. that the lump my mother found in her breast about six weeks ago -- after a long day of helping my brother paint his house in Hoboken -- was malignant. the word in Italian -- for those of you who might ever need to know, and i pray there is no one reading this, who might ever need to know -- is maligno. in this country it sounds more like a trenchant teenager, than cancer.
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last night they operated.
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there will be chemotherapy.
***
look. here's the left-hand navigation.
[nightingaleshiraz] [?]
[Via Baccio Pontelli, Roma]
[venerd́ 07 dicembre 2007 ore 21:59:12] [¶]
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also known as "other people's parole".
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"I can think of no finer writer to have beside me while Italy explodes, Britain burns, while the world ends."
--- Salman Rushdie on Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler.
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"...anzi quando ti arriva la tristezza scacciala via lontano ripensando ai momenti belli che hai passato con noi e poi ricordati che quando siamo giovani e belle come te non si deve essere tristi perche tutti i giorni quando nasce il sole la vita ci da qualche cosa di bello."
--- Franca & Miro, parlando dei momenti tristi.
***
"These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all
The way we look to a distant constellation
That's dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don't cry baby, don't cry"
--- Paul Simon, about The Boy In The Bubble.
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"Always there's that space between what you feel and what you do, and in that gap all human sadness lies."
--- From BLUE DOG by George Rodrigue.
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"Oh Lord, Thou who allowed Maria to conceive without sinning, please allow us girls to sin without conceiving."
--- anonymous graffiti on a public bench, Cortona, Italy.
[nightingaleshiraz] [?]
[Via Urbana, Roma]
[sabato 01 dicembre 2007 ore 07:12:15] [¶]
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