MindSpinner

I’m still reading Pretty Birds off and on, when I decide it’s time to ignore everything else that clamors for attention. I’ve been using that little stack of index cards called a Hipster PDA to keep up with all my action list, and I’ve decided that I need to write on the front card, “Read 20 minutes,” along with “Exercise.” It’s too easy to let those things go when there are not enough hours in the day. And there won’t be enough hours in the day, now that school is starting.

At first I decided that Pretty Birds is clearly a journalist’s novel. Well-written, certainly. I knew I had to buy the book when, listening to NPR, I heard Scott Simon read the passage in which Irena shoots the lemons. I also wanted to read it because of Yelena, a Serb exchange student I taught in ’92-’93. After my first three dips into the book – maybe 75 pages – I was feeling, despite the capable prose, a reporter’s careful, restrained distancing from dimensions of characters’ inner lives. Even Irena’s rape seemed matter-of-fact, as if our tough young heroine could not be fazed by something as morally weak as the Serb soldier’s clumsy assault. (In fact, the more I think about it, the more I wonder whether Irena’s involvement with her coach and the apparently gratuitous sex scene that occurs early in the novel aren’t there most crucially so that she won’t be a virgin when the soldier forces himself on her, so that she’ll be sexually experienced and tough and not let a war-time rape haunt her, though of course at some level it must.)

I’d even begun to take some issue about what began to feel like a misrepresentation of the human experience of war simply through omission. The focus on reportable exteriorities seemed to insist that an objective and somewhat distanced approach was the only way to tell the truth, to avoid putting oneself where one could never actually really be, in the shoes of these characters during this war. However, that is exactly where a novel has to put us, in order to tell what readers can know of such truths, at least by reading rather than by experiencing war.

Now that I’ve read to page 109, the distance that defines objectivity has telescoped inward as Scott Simon works his way into psychological and physical truths that are at the heart of the story he was obviously compelled to tell. Nermina’s death and Mrs. Zaric’s letter to the dead girl’s parents move us in that direction. Objective artifact, a letter, but full of human feeling.

Setting Pretty Bird free, in hopes that he will survive, strikes a new note of pathos that is not reserved for a severed human foot with its painted toenails or even for Milan Zaric’s mother earlier in the book. Likewise the story of Cesar the old blue hound and Kolo the starving bear in the zoo. It is Cesar the hound, however, that has seized upon my thinking.

Another woman brought in an old blue hound who was exhausted and hoarse from barking. The poor dog had been driven crazy by bombs. It was a quiet morning. But Cesar whimpered, bucked, and cringed in a corner, hearing whines from mortars and bombs that were above human register. (p. 101)

Irena helps the vet, Dr. Pekar, put the dog down, death being the only peace the doctor can offer. I cried. Instantaneously. Now this moment is probably, for many readers, less affecting than, say, the death of Nermina, Irena’s teammate. Maybe it struck a chord for me because, when our Sheltie had grown so old and ill that the spark left her eyes, I was the one who had to take her, on my own, to have her put down. I still remember the horrid shock when I realized that “putting a dog to sleep” was not – had not been - a five-minute process or even a two-minute process of the dog’s drifting off in my arms but a process of mere seconds. I had watched the needle emptying into the vein, not the life leaving the eyes. So maybe it was this connection that made the small incident in the book bring home some true thing about the horror of war, that it could drive the dog mad.

Three days later, I’m still puzzling. What made the death of the dog more affecting to me than the death of Nermina or Milan Zaric’s mother? Is it because in war I expect people to die but simply hadn’t thought of this additional horror - because I was braced for the one but not the other (as may have been Scott Simon’s experience, too)? Is it because humanity feels culpable – even the apparently innocent among us - for the whole business of war, having proven over and over again that war is a predilection of our species, such that we may, any or all of us, find ourselves damned to it now and then? Is it because dogs cannot pick up guns and shoot back, as Irena will do? Is it because we therefore ascribe to animals a sort of innocence we do not find in ourselves, even though Kolo the bear eats his cagemates? I don’t know.

But, in the final analysis, I am not sure I think of my former students who have gone to fight in Iraq as significantly less innocent than Cesar the dog. May they live and come home whole in body and mind. Somehow.

My daughter wants a Teacup Yorkie. Her friend is raising them. She plans to carry it around in her purse. It will live in her room, and she’ll always take care of it, and I will never, ever have to clean up after it. Somehow this will be true even though she’ll go off to college in four years. No doubt it won’t bark, either. It sounds like an animated fashion accessory.

Am I going to fall for this? No! Not this time. The kids and I already have a cat, two short-legged Jack Russells, a geriatric ferret, and two goldfish swimming around in a large planter half buried in the garden. Do I sound like a slow learner, or what?

Take the cat. Now, the fact is that I adore the cat. He’s three years old and has an enormous talent for getting ever fatter no matter what low calorie, high cost, vet-prescribed diet he is fed. I adore him even though he has summer allergies and asthma and is currently recovering from a case of pneumonia, such that I’ve just spent $300 on medication and testing and will be giving him medications twice daily for a month, which may as well be a life sentence for both of us, as you understand if you’ve ever tried to medicate a cat. He’s getting very good at popping pills out with his tongue. I’m getting very good at popping them back into the side of his mouth and holding his mouth shut until his swallows. He is just good enough not to scratch and fight, unless, of course, I’m trying to get him into his carrier for a trip to the vet. The other day, I was succeeding in total incompetence, with scratches to show for it, when my daughter took over, swaddled him in a towel, and popped him into the crate - no trouble at all. Her cat proficiency extends to all manner of behavior management issues. She gives the cat a bath whether he likes it or not, holds him as long as she wants, and dresses him up for kung fu lessons.

She’s not so keen on daily pet owner chores she vowed to do when she was politicking for a kitten. As far as that litter box that I would never ever have to change because she’d do it every single day, well, right now you don’t want to know. Thank goodness for Arm and Hammer Super Scoop litter. The stuff is potent enough to allow me to hold out until she gets back from her dad’s this afternoon, when I can make her clean it out. But when the cat gets sick, cat vomit is mine, all mine. Likewise the vet bills.

I don’t care how cute that Yorkie puppy is, and no, I don’t want to see it. I know my weaknesses.

Two of my weaknesses are asleep in crates in the garage. Short-legged Jack Russells make incredibly cute puppies and indeed heart-winning dogs. Their talent for winning hearts is, however, clearly a survival mechanism designed to ensure that all the trouble they get into does not result in doggy homicide. They are brothers, the last two puppies sold from a litter. Who could separate them? I bought them for my son, who had deeply loved the family Sheltie. His bond with that dog helped him weather childhood, and I thought these two pups might help him weather adolescence in the wake of his parents’ divorce. Turns out girls are more relevant these days than dogs. Foreseeing that should have been a no-brainer, but then he’s my first adolescent.

The dog with two eye patches is deaf; the dog with one eye patch doesn’t listen. Neither successfully crate trained, despite my assiduous efforts, so home for them is pretty much the dog pen behind the garage. This was a carefully researched and designed dog lot, big enough for running around. Jack Russells are known to jump, so the cedar fence is five feet tall. The slats are close together because the deaf dog barks a lot, apparently for the sheer joy of moving his mouth. (The hearing dog, who has to listen to his brother barking, appreciates silence and almost never barks.) I figured that the deaf dog might not bark at what he couldn’t see. Jack Russells dig, so I had a plan for that, too. I bought PCV-coated wire fencing and had it tacked to the bottom of the fence, with the lower edge buried under the sod.

I thought I was smart, but these dogs are smarter. Moreover, they love romping through the wide world beyond their confining dog pen. Thus began a drama in which they play Hogan’s Heroes while I begrudgingly assume the role of Colonel Klink. The chicken wire is a joke on two counts. They tear it out of the ground and then dig under it. Better yet, they chew through it. They chew through the lattice under the deck, too, where I’d planned for them to have shade. I’ve lined the deck lattice with different fencing they can’t get their teeth through. I’ve carried rocks from all over and lined the inside perimeter of the fence with them. I’ve learned that these rocks should weigh nearly as much as the dogs themselves if they are to do any good. The dogs, for their part, have enjoyed many, many glorious romps in the wide, wide world, while I’m ever in search of ever bigger rocks.

The deaf dog, who is the friendliest, most adoring little personality you could hope to meet, has cultivated the habit of barking at night. Not just part of the night, but really as much of it as you could hope to sleep through under the best of circumstances. We can report, however, that a $99 Citronella anti-bark collar really does work and could be the best purchase a dog owner ever makes. The dog wears it at night. Neither dog wears a collar in the daytime. It would be nice for them to have tags when they go romping in the wide, wide world, but they believe in cooperative chewing, and each will systematically chew the collar off the other and then they’ll play tug of war with it.

The geriatric ferret is very little trouble, really, except for the cage cleaning and the incident in which she got lost before the builder got the last register over the last vent in our new house. We looked for her for three days and found her when I thought to check the crawl space. She’d gone adventuring in the ductwork and wriggled out through the furnace. She’s had cancer and survived. She’s lost all her hair and grown it back. She lost her best buddy more than a year ago when he escaped into the wide world and never came back. She makes a kind of chortle chirp for joy when she’s let out of her cage to play. She’s a friendly little pound and a half of moxie, all covered in fur.

The goldfish please me and give me a reason to go out to the garden each morning to drop a few flakes of food into their water garden. They swim to the surface and devour the flakes. By chance, they are precisely the same orange gold as the daylilies planted behind their pot.

Question is, do we need one more endearing, adorable, bothersome, expensive little character in this household? The answer is no, no, no.

I remember reading years ago Beryl Markham’s poetic and gutsy (yes, both) memoir of her life in Africa, West With the Night. Markham made the horizons of a life seem potentially almost limitless. Hers is still one of the most beautifully written memoirs I’ve read (no matter how much of a hand her third husband did or didn’t have in writing it). But as I read, I thought, You’re not telling me the half of it. If you lived and perceived this bravely and beautifully, the personal aspects of your life probably also reflected adventurous courage. So I read a biography, too, to satisfy my curiosity. (I am not an avid reader of biographies, generally. If drama is life with the dull bits cut out, as Alfred Hitchcock said, biography is life with the dull bits intact.) I don’t even remember which biography it was, though it might have been Straight on ‘Til Morning, by Mary Lovell. (That title seems to ring a bell - besides Peter Pan, that is.) Whichever biography it was, it confirmed what I suspected. Markham hadn’t told her readers many of the intimate aspects of her remarkable life, but only what she had distilled as the legacy of her memories. So she gave us memories and vision, but not whom she slept with or even married. I respected her choices because those choices respected people and situations.

I’ve thought about blogging in the light of Markham’s memoir. As a blogger, I think I’d rather be a Beryl Markham than a Stephanie Klein. Not that I’m in any danger whatsoever of being likened to either, but one does like to sort out hypothetical questions. Of course, I have a challenge Markham never faced - a preponderance of dull bits as opposed to solo transatlantic flights, lions, and so forth. So if I manage to shape something worth writing and reading out of my dull bits, or better yet reach out and snatch better bits whenever the gods of endless responsibility glance the other way, I figure I may be accomplishing something courageous, even heroic, too.

The whole project is analogous to ongoing efforts in my backyard garden, which is no less than a life-long attempt to make an Eden out of bad dirt, a lot of weeds, and, currently, a plague of Japanese beetles. So there’s still a lot of bad dirt, and there are still a lot of weeds, and the horrid beetles have stripped the grape vines bare, but there’s the someday shade garden and the stone path, lilies and roses, thyme, rosemary, and lavender, two goldfish in the planter-pot-turned-pond, and, today, a handful of ripe blackberries to eat out of hand. Perhaps this blog is yet one more quest to make life not only habitable but beautiful, dull bits and all.

A couple of days ago, the first ant appeared in my kitchen, in the sink. It was not a small ant. It was brown and measured perhaps 3/8″in length. I figured it had wandered in by accident. It was lost. I would put it outside. I tried to catch it in something, but it was too quick for comfort. A few attempts later, it had slipped down the garbage disposal. “Too bad, you’ll have to get yourself out,” I thought. Or maybe I actually said it.

When I opened my back door to visit the garden early yesterday, I realized that my ant was no wanderer; he was a scout, and he wasn’t lost at all. As soon as I cracked the door, two dozen ants poured into the kitchen, like eager shoppers when the doors open on the day of a big sale. Mercy was no longer applicable. This was an invasion. I stomped, though a few ants made it past and were later to be found scurrying when I lifted a plate on the counter. One stuck his head under the flour canister and held very still, pretending to be a brownie crumb.

The second time I went out the back door, the same thing happened. Another huddle of ants was bunched up against the door just waiting for it to open. I stomped again. Then I decided to try something. I swept up all the broken bodies and put them in a little heap just outside the door. It was meant as a message: this way lies death. I watched until another ant found them - he grew agitated, checking the bodies again and again, waving his antennae and his little forelegs as if he were saying “Oh! Oh!”

I went about my business. I did not open the door again all day.

This morning I bought ant spray at the grocery and carried it with me all the way around the house to kill the ants from the outside without letting any more in. There were no ants. Not one. I sprayed around the door frame for good measure, but the deck was deserted. I think we’ve reached an understanding.

I’m backtracking today, all the way to last summer, when I read Life of Pi and wrote to a friend about the book. I’m pasting part of the note below.

Why would I do this? For the sake of potential conversations about books, of course. I should be blogging about what I’m reading now (just finished The Kite Runner and Getting Things Done, am sixty or seventy pages into Scott Simon’s Pretty Birds), but this summer has not offered much time for reading and writing about reading, given a job change and a summer Web project, so I’m cheating.

No doubt, I am also posting this note because a casual acquaintance disparaged reading to me today as having little substantive relevance to “real life.” He thought I was nuts for putting a shared love of books high on my list of criteria for a successful relationship. I am in full defiance mode.

Here’s the greater part of the note.

Your ideas about Life of Pi brought me back to the novel and to the task of working out what to make of it, a task I had not (and still have not) finished. But I think I am making a start. (I am very happy at this sort of thing, like a child absorbed in building a sand castle with sand that actually holds a shape.)

I should read the novel all over again. (In fact, all bets are off until I do, and all sand castles merely hypothetical until shored up on every side with little sandy buttresses.)

My impression was that I began to expect one thing while I was reading or listening, and then the book became another, several times over. I do not think this was, in fact, a lack of unity or purpose; I think it is evidence that the story is not to be read merely as a remarkable story in the survival genre that swerves into magical realism here and there. I think it’s a story about stories and storytellers, the stories we choose to believe and the stories we don’t, the stories that we mistake for truths that are not, the truths that we dismiss as stories wen we shouldn’t, and most of all, the stories that are most worth telling and hearing and believing imaginatively, if not literally, as if reality isn’t the most important thing in the world after all.

There’s a tip-off in the close to the author’s note, which is itself a fiction, like Hawthorne’s “Customs House” introduction to The Scarlet Letter: “If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.” So maybe the book is about choosing what to believe and having worthwhile dreams. It’s a testament to a faith in stories and in truths that are not slave to mere “crude reality.”

There is the story of how bad zoos are, which is dismantled and replaced by another story of how bad zoos are not.

There are the stories which are the world’s great religions, stories which each in their own way point to God, and which therefore should not be dismissed, each by another.

There is the story of the boy and the tiger on the boat, which is worth telling and believing not because it is necessarily believable, but because it is a great story that speaks to faith, resourcefulness, and the potentially indomitable human spirit. So Martel makes us believe it for a bit by force of vividness and detail, then undoes the believing with the fantastic conversation between the blind Pi and his blind fellow shipwreck victim whose paths supposedly cross, and the story of the carnivorous island, which sounds like an episode from The Odyssey. (It reminds me of the island of Circe: this is a place that will devour you, a place you cannot stay.) Then we realize that the carnivorous island story does not have to be literally true; it can by mythically true of all sorts of situations we can encounter in crude reality, from a bad marriage to a bad job to a seductive addiction.

When the story of the French cook comes along, we find ourselves attempting to choose, as Pi suggests, the story we wish to believe. Both, of course, are fictions. Martel implies that the value of a story does not lie in whether or not it actually happened. The value of a story lies in whether it speaks to us dreams worth dreaming and beliefs that keep us afloat, or indomitable, and sometimes within reach of the divine.