Dr. Metablog

Deer Dream

In this one, I see two deer (it's not clear whether they're mule or white tail) lolling on the ridge line. They're semi-anthropomorphic -- they look like deer, but they're sprawled on the ground as if in a reading position, each supporting his head with one hand (or hoof). I climb to where they are lying and join them, but the terrain is very steep and I tumble backward  head over heel a hundred or so feet into a swampy thicket. The deer follow me gingerly. There's a fadeout. Next thing I know, I'm lying on the back of one of the deer just like in the westerns when a dead man is carried back to town  horseback.  The deer take me home -- to a log cabin, unfamiliar to me, in the woods. My friends unload me, and one of them says, "We should do something for the deer." I say, "OK, let's not shoot them."  End of dream. 

Once again, my nighttime life is orders of magnitude more imaginative that my daytime existence.

Amnesia on Film: The Vow (2012)

Amnesia movies are not absolutely fettered to reality, nor should they be. Hollywood amnesia, as has been frequently noted, is the most flexible and variable of illnesses. Nevertheless, The Vow (2012) breaks new ground in want of integrity. One reviewer called it a "heartless, soulless jumble," but that's letting it off easy.

A young woman, played by perky Rachel McAdams, suffers an automobile accident and forgets the five years of her marriage to a young man, played by wooden mumbling Channing Tatum. The couple stumbles around for ninety bumbling minutes but eventually he wins her back in cliche date-movie, rom-com tearjerk fashion. Loss of memory, which in any close-to-reality situation would be psychologically troublesome if not utterly disabling, proves to be of no more consequence than the loss of a pair of shoes or eyeglasses. Simplistic, superficial, offensive.

The film advertises itself as based on real events. Loosely based, I'd say, because in actual fact, there was an accident and she suffered loss of memory, but he had an affair, the marriage crumbled, and they divorced. But that was in another country, one in which real human beings might dwell.

"No redeeming characteristics" says another reviewer. The film is especially not redeemed by expressionless Channing Tatum, who fumbles and garbles a higher percentage of his dialog than any actor in the history of Hollywood.

First Days at Cornell, September 1956.

Early in September of 1956, I found my way from Flatbush to Hoboken and there boarded the old Lehigh Valley Railroad (the 'Leaky V') for the eight-hour ride to Ithaca. Surely I was the most naive and callow lad ever to set foot on the grounds of Cornell University. I was ignorant and provincial and I had never so much as visited a college campus. Although I lived a bicycle ride's distance from Brooklyn College, I had never been either enterprising or curious enough to ride by and take a gander. What I knew of higher education was what I had gleaned from 1940s black-and-white movies in which mature-looking but prankish fellows in raccoon coats smoked pipes and harmonized and made fun of the 'prexy' and of the bespectacled 'profs' and who were unworthy of the attractive coeds they pursued until just before the final fadeout when they reformed themselves enough to earn a kiss and a wink. Nor did I have the slightest idea what was signified by the wink.         

I arrived at Cornell a few days before classes began. During those first days I had three separate mind-shattering experiences.

The first: one morning, I took my newly-purchased map and set out on a long walk (probably to avoid one of those atavistic rah-rah events which Cornell favored and to which I was constitutionally averse). Sometime during the day's wandering I came across a road sign that read "CITY LIMITS." It was as if I had been struck by lightning. Until the moment that I encountered that sign, I had no idea that a city could have limits. Regular readers of this blague know that I spent my first seventeen years in the interior regions of darkest Brooklyn, a large borough in an even larger city from which there was no exit and certainly no "limit" -- especially not while on foot. My family, my family of origin, was automobile-free and I myself had left the neighborhood precincts only a handful of times. Although unworldly, I was nevertheless capable of extrapolation. If it was possible to pass beyond the city limits, then perhaps it was also possible to re-negotiate other limitations that I had assumed were eternal or unalterable. I walked past the sign and transcended the city of Ithaca. I couldn't go very far because my map went blank, so after a hundred or so feet I hustled back -- but for the first time in my life I had stepped over the line.   

The next day: terra incognita of an entirely different order. I wandered into the McGraw Library and found myself in the periodical room. Until the moment that I entered that space, I was acquainted only with magazines that would be found in a barbershop or in a dentist's office -- Life and Look and Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post and, for profound intellectual stimulation, the National Geographic. And yet here was a room with an apparently limitless number of periodicals: Journal of Physical Chemistry, Journal of Theology, Journal of Metaphysics, Journal of Medieval Studies, Journal of Biblical Archeology. I had no idea that there were such periodicals nor did I know that there were such areas of knowledge. Was there in truth a subject called anthropology?  and various shades of anthropology -- cultural, physical, linguistic? To say that I was wide-eyed does not do justice to width of my eyes. I spent hours leafing through these publications. I didn't understand much of what I read, but I did realize that there were things going on in the world for which P. S. 217 and EHHS and Flatbush had not prepared me. 

A third and most miraculous occurrence. My assigned roommate arrived. His name was Harry Wallace Blair II. He was delivered to campus by his parents and his grandparents. I was introduced to his family, and, wonder of wonders, his grandparents spoke English. Coming from immigrant Brooklyn, I had never encountered grandparents who spoke English. Or imagined that there could be any such. Italian, yes. Polish, certainly. Yiddish, of course. But English, never. I was totally flabbergasted. I wonder whether Harry's grandparents noticed my repeated gasps.

Oh, yes, I forgot one other event of the first Cornell week. Classes began. I enrolled for introductory chemistry -- a big mistake. Chem, I quickly discovered, was not where my talents lay. It was a large lecture class -- possibly 300 or 400 students. We all sat for a math screening test. Quite in error, I was assigned to a special advanced section of twenty students supposedly talented in mathematics. In the class were nineteen men and one woman. Can you guess, grandchildren and regular readers, who was that woman?

"What Wondrous Life is This I Lead"

"Now for my life," the doctor* boasted, "it is a miracle of [eighty] years, which to relate, were not a history but a piece of poetry." Sir Thomas didn't know the half of it; if his life was a miracle, then mine is a hundred times more so. Yesterday the miracles started first thing in the morning when I drove (I own a horseless carriage -- a circumstance Sir T. couldn't possibly have imagined) to our spanking new hospital to have my innards inspected. The MRI doughnut deployed a couple of teslas worth of magnetism to spin my protons into images, a process which, though incomprehensible to me, is a heck of a lot less agonizing than extracting the information from my personal body with scalpel and stand-by sponge, and is significantly more informative than inspecting my urine, which is what a seventeenth-century doctor like Browne would have done. Later, I took a short walk to the local bank to take care of business and moved some, well, not exactly money but virtual or magic money from one account to another. Back home, I conversed by cell to NGP who was on the road to Virginia in a horseless carriage of his own. Inasmuch as he was behind the wheel, we skipped the face time feature. Nevertheless the long-distance mobile communication experience was plenty miraculous. The climax of my day was a walk to a neighborhood theater where Angela Hewitt blessed us with an exquisitely rendered performance of Bach's Goldberg Variations. She was in a zone; I was riveted. Is it more wondrous that Bach composed the Variations, that Ms. Hewitt performed them with such delicate power, or that the concert took place right around the corner, almost at my doorstep?  After the Bach, the day being now almost over, along came still another miraculous moment when I watched, supine in my own bed, in real time, the last minutes of an NBA game beamed in from Boston, Massachusetts, two thousand miles to the east, and almost at the Atlantic Ocean. It was an excellent game -- a stunning win for the Brooklyn Nets, and an equally remarkable triumph for my pixel-rich widescreen TV. It was a long day and a varied one, and I was beat, so while snuggling a-bed with the lady friend (an intimacy that is not only a miracle but a piece of poetry to boot), I instructed Alexa to give us a little opera. Alexa complied and chose WQXR in NYC, and for a drowsy hour we were grateful operavores.

No question but that my day was comprised of a series of miracles, each one more incredible than the other.

Nor do I even bother to tally daily miracles so commonplace that we cease to notice them: water in (both cold and hot) and waste out, electricity, central heating and A/C, refrigeration, natural gas to cook by, big bright cheerful windows, etc.

"What wondrous life is this I lead."

*Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, first published 1644.