On the internet of things
"Oh — my heart"
“Honey, there’s a whole dozen eggs in here,” says my spouse Janyce, calling me from the kitchen.
“Damn,” I say.
I told her we were completely out of eggs the other morning and I opened a can of tuna instead for myself and she made a bowl of cereal.
“Yeah, they were right here underneath the other carton,” she says.
“Well, guess what we are having for breakfast,” I say.
It’s Sunday morning. Rain again. Every one of our windows is fogged up from the muggy morning air outside and the refrigerated chill inside. Swirly woke me up promptly when the sunlamp gradually started to fill the room at 6 am by standing on my shoulders and licking my ear. Now she is lying blissfully next to me, having scored Janyce’s side of the bed, breathing steadily with her head fully resting on the pillow like a person.
She needs a bath. Yesterday, while out on our walk, she snuck in a frenzied, jubilant roll in a muddy trough of rotting leaves when we weren’t paying attention. It took Janyce the hose and many rounds of blackened wet wipes and dry towels, to get her passable again for home entry. Moments after the roll, the dirt completely disappeared under the shiny exterior of her coat. “Look, she’s fine,” I would have said, and skipped the heavy scrubdown in the garage by the kitchen door. But not Janyce. She has a knowingness of dirt and has said to me on many occasions “Dust never sleeps.”
The low tide riverbed silt of things.
The invisible silt that made its way down deep in my dog’s fur reminds me of the opening line in a poem by Erin Murphy. I read it the other day and liked its simplicity of statements about nature and humanity despite the technology reminder in the title. As if we need a reminder of the Internet— that blue light hum all around us, seemingly subsuming our every thought.
THE INTERNET OF THINGS (n.): the networking capability that allows information to be sent and received by objects and devices The low tide riverbed silt of things. The cloud-swept distant hill of things. The open bedroom window in spring of things. The moonlit cricket symphony of things. The pitter-patter tin roof rain of things. The fifty-year marriage loose skin of things. The clipped winter light of things. The stippled lymph node of things. The grief. Oh—the grief. The brief ecstatic flight of things.
I like the poet’s insistence here on a list of “things” having their own networked significance. The best part of this poem is visual. Namely the spacing of the stanzas. I appreciate how she takes a phrase like “cloud-swept distant hill” and breaks it in two with the spacing, so that “riverbed silt” is coupled with “cloud swept.” Later “tin roof rain” is coupled with “fifty year marriage” and “loose skin” with “winter light.”
I especially like the use of “grief “and “ecstatic flight” together. This last stanza, with its lyric opener,
“Oh—the grief”
is reminiscent of Wordsworth and Shelley, and it’s used expertly to set up the power of the last phrase: “The brief ecstatic flight of things.”
What a wonderful winged image for this thing we call our lifespan. A brief ecstatic flight, like the picture I hold in my mind of the barred owl that blew through our backyard and descended silently on a low branch at dusk. “Was that a hawk?” I said to Janyce while setting my mocktail down on the glass-top table and straining my neck to see around the tree branch. I got up to see further. And then, with barely restrained ecstatic flailing of my arms in Janyce’s direction, I stood in the middle of our backyard, pointing toward the tree exclaiming. “It’s an OWL!”
Stanford psychiatrist and researcher, Anna Lembke says that “joy and pain are co-located in the brain.” The same part of the brain that is responsible for pleasure is also responsible for pain but in a kind of seesaw mechanism that is always working for homeostasis or a level seesaw. Poets and artists know this duality already and find myriad ways to express it, sometimes with a single image.
Oh—the grief. The brief
ecstatic flight of things. Speaking of the grief. Everyone is talking about Hulu’s second season of “The Bear” and for good reason. There is so much to love in that series. The writing is superb, the character development, and the feel-good story of people becoming their fully realized selves is hard to beat. As good as the series is, it’s that damn soundtrack that kills me, though. I forgot how much I loved R.E.M. in the 1980s. This music video is the whole two-season vibe in one beautiful, moody film “it’s sweet and it’s sad and it’s true.”
“You ready for breakfast?” I say to Janyce while walking into the kitchen and pulling out the fry pan. I decide in that very minute to recreate a version of Sydney’s perfect omelette she made for Sugar in episode 9 of season two. A friend of mine texted me an article in Food and Wine about how the cookbooks on Carmy’s bookshelf are required reading.
I skip the step of straining the eggs through a sieve but I do the rest. Turn the heat up high. Swirl the butter. Shake the pan. Add the cheese to the still wet middle. Fold the sides. Even crush a few potato chips on the top.
“Is it good?” I say.
“It’s amazing,” she says.