Edna St. Vincent Mallay, who brought us the candle burning at both ends, was born on February 22nd 1892, a woman before her time. Enchanting, bold, and brilliant, her poetry was described by Thomas Hardy as one of America’s two greatest attractions – the other was the skyscraper.
She smoked in public when it was against the law for women to do so. She lived in Greenwich Village during the halcyon days of that starry bohemia, she slept with men and women and wrote about it in lyrics and sonnets that blazed with wit and a sexual daring that captivated the nation.
Poring over thousands of papers and letters, and with the cooperation of E. Vincent’s sister, Norma, biographer Nancy Milford learns how this ‘New Woman” evolved. It was her mother, Cora, who urged Edna and her two sisters towards a fierce and unconventional independence, having asked their father to leave the family home in 1899. It was Cora who taught her daughters to love music and literature from an early age. In Edna’s scrapbooks, are preserved performance programs, photographs, and early writings of the first woman poet to win the Pulitzer. Wholly empowered by a devoted mother, Edna was performing and writing when she was just five years old.
When I think of all that I wish for my daughter and that which my mother still hopes for me, I appreciate Cora Mallay’s fierceness and imagine a little of it resides in me. Formidable and uncompromising, her mother, Norma exclaims:
. . . was not like anyone else’s mother. Yes. She was ambitious for us. Of course she was! She made us – oh, not ordinary!
We all want to be “not ordinary,” to matter while making our respective marks on the world.
As the sun resumed its predictable shimmer following a rare wintry rain in Phoenix today, I looked up and through the trees that line a downtown parking lot, and I thought of Edna St. Vincent Mallay, whose childhood pulsated with her love of nature, poetry, and music. Of those formative years, she would later recall, “it never rained in those days” . . .
City Trees
The trees along this city street,
Save for the traffic and the trains,
Would make a sound as thin and sweet
As trees in country lanes.
And people standing in their shade
Out of a shower, undoubtedly
Would hear such music as is made
Upon a country tree.
Oh, little leaves that are so dumb
Against the shrieking city air,
I watch you when the wind has come,—
I know what sound is there.
I’m not a compulsive list-maker by any stretch, but sometimes, if I have a new pad of paper, a new ink cartridge in the fountain pen I use maybe three times a year, and nothing else to do (in other words, my Wireless connection is acting up) I’ll start a list such as that begun on June 24, 2012. Entitled, “Things We Really Need To Do Around Here,” it has been ignored for nine months. Thirteen of fourteen things still need to be done, not the least of which is “Hang pictures & get rid of ones we HATE.” The only thing done that resulted in any demonstrable changes was “Call the Mike the Painter.”
On July 1st, I began another list. I wrote it down with To Do at the top and next to each item, I added an empty check box:
Ask mam – did granda tell her about The Battle of the Somme??
Poppies
Well-intentioned and clearly focused on an upcoming vacation that necessitated sending Atticus to kitty jail, I was off to a good start. I’m guessing Beck must have popped up on Pandora, sending me and my list off on a tangent that ended with remembering my grandfather who fought in World War I. Nonetheless, we went on vacation, the cat lives, my playlists include more Beck and Tom Waits, and I have written about my grandfather and his experiences as a young soldier lest any of us forget.
While I don’t make daily to-do lists, I am rarely without post-it notes in my handbag, or one of those little notepads reporters used to carry around in their back pockets. This is not entirely about being ready to jot down things of a pedestrian nature, although that has happened – I’ll quickly scribble some new medical term I need to look up on Google, because instead of asking my doctor what she was talking about, I just sat there, nodding sagely. Or I will remember that I need to buy shampoo. I might hastily write down the name of the store where I can find a handbag like the one hanging from the arm of the complete stranger I met in the post-office, befriending her over our mutual regard for a bag that’s just the right size. Paper and pen at hand is more aspirational, anticipation of some treasure waiting for me in the most unexpected places.
I remember a summer afternoon in 2008 on Brattle Street in Cambridge, MA when I spotted a bright yellow piece of paper stuck to the window of an American Apparel store. On it, something John F. Kennedy had said about immigration, that I have since learned was part of the Legalize LA campaign. No smartphone on hand to take a picture, I captured those achingly relevant words in my little reporter’s notepad, and for good measure added them to my signature on my work email:
Immigration policy should be generous; it should be fair; it should be flexible. With such a policy we can turn to the world and to our own past with clean hands and a clear conscience.
Along with John F. Kennedy’s compassionate words on immigration, I have jotted down reminders, presumably, to buy water, ice, band aids, and plane tickets to San Diego. Stuck between the plane tickets and the need for band aids, is The Drunkard’s Walk by Leonard Mlodinow. This is the title of a book, and I am now bemused, given the theme that is developing here, by its subtitle: How Randomness Rules our Lives. I wish I could remember who told me about this book and in what context. I probably need to read it.
Randomness continues on the next page with apples, strawberries, bananas and a toothbrush. I need to call Kathleen, perhaps about a pair of shoes from Sandalworld online, where, as it happens, I will also find Jack Rogers. Realizing eventually that Mr. Rogers is not someone I need to call, but is the name attached to pricy sandals which the website screams, are the summertime staple. There is another quotation: “Culture is a social control system. If you don’t manage it, it can undermine innovation and creativity and hinder your ability to execute your strategy. This is why a leader should care about culture.” Indeed a leader should. I have no idea where I was or who said this, but obviously it was someone who said something I had also been thinking about, except better than I could and at just the right time.
A man of few written words, my husband loves his post-it notes where his abbreviations of grocery items often render them cryptic as ancient hieroglyphics or personalized license plates.Yesterday morning, I spotted on top of a small pitcher of water his note to himself to feed our family of humming birds and water the petunias in the front yard. He added a flourish. “Hum-bird. Water the Front.”
The stories we could weave from our discarded lists and post-it notes – resolutions, reminders, instructions, and bucket lists. Our favorite things. The very worst things, too, the things we fear the most – a message received too late, a fence never mended, undeniable evidence of a loved one’s harrowing descent into memory loss. Intimate. Relatable. Human.
Whatever is posted on those notes stuck to themselves at the bottom of my handbag is unlikely to see the light of day, unlike the array of yellow post-its, lists, and miniature drawings that meander around, above, and on top of a desk belonging to the aunt of a friend:
An artist, she has pressed tightly over the edge an intriguing “Simplicity. Complexity.” I am curious about the story contained in those words but it’s likely to remain elusive, as it does for artist Adriane Herman who for almost a decade rummaged through trashcans and grocery carts, culling evidence of the way we spend our time – or the way we aspire to.
In her review of Herman’s word-based art, Annie Larmon describes this reconstruction of “our most ephemeral and disposable documents as relevant cultural artifacts,”
From grocery and to-do lists to notes scrawled on Post-its, Herman slips between humor and scrutiny while unpacking the social narratives and psychological patterns loaded into the uncensored scribbles
Here, in Art of the List, Herman presents and discusses these marks we make, our sometimes desperate attempts to contain the lives we are living in small and sticky spaces:
The Rolling Stones “Shattered” was stuck in my head all weekend long, not all of it, just a few bars, just enough to be maddening. Not the first time, nor will it be the last, for me to fall prey to an “earworm.” I’m not alone. It turns out, according to psychologist Dr. Victoria Williams that 90% of people experience this “involuntary musical imagery” at least once a week, whereby “a tune comes into the mind and repeats without conscious control.” There are other words for it too according to the International Conference on Music and Cognition website – Dr. Oliver Sacks calls it “sticky music” or “brain worms,” Dr. James Kellaris describes it as a “cognitive itch,” which, he suggests may be relieved by singing aloud the mental tune. Dr. Daniel Levitin, who studies the neuroscience of music, refers to it as “stuck song syndrome.” Levitin also points out that “the songs that get stuck in people’s heads tend to be melodically and rhythmically simple.” Not to diminish the genius of Jagger and Richards, “Shattered” is not a complex tune. Then again, the same might well be said of the opening four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.
Because music memory is unconscious, so effortless, researchers like Dr. Williamson are fascinated by the implications of understanding it, hoping that if they can better understand why some songs “stick” more than others, they might also find that music memory could help treat patients who suffer from memory loss. Williamson tells NPR’s Jon Donvon that because songs are typically recalled with such accuracy, “this tells us something about the automaticity of musical memory and its power as a tool for learning . . . imagine if we could recall facts that we wanted as easily as we can bring new ones to mind without even trying.” Imagine, indeed. Anyone interested in learning more about the music in their head, can visit The Earwormery to participate in research studies being conducted by a team at Goldsmiths, University of London and BBC 6Music.
Back to the Rolling Stones and “Shattered.” I know what caused this “cognitive itch.” It began with a random email from my brother, which in part, read as follows:
… it’s easy, given the antics of The Rolling Stones in their dotage, to forget what a brilliantly bratty, snottily subversive band they once were. Today, the workings of the shuffle function on my iPod unexpectedly presented me with ‘Shattered’ from ‘Some Girls‘. What a great song! I recall once reading an interview with the New York songwriter Ed Hammell. He recalls being in a bar in Manhattan just a couple of days after 9/11. There was a disco in the bar, and people were dancing to the usual floor-filling favorites, probably trying to forget about the horror of terrorists having blown the heart out of their city. ‘Shattered’ came on, its pumping, driving rhythm prompting whoops and hollers and dancing, until that line which Mick Jagger delivers with the utmost indifferent cheek, “Life an’ joy an’ sex an’ dreams are still surviving on the streets, an’ look at me . . . I’m in tatters. I’m shattered . . .” and within seconds those on the dance floor were embracing each other tightly and weeping uncontrollably. And the way they stayed so, until the song ended, struck Hammell as one of his saddest and yet most affirming memories of post 9/11 New York.
Well, little brother of mine, so far away from New York City and even farther away from Limerick, Ireland, I decided to visit Wesley Bolin Memorial Plaza to pause a while by the 9-11 memorial and to remember again when I first heard about those planes crashing with such force into the heart of New York city. It had been a clear blue morning there, the city’s skyline sparkling in the sunshine, as it was here in Phoenix. I had just dropped Sophie off at pre-school, not yet fully aware of the horror that, by day’s end, would envelope us all.
Until the morning of September 11, 2001, I had taken for granted the sense of security I felt as a woman who had traded in Northern Ireland for America. Such naïvety. I had forgotten that anything can happen. I had grown complacent. Confident. Over-confident that – unlike her mother – my little American girl would never catch herself looking twice at an unattended shopping bag forgotten by someone who was merely in a hurry, or find herself standing stock still with her shoes off and her arms over her head while an airport security guard frisks her or wonder while poring over international headlines, how a complete stranger could hate her because of her nationality.
Anything can happen. You know how Jupiter
Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head
Before he hurls the lightning? Well just now
He galloped his thunder cart and his horses
Across a clear blue sky. It shook the earth
and the clogged underearth, the River Styx,
the winding streams, the Atlantic shore itself.
Anything can happen, the tallest towers
Be overturned, those in high places daunted,
Those overlooked regarded. Stropped-beak Fortune
Swoops, making the air gasp, tearing the crest off one,
Setting it down bleading on the next.
Ground gives. The heaven’s weight
Lifts up off Atlas like a kettle lid.
Capstones shift. Nothing resettles right.
Telluric ash and fire-spores boil away.
Anything can happen.
Coming into focus is a stark and sobering reminder of this truth, the diminutive and solitary piece of a steel beam salvaged from the World Trade Center. Far from home, it is now a part of Phoenix, Arizona, a memorial to all who perished in those cataclysmic attacks on America on September 11, 2001. The concrete on which it sits at Wesley Bolin Plaza is mixed with rubble from the Pentagon and earth from Shanksville, Pennsylvania where Flight 93 plowed into an empty field.
From 10 o’clock in the morning until 3 o’clock in the afternoon, the predictable rays of Phoenix sunshine pierce unforgettable etchings, messages laser-cut on a sweeping canopy of steel, thereby illuminating on the great circle of concrete directly below, a moving sequence of dates, times, events, and emotions. Thus, “Moving Memories” appear and disappear with the sun.
Strolling along the beach on a foggy afternoon last month, it occurred to me that the Morro Bay oceanfront would not be entirely out of place in an early 20th century industrial landscape by English artist, L.S. Lowry. Not unlike his famous “matchstick” people, swarms of beachcombers are dwarfed by three towering smokestacks every bit as recognizable to tourists as Morro Rock, the Gibraltar of California. Every summer, I am surprised to see those smokestacks still looming at the edge of Morro Bay – incongruous reminders of the paradox of progress, rising up in the shadows of Morro Rock, once sacred ground and now sanctuary to the endangered Peregrine Falcon.
In 1978, far away from the California coastline, L.S. Lowry’s work reached the masses, when two years after his death, “Matchstick Men and Matchstick Cats and Dogs” went straight to the top of the British charts. By some duo I had never heard of, this quintessentialone-hit wonder brought with it a perfect opportunity for teenagers like me to learn that paintings and drawings were as vital to history as the maps and textbooks we pored over in school every day.
In articulating his vision as an artist and the moment when the mundane became extraordinary, Lowry recalled:
One day I missed a train from Pendlebury, a place I had ignored for seven years – and as I left the station I saw the Acme Spinning Company’s mill … The huge black framework of rows of yellow-lit windows standing up against the sad, damp charged afternoon sky. The mill was turning out, and I watched this scene – which I’d looked at many times without seeing – with rapture . . .
Edna St. Vincent Mallay, who brought us the candle burning at both ends, was born on February 22nd 1892, a woman before her time. Enchanting, bold, and brilliant, her poetry was described by Thomas Hardy as one of America’s two greatest attractions – the other was the skyscraper.
